What Coral Do You Most Regret Adding to Your System?

[Mark Gray]

Zoo's the take over

 

[dewy]

Blue clove polyps and gsp

 

[Pntbll687]

Pulsing Xenia. Nearly too over a 25g cube I had. Thought I eradicated it, but just comes back.

The only thing that keeps it in check is low nutrients in the tank, it actually stops pulsing when nitrates and phosphates are low enough.

 

[CraigMixedReef]

A kid at the LFS gave me a pinkie nail size piece of GSP for “ free” when I stated my first reef. I was so excited to be getting into corals, that I never did any research - glued it down and tested magnesium frequently (more advice for the same shop) 6 months later, I had a thick green lawn of GSP all over my live rocks! Needless to say, I didn’t add any GSP to my next tank. I still have the first tank set-up and it is still a sea of green! I now take my advice from this site!

 

[davocean]

Hands down blue clove polyps were the worst thing I ever added to my tank.
To this day I won't even buy frags from anyone that has them, one polyp is all it takes, your rock will eventually be completely covered in them.

 

[Niterunner77]

GSP & Xenia...... both of these will takeover with a vengeance. My wife loves the Xenia cause of the way it pulses. My LFS gave us some “free” with our coral purchase. It was “free” money wise but took my time to try to keep it under control in which I had to eventually remove the rockwork to rid my tank of these weeds.... my wife still said but it’s pretty though. Can’t we just keep a little of it? Y’all have to realize that it grew from a couple polyps of Xenia to basketball size in a hurry. And I said “heck no”!!! That is my first experience and last with these 2 unruly corals!

 

[Cesar Romero]

This is great information as one getting into the hobby! Just curious, are there any articles regarding the subject of corals to avoid for those starting out? Or that really help anyone of you?

 

[jason.kennedy.98478]

every coral I managed to kill ! LOL

Ditto

 

[happyhourhero]

Red mushrooms by far. Kenya tree is just some snips with the scissors.

Mushrooms spread, smother and roll nuke

 

[tweeter]

I just made a video on them. Green trash palys.

I love the new look!

 

[marinesnow]

Gorilla nipples lol. There’s literally hundreds of them now.

 

[Cherry Bomb]

Mine is my Devil’s Hand. It’s so ugly. I bought it I was new and had no idea, just saw this fun looking blue/green nice shaped coral. Then it shed and blew up like an ugly brown weirdo balloon 4 times it’s size. It’s still in my tank and has its moody periods of shedding. Definitely not a show piece. Lol

 

[KenO]

Blue clove polyps. I had to nuke my tanks with Fendbendazole. I plan on using Fendbendazole in my coral QT to make sure they never get into my tanks again.

Next would be mushrooms and green Palys. I’m working on getting rid of them now.

And last but not least is that innocent looking algae that looks so interesting until it spreads like wildfire on a hot summers day.

 

[MgSullivan]

Hydnophora, encrust so it cannot be removed and would sting and kill everything near it.
Also have had my battle with blue/green palays, blue/purple mushrooms, baby dropping pocilapora.

 

[Benny Morosco]

I remember feeding Aiptasia in my first saltwater aquarium because I just thought it was a coral. I fed it shrimp, and it wouldn’t stop growing.

What a n00b.

I did the same

 

[BestMomEver]

Gorilla nipples lol. There’s literally hundreds of them now.

What is that?

 

[garethwood]

I wouldnt say any 1 coral has been uncontrollable...

GSP seems to only grow upwards so its on a lightbulb shaped rock, it wont grow under.

Zoas, I like them so dont bother trimming back, also the only thing brave enough to grow near my condy.

Kenyan trees, great for sucking up nasties in the water.. but they arent containable in any way!

My main issue of controling corals

SID2! this lil bugger goes full psycho everytime i walk past the tank, meaning i can no longer trim anything in the tank without being savaged.. yeah hes tiny and cant hurt me, but its enough to make me jump and break stuff! If Nancy wasnt so keen on him, hed be cat food!

 

[Vin's Reef]

These palys!!!

 

[VR28man]

Good thread.

Encrusting purple porite, got it from Copps years ago as a freebie. 2yrs later I had to remove the whole rock. Nothing can stand in its way.

@Reefltx - Interesting. Any pictures?

Every beginner coral, but especially mushrooms.

(An article I wrote: Beginner Corals – The Basics of Reef Success)

@mcarroll - good article. I agree 100%.

Only thing I'd add is that if you look through Corals of the World, most of the corals (say, Acros) you find identified by scientific name commercially are from "all shallow reef areas" (ref: A. millepora "Shallow water, usually reef flats, but also lagoons and upper reef slopes.") - meaning that's a hard discriminator in finding specifically lagoon friendly SPS.

But the reality is that a lot of common, cheap, SPS species ID'd in the hobby - P. damicornis, Stylophora, Acropora yongei (most commonly available in green form as the "green slimer"), millepora, tenuis - can be found in the lagoon, on the back reef or reef crest (or even reef flat, with insane light and flow). So they allegedly can do well in the aquarium once acclimated, if given decent light and flow.

@thabizness - I like the new look. Very much.

 

[mcarroll]

Only thing I'd add is that if you look through Corals of the World, most of the corals (say, Acros) you find identified by scientific name commercially are from "all shallow reef areas" (ref: A. millepora "Shallow water, usually reef flats, but also lagoons and upper reef slopes.") - meaning that's a hard discriminator in finding specifically lagoon friendly SPS.

But the reality is that a lot of common, cheap, SPS species ID'd in the hobby - P. damicornis, Stylophora, Acropora yongei (most commonly available in green form as the "green slimer"), millepora, tenuis - can be found in the lagoon, on the back reef or reef crest (or even reef flat, with insane light and flow). So they allegedly can do well in the aquarium once acclimated, if given decent light and flow.

Good observation!! No disagreement here...just to further those thoughts..

One thing to consider is that CotW only deals with stony corals. Lots of non-stonies are oriented to lagoon life. But with a little digging you can hone in on some candidates in CotW too.

As far as doing well once acclimated, I'd say the same should largely be true for most coral from "all shallow reef areas".

If it weren't true to some degree, then how could all those corals so-designated be successful enough to be found in "all shallow reef areas", right?

What is clearly more variable than the capabilities of those corals are folks' approach to keeping tank.

Just to stay within my own anecdote: Were I able to snap my fingers and make my mushrooms disappear, I see no reason that I couldn't have had a nice acro system. Even dosing ca, alk and mg maually as I did for the first 7 years or so. But instead, the acro's I had (nameless other than Green Slimer, but probably all from that gouping of "all shallow reef areas" corals) did well and put up with the minor inconsistencies of daily dosing....but they did not contend well with mushroom invaders at all, so it ended up being a short term experiment. I didn't need to blame the acro's for being delicate or me for not having a doser. ;Facepalm

Leaving my own anecdote...

Other common tank-keeper causes (with others) have been things like weak flow, weak nutrients regimes and the ultimate wild card – lighting without a light meter. If we had a way to measure in-tank flow velocity, and if everyone had at least a lux meter and if everyone could be convinced that reef tanks need nutrients to get started and to grow, that would eliminate an enormous share of coral troubles.

What we have until that happens....

Flow
Tunze's flow vs turbulence video gives us some info on flow velocity for some common pumps.

The scientific literature seems to indicate our tanks need to be on the high end of the flow velocitities depicted in Tunze's video in order for the flow to perform some of it's most elementary functions.

There are flow meters that work like we need (like used in the Tunze vid) but they range in cost from $_,___.__ on up.

Thankfully the pumps can be very economical....but not all pumps marketed for the purpose (regardless of price) are ideal.

Light
Beginner’s Lux is nice and short and deals with using a lux meter. @Dana Riddle has a number of articles on light measurement that deal with using a lux meter as well as a PAR meter, and is where I finally got the idea how to use my lux meter on my tank! I think Product Review: Lighting for Reef Aquaria: Tips on Taking Light Measurements in particular, but it's addressed in more than one piece.

Considering that light meters range in cost from $0.00 on up, ($10 and up for a real, handheld meter) there's really no excuse to light a tank without a meter these days.

Nutrients
This is more problematic.

I think there's a clear backlash in tanks against the "whole low nutrient thing".

If you look at all the crazy dino threads and even green algae takeovers where nurtients are testing at zero, it's clearly not beneficial to the tank or "the cause", but it's hard to say whether that fact is mellowing the trend toward those kinds of systems being set up.

It's still not uncommon to find articles and other guidance telling reefers to keep their tanks at the very limits of testing detection (often indistinguishable from zero) for nutrients.

The ocean is sometimes cited as the "source reason" for recommending these levels. But reefs that thrive under more tank-like circumstances where nutrients are replete (yes they exist) don't seem to get mentioned or included in the numbers. I think those articles are literally just propagating statistical oceanic averages or something like that. At the very least those recommendations seem to lack needed context.

Thankfully tests are cheap and widely available for the basics. Available guidance on the topic is actually the only real problem.

With those three areas under control, I think most tanks could actually support most corals.