Your oldest coral!

Gumbies R Us · Jun 18, 2026

We always like showing off the newest frags we pick up, but what about those corals that have been with us for years? I want to see your oldest coral in your tank!

KrisReef · Jun 18, 2026

My wife asked me recently “How come you have that coral in a bucket?”
“It’s taken up too much space in the tank, and I still have a few fragments growing in there.”

From Google AI:
Heliopora coerulea, or blue coral, is a unique octocoral known for its hard, blue skeleton, which is unusual for soft corals and gives it the name "blue ridge coral". It's a reef-building species found in the Indo-Pacific, characterized by its blue aragonite skeleton (due to iron deposits) and small, fuzzy white polyps that cover it, making the living coral appear brown or purplish. It's considered a "living fossil" and is listed as vulnerable due to threats like climate change and habitat destruction.

I got this as a quarter sized fragment and it grew from the bottom to the top (18” tall) before I laid it on its side about two years ago and it then started growing 90 degrees off the original axis. The fish loved to hide in it, but I recently decided to put it in a bucket because it was too big and I wanted more space for new things.

It has been fragmented and traded / donated more than I can recall, frags usually much larger than the original I started with.

There is a recent article about the discovery of “the largest known coral colony in the world “, and it was a blue ridge coral. The discovery made turning this tiny colony into a garden feature much easier than before. The endangered status reflects the fact that we often don’t know much about the world around us, as a scientist might report to understand.

One of my reasons for having a reef since I started back in the last century was to, if I could, grow out a blue ridge colony into a coffee table trophy (things that have fallen out of fashion in recent years). I also wanted to grow up some tridacna clams, which is currently in progress but not a coral