Frogspawn color change.

[Postyoa28]

I thought I would share my experience with my frogspawn coral. Originally I had it in a 55 gal. under 2 T5 bulbs (10K / actinic) near the surface. The coral was a small, single head with the standard green tips/ brownish clear tentacles. Even though it was a single head, it had great extension because of the low light (comparatively to other set-ups).



I had a power outage sometime last year, and the tank crashed. My kenya tree self destructed and I did my best to do water changes to get the tank beck to health. I saved a majority of the fish and coral, though everything took a hit health/growth wise. Here's the interesting part. The frogspawn changed color from the standard coloration to blue tips with clear tentacles.





Please note the change was in the tank under the same conditions, post crash. The color was great and the polyps were extending again and feeding fine.

In June of this year I changed jobs from a field biologist to a more office centric position. I set up a 10 gal. nano tank in my office and used a RAPIDLED PAR38 bulb (white/blue/royal blue LED). I moved my blue little frogspawn to this tank after cycling and it was doing great. The picture above is from this office tank and you can really see the coloration brought out by the royal blue portion of the bulb.

I was out of the office on a commercial fishing vessel for a week late last month. When I came back, my emerald crab (I'm assuming) knocked the frogspawn out of the rockwork. I pulled it out and noticed that it was shrunken back into the skeleton, also that it was beginning to split into 3 heads. Over weekend after that, I came in on Monday and saw the polyps were out. However, it had reverted back to the normal frogspawn green/brown coloration. I guess shock has something to do with this change. I'm a little bummed considering I thought it would hold the blue color and be a unique show piece when it grew out.

Here is a picture of it today.



Has anyone else had an experience similar to this? Just curious. Thanks for reading.

[zachfishman]

Generally speaking, you can expect most any coral to look a little different between different systems. This is mostly in regard to polyp extension and color intensity, though.

I expect that your FS bleached out during the stressful event, appearing more blue than green, and as you suspected returned to its normal shade after recovering. Neat nonetheles!

[mdbannister]

Change in lights will change the coloring (or appearance of the coloring).