Charting growth and rescuing corals.

[MondoBongo]

one of my favorite things to do now that i have been hitting my stride with my husbandry and tank maintenance is rescue those sad little browned out acros from the LFS.

a lot of times you can get them for a song, and once they settle in, they can be really great pieces.

in addition to that, i have been trying to be more diligent about taking pictures of corals to chart their progress over time. when you look at your tank every day, you tend to miss the small changes, so it is always nice to be able to go back and see just how much things have grown.

so what follows is a compilation of some of these rescue corals and growth shots. i apologize for the low quality, they're all cell phone pictures.

the purple coral in these pictures was my very first acro. i almost killed it, as you can see by the first picture, while in QT because i was having some severe alkalinity and salinity (no ato at the time in qt) issues. over the last year and a half or so, this has rebounded in a real way and is now one of my favorites.



you can see in front of it, the green polyp acro. this was my very first rescue. i had been eye balling it in my LFS's tank for a few weeks, and it was in rough shape. i ended up getting it off them for $15.



this guy now grows so well for me, that i have fragged it many, many times (often by accident) and distributed it to several other hobbyists.



one of my most recent rescues was this poor little fellow. he was half dead in the LFS tank, all browned out and bleaching, not in good shape.

i picked him up less than a month ago (January 15th, 2015), this is how he looked the first day in the tank:



not even three weeks later he has come back with a vengeance, and is looking amazing. i can't wait to see a couple months now how it shapes up. this one cost me $10 and the blessing from the LFS owner of: "well, if you want to give it a try..."



next rescue i got the same day as the above. $15, all brown, but with good polyp extension. i knew this one had potential:



again, picked it up on January 15th, 2015, and here it is about three weeks later, starting to show some awesome colors:



you can also see the frag behind it, came in the same day, i don't have any good shots of it unfortunately, but it has come a long way too.

finally, this last one was not a rescue, it was a frag a friend gave me. this itty bitty little hammer started off about the size of a quarter, and has just gone nuts:



so there you go. enjoy, take pictures from time to time! it's always great to see how far your tank has come.

and don't count out that sad little brown twig in the back of your LFS tank. it's just hanging on, waiting to find a good home.

cheers!

[hbrochs]

That's pretty awesome!

[jimmy n]

So fun

[tkeracer619]

Just be careful introducing pests. I see that you QT which is good.

I once got a brown acro from a local micro fragger for $5.

I sold him a large frag of the same coral 3 years later for $100. He asked where I got it and I told him "you for $5" . He was most amused. I miss that coral, it became quite special and was the home to my fancy gumdrop coral crouchers before my tank crashed in a move.

[MondoBongo]

Everything wet gets QT. Fish, clean up crew, and corals.

I also use a two stage dip process. One iodine based dip, and the second in rps all out.

I'm looking to move soon to interceptor, or maybe just straight ivermectin.

Gotta QT. If you don't, you're asking for problems.

[reefwiser]

This is when you learn how to keep SPS is in rescuing corals. You learn what can and what can not be done and what conditions do the trick.

Great job