AstroReefer

I just added a “Coral Database” page, with the goal of tracking and providing information on the corals within my tanks. While my experience in buying coral is only a few years old now, I have run into a number of issues and complaints that I wanted to attempt to solve.

• Online vendors often post over saturated photos (on both WYSIWYG and stock coral), or with light settings that you do not have within your tank. This leads to the coral “looking” nothing like the photo once in your tank.
• Frags being sold are often very small. While the database is not touching on the value of small frags, it can be an issue when trying to judge the overall look of a coral colony once its grown out. Or if trying to understand the growth pattern of coral ( for example will that Montipora cup, plate, or encrust).
• Coral naming is misleading for a number of reasons. The “same” coral lineage can have multiple names from different vendors. Local Fish Stores (LFS) may sell without the names, which is compounded then when you have misleading photos which then leads to challenges identifying the coral.
• While some vendors list helpful data such as flow and lighting requirements, water parameters may be missing. Parameters + lighting can even lead to different colors on coral such as Acropora.
• Growth rates, while complicated due to different tank environments, is often not even generalized to give an idea about the speed you can expect for full colony size in your tank.

I still have a lot of work to do on documenting the current state of my coral, putting the historical information together, gathering photo evidence, and some other research together. Hopefully I finish this soon and can keep it up to date on a regular basis.