Yes it does grow . . .

Reef tanks are kinda like children. One day you realize how much they've grown without you even noticing it. From time to time I take pictures of the tank, usually when Im thinking of cutting something into pieces to sell off. Since it's BRS auction time I was thinking of fragging (reefspeak for fragmenting or cutting something into a bunch of pieces) the mushroom leather so I took some pics in preparation for posting at the BRS website. So as I was looking at the pics of the leather I was about to take a razor knife to, I started comparing the pics of the tank from January until now and was quite pleasantly surprised.

This pic above is of the left side of the tank. The left side of the pic was taken last week. The right side was taken on January 11th. I knew the stuff was growing but didn't realize how much it had grown in just 4 months.


This next picture is not the best but its of a colony of two SPS corals that I got from my good friend Dawn. The purple-ish stick looking coral is an acropora that has been very successfully propagated around Boston for quite some time. The original frag of it came from the New England Aquarium reef tank (that sounds alot cooler than it really is). I dont know the name of the greenish coral with big brown polyps in the back. Its a rather average SPS coral, not that cool in coloring, but it grows well especially under moderate lighting. The growth on this is far more than I expected given the lighting and lack of consistent calcium supplementation.

In the end I decided not to frag that leather and instead moved the brain to the other side of the tank to give the leather room to spread its wings. At some point though I will frag it though. That's one of the focuses of the BRS and things I enjoy most about reefkeeping. Trading and selling captive bred corals helps reduce stress on wild reefs. Every coral in the ECC Reef is "aquacultured" (aka grown in a tank). Even the two clowns are captive bred, born and raised in Rhode Island . . . they don't have that half Boston, half Long Island accent though.