Blue polyped gorgonian

[Delphinus]

Unfortunately I've given it away. It looked great for about a week and then started a very quick decline. Wouldn't open, wouldn't feed, spots of recession. I'm not sure if it's too late to save it anyhow, time will tell, but I'm convinced that keeping it would have meant it was toast for sure.

Its twin (ie. same type of coral that came in on the same shipment) was still at the store last time I looked (a couple days ago) and that one was doing considerably better, so it's just something about my tank that it didn't like.

I kinda broke a rule I had made for myself by buying a non-photosynthetic gorgonian anyhow and sorta feel like I got the smack down as a result. There are a few species that I know to be photosynthetic that I'm always on the lookout for, but they just don't seem to come in to the stores out this way. So when a gorg of any kind shows up at a store I get excited and this one, well I thought it had a chance of being photosynthetic but I realized quickly when I got it home that it likely wasn't. (Telling apart photosynthetic versus non-photosynthetic is supposeldy fairly simple - zooxanthellae is brown, so the polyps are brown. At the store these looked kinda dull in colour so I thought that counted as brown. At home under my 10k's plus actinics the polyps just glowed.)

[danny zubot]

Thats too bad Tony.

This confused me a bit.

(Telling apart photosynthetic versus non-photosynthetic is supposeldy fairly simple - zooxanthellae is brown, so the polyps are brown

Photo is brown, so if the gorg. polyps are brown it should be photo? And if they are say blue it is non-photo? Is that what you meant?

[Delphinus]

Yeah, basically. On a photosynthetic gorgonian, the polyps themselves will be tan or brown (although the flesh in between polyps may be a different colour). So if the polyps are white or brightly coloured, then it's probably a filter-feeder and not photosynthetic.

But some people seem to do OK at the non-photosynthetic ones ... I'm hoping to try again some day but just not in this tank.