About Stock

Coscinaraea is one of those corals that gets overlooked on a crowded stock list, mostly because it does not scream for attention the way a rainbow Acropora does. It sits low, grows flat, and wears muted colours that shift with the light. That understatement is exactly why a lot of experienced reefers keep coming back to it, especially for spots in the tank that need something calm rather than something loud.What does Coscinaraea actually look like?It is a plating or encrusting LPS, meaning it grows outward across a surface rather than up into a mound or branch. The skeleton forms...

Walk along any wall of large polyp stony corals in a display tank and Platygyra is usually the one that looks like a topographic map. Instead of round separated corallites, this genus grows in continuous meandering ridges and valleys, which is exactly why it earned the common name maze coral. It is a genus that rewards a slow, attentive keeper without demanding advanced skills, and it happens to be one of the more forgiving LPS options for someone building confidence with large polyp corals.Reading the Maze PatternPlatygyra colonies form a network of fused walls rather than individual mouths sitting in...

Favia and Favites sit in the same family and get mixed up constantly at the shop counter. Both are LPS corals with a distinct pineapple look, walls of fleshy polyps separated by ridged skeleton that genuinely looks like the outside of a pineapple. Once you know what to check, telling them apart takes about ten seconds.Favia vs Favites, the quick tellFavia corallites (the individual polyp cups) are round and sit apart from their neighbours, each one distinctly separate even where the colony is dense. Favites corallites share walls with the polyps next to them, so the skeleton looks more like...

Goniopora is one of the most photographed corals in the hobby and one of the most quietly returned. Its long, tentacle-tipped polyps sway like a bed of tiny flowers, which is exactly where the common name comes from. It also has a reputation, earned over decades, for looking magnificent in a shop tank and then fading over the following six to twelve months in a home aquarium that isn't quite ready for it. This isn't superstition. It's a pattern experienced reefers have watched play out again and again, and it's worth understanding before you commit tank space to one.We regularly...

Gorgonians look like they belong in a different reef entirely. Instead of a hard calcium carbonate skeleton, they build a flexible, horn-like core called gorgonin, covered in a fleshy rind studded with polyps. That skeleton bends in current rather than resisting it, which is the first clue to how these animals actually want to be kept. We regularly work with aquacultured photosynthetic gorgonian frags at Gallery Aquatica, and they reward a bit of understanding of that anatomy before they go anywhere near your tank.How gorgonians differ from stony coralsA stony coral like an Acropora grows its living tissue over a...