Favia and Favites Brain Corals: Pineapple Textures and Feeding Tentacles Explained

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 tell

Favia 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 a honeycomb or a tightly packed mosaic with no gaps between cups. Run a finger's width test in your head: if you can trace a clean ring around every mouth, it is probably Favia. If the ridges fuse into shared walls, it is Favites. Our aquacultured multi colour Favites frag is a good reference piece for this, since the fused wall pattern is obvious even on a small fragment. Platygyra, a close cousin often sold alongside these two (our gold and green Platygyra frag is one example), takes this a step further with long meandering valleys instead of round cups, which is why it is nicknamed maze coral.

Lighting and flow that suit both genera

These are mid intensity LPS, not shade dwellers and not corals that want to sit under the same light load as an SPS-dominated tank. Aim for roughly 80 to 150 PAR at the coral's placement depth. In a typical mixed reef under LED, that usually means low shelf rock or mid tank rather than the top of the display, and it means dialling intensity back if you are running strong single-diode fixtures. Flow should be gentle to moderate and indirect, enough to keep detritus off the tissue and prevent film buildup between corallites, but not a direct jet that keeps the polyps retracted. If the flesh stays puffed out and fully expanded during the day, your settings are close. If it stays shrunken back into the skeleton, either the flow is too aggressive or the light is overshooting what the coral wants.

Sweeper tentacles and spacing

Favia and Favites are some of the more territorial LPS you will keep. At night, or when they sense a neighbour, they extend long sweeper tentacles that can sting adjacent corals and cause tissue recession over days or weeks if contact is repeated. Leave a minimum gap of 8 to 10cm from the nearest neighbouring coral, more if you are placing it near soft corals or other LPS with their own sweepers. Watch the tank an hour or two after lights out at least once in the first fortnight after placing a new frag, since that is when sweeper activity is most obvious and you can judge whether your spacing actually holds up in practice.

Feeding at night

Both genera have prominent feeding tentacles that emerge after dark, fine, almost fuzzy structures used to catch drifting food particles. Target feeding after lights out, or at least once ambient light has dropped, gets noticeably better response than daytime feeding. Use a turkey baster or feeding pipette to place small pieces of marine mix, mysis, or a prepared LPS pellet directly onto an open polyp, and hold flow down briefly if your wavemaker has a feed mode. Feeding two to three times a week is enough to support growth and colour on top of what the coral pulls from the water column and its zooxanthellae. Stocking a variety pack from our coral food range makes it easy to rotate particle sizes for smaller versus larger polyped colonies.

If you are planning rockwork around a piece like this, leave a defined ledge or flat spot rather than tucking it into a crevice, since access for feeding and observation matters as much as light and flow. Our aquascaping materials section has flat rubble and rock pieces suited to exactly this kind of placement.

Favia, Favites, and Platygyra colour morphs move through our coral list fairly often given how popular they are with reefers wanting hardy, expressive LPS. Availability shifts week to week, so the most reliable way to see what is currently on hand is to check out our stock list at the LPS coral collection before you plan your next placement.