Home Large Polyp Stony Corals Healthy Online Alveopora Corals Frags for your Coral reef Display

Healthy Online Alveopora Corals Frags for your Coral reef Display

The sight of lush, beautiful Alveopora polyps swaying back and forth in a reef tank is simply mesmerizing. The pulse slows, blood pressure drops and the observer is transported miles away to the reefs of the Indo-Pacific while the powerheads buffet the colony in one direction, then another. Alveopora LPS corals, sometimes called flowerpot corals for the shape that the feeding tentacles affect around the oral disc of the polyp, are a joy to watch being animated by the flows in your display. A joy that is only eclipsed by the satisfaction of watching a healthy colony grow ever larger over time and your reefing friends drool over how good it looks in your reef tank. Alveopora are not an easy coral to keep healthy and happy but if you have some experience and success keeping corals, monitor and manage your water chemistry reasonably well and are ready to take your coral expertise to the next level, you’ll never regret rising to this challenge! They’re simply beautiful.

Alveopora Coral Care Guide

Experience Level

As we mentioned, Alveopora are not a good choice for beginning coralheads but take that with a grain of salt, as when it comes to coral husbandry, the time a reefkeeper spends reading, researching and applying what they have learned can save months and years of trial-and-error learning the hard (and expensive) way. We recommend that our clients consider adding one of our online Alveopora coral frags to their display only after they have had success with other LPS corals and have learned how to proactively manage the water quality in their systems. It’s fair to say that this timeline is best measured in effort, knowledge and accomplishment rather than months and years. Your mileage may vary.

Optimal Water Quality Parameters

Temperature: 72-78F, 22-25C
pH: 8.1-8.3
dKH: 7-11 (125-200ppm CaCO3 equivalent)
Calcium: 375-450ppm
Magnesium: 1275-1350ppm
Salinity: 35ppt
Ammonia (NH3): less than 0.1ppm
Nitrite (NO2): less than 0.2ppm
Nitrate (NO3): less than 0.2ppm
Phosphates (PO4): less than 0.03ppm

Lighting Preferences:

Alveopora tend to thrive best in moderate lighting in the middle or lower-middle part of the water column, depending on the depth and lighting of your display. Where and how you light your new Alveopora coral frag will depend a great deal on how the symbiotic and photosynthetic zooxanthellae algae living in the tissue of the coral respond. They make the glucose and other nutrients essential for coral health, so after acclimation, place your flowerpot frag in an area with slightly less light initially and then gradually move into higher lighting. As with other corals, you’ll want to pay close attention to the color and posture of the polyps and provide enough time to adjust to the light before moving it to another location.

Water Flow Preferences:

Most Alveopora species are tolerant of flows that range from low to moderately aggressive. With the powerheads and controllers available to reefkeepers today, that makes modifying flows in your display really easy. Indeed, many have preprogrammed modes that ramp up and down at intervals determined by the controller or the keeper. We recommend that you start off with lower flows until your frag fully acclimates to your display. If you achieve good polyp extension and posture, then start experimenting with higher, shifting flows and monitor how your Alveopora responds.

Placement Considerations:

As we mentioned, placement will depend a great deal on the type and intensity of your lighting and the depth of your display. Initially choose a spot in the lower half of the water column and take care to provide enough room around your new Alveopora frag. As it grows and adjusts, the polyps of this coral can extend quite a bit (approx. an inch, sometimes more) and when animated by the flows the feeding tentacles on each polyp can sting anything that they come into contact with. Also consider that as your Alveopora colony grows and thrives, the reach of its stinging ability will expand accordingly, so bear that in mind when placing other corals, clams and other sessile critters nearby.

Feeding Considerations:

Although your Alveopora frags will get most of what they need from the algae living in their tissue, a little plankton occasionally will also expedite growth. We recommend staying away from feeding denser types of protein like shrimp, clam and fish no matter how finely you chop them, Instead, choose foods they eat in their natural habitat, such as zoo- and phytoplankton. There are plenty of reputable outfits that sell algae, flagellates, rotifers and other living plankton and you can culture Artemia nauplii at home, gutload them with plankton before feeding and deliver motile packets of nutrition to your thriving Flower pot coral colony.

Carefully Propagated and Inspected Alveopora Frags Online from CoralFrags.com

We fully quarantine all our broodstock before moving them to our coral propagation systems and carefully inspect them on an ongoing basis to help ensure that they don’t harbor unwanted hitchhikers that can transform reefkeeping from fun to nightmarish. The last inspection occurs right before we ship our Alveopra coral frags to our clients. When it comes to the biosecurity of our clients’ systems and ours, we walk it like we talk it and take our responsibilities very seriously. It takes more time but we believe that these steps make a tangible difference in the success of our clients and it is simply how we choose to operate our business. If you’re looking for an ethical online coral frag provider who delivers healthy corals to their clients, give us a shot and let us know how we’re doing. We’d love to hear from you!

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