Does this plate coral look normal?

[Josegard22]

Ok. So I got my first plate coral and I'm not sure what it's supposed to look like when it's happy. Does this pic look normal for it? It's been in for about 6 days.
Sal. 1.025
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 25
Ammonia 0
Alk 8
Temp 78.6
Calcium 500
Ph 8

 

[kurt_n]

Looks fairly happy, but you're going to want to move it off those rocks and put it on the sand bed. Plate corals will move on their own - they'll inflate their tissue, puff up, and pretty much "walk" wherever they want to go. Up on a rock, it's going to fall off, damage its tissue, and then we'll be having one of those "... is it still alive?" discussions.

 

[Josegard22]

Hmm. Moving may be difficult. I should have done some checking before I placed it. The guy I got it from said I could stick it anywhere so I made a little epoxy pedestal to go under it and glued the sucker to the rock!

 

[Nina51]

yikes! plates have soft tissue on their undersides. if you actually applied glue or epoxy to it's underside, you might have a problem. hopefully, it was a tiny bit and the coral can be removed from the rock and placed on the sand.

 

[cloak]

I don't think I've ever seen a plate coral with bubbles like that before. I'm not really sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Anyways, I agree with the above about putting the coral on the sand bed. You should be able to pop the coral loose with a little force. GL.

 

[Josegard22]

Thanks everyone. Will be working on that this evening. I have some Xenia that would look better there anyway.

 

[kurt_n]

As others have said, yeah... 'yikes'. Agree with cloak... the "bubbles" for tentacles look different than I've seen before, but at first glance didn't necessary seem unhealthy. However, if you've glued it down, those "bubbles" are probably just the coral trying to free itself or figure out what the heck just happened!

Hope you can get it off without too much effort. I'm a bit concerned you won't be able to do it without damaging the tissue, but you don't have much of a choice at this point.

 

[shesacharmer]

You might want to think twice about putting xenia on your main rock structure. It has a tendency to take off and grow like wildfire if it likes your tank. Most people are happier if they give the xenia a little "island" rock of it's own to conquer.

 

[kurt_n]

Yeah... that too. I was just going to go back and edit my post and say the same thing about the xenia.

 

[Sk8r]

Epoxy is often fatal to plates. I'd see if I could break off a bit of the rock, bury it in the sand and hope the thing would eventually slough off the epoxy (it was originally created as a wound dressing.) If you breach the membrane, you may kill it outright.