Hey, I thought I'd share my success with this coral so far.
Here's a pic of my goni frag when I got it:
And a more recent picture:
The basics on care:
High lighting
Moderate/gentle wave flow
High nutrients
Feeding is important with phytoplankton/zooplankton
Iron is beneficial?
Here's a thread I started on another forum on this coral with my and others' imputs.
http://www.nano-reef.com/topic/339925-goniopora-success-tips/
Oh and this is a particularly good article i found on them:
http://www.reefs.org/library/article/r_toonen20.html
Some excerpts:
"Feeding attempts with newly hatched brine shrimp were unsuccessful, and despite repeated contact with the tentacles, these prey were far too large for the animals to actually ingest. In fact, repeated contact with the tentacles led to the tentacles retracting and therefore an end to feeding rather than the animals actually being fed. Gut content analyses of polyps excised from wild colonies revealed that the majority of the prey were microcrustaceans (copepods and their larvae, juvenile mysids, barnacle cyprids and such) but much of the diet appeared to consist of a mixture of phytoplankton and other tiny non-crustacean plankton (such as polychaete and mollusc larvae, ciliates, and rotifers) of the same size range. Turns out that phytoplankton was found in the guts of every animal examined and probably accounts for a significant proportion of the nutrient uptake by these corals, and was the only prey type that showed significant variation in capture rate by tidal regime or day versus night-time sampling."
"Given the results of Meredith's research, it is not surprising that the occasional reports we see for the maintenance and growth of these corals tend to be lagoonal or refugium-type systems with intense lighting and plenty of opportunity for the capture of tiny plankton and invertebrate larvae. It is also not surprising that a typical pattern of apparent health last for some months before the animal begins to show the signs of starvation (due to both deprivation of planktonic prey and the resultant decrease in photosynthetic ability) followed by a decline and eventually the death of the colony occurs in the majority of reef tanks (in which these type of prey are rarely provided in sufficient numbers). The animals do not need a lot of prey -- Meredith found that supplementing the feeding of wild colonies did not significantly increase growth rate, suggesting that the animals are not prey limited at natural feeding rates (roughly 50% of the polyps contained prey items of the sort outlined above at any given time), but decreasing the amount of prey captured obviously has a strong negative impact. These results explain the observation that adding declining animals to a well-stocked and highly productive deep sandbed system (such as Morgan's at IA) typically results in a complete recovery of the colony, because the renewed capture of phytoplankton and invertebrate larvae in addition to providing nutrition to the colony, in turn should lead to the increase of zooxanthellar output and both contribute the revival of the colony."
