I posted this over in the general reef forum, but then thought that I might better find the answers I am looking for here. Does anyone have any ideas about this ? :
We were watching the tank this evening right before going to bed and right after it was fed with DIY "coral chow". We noticed that one of our blue tipped (w/ green polyps) acros seemed to have a pinkish tint to it's base, when a flashlight was shined onto it. A couple of minutes later we noticed some smallish red sheres floating in the water column and after a while alot floating on the top water surface. They were coming out of the polyps of the acro, literally. We watched as they were pushed from the polyps as eggs from a chicken, and the polyps were producing more than one sphere each. The polyps appeared to be unharmed by this action (I checked since I was worried about a parasite or something). We fished a few out and looked at them under a magnifying glass. There were very sticky and appeared to move to form themselves into the sphere shape. Each sphere was comprised of many smaller spheres clumped together to form the larger sphere shape (kind of reminded me of a volleyball the way you could make out the individual shapes from the grooves where they were joined together)
Here is the coral colony with the pinkish/orangish objects visible in various stages of emerging from the polyps.
And here is a picture of them floating on top of the water,kind of hard to make out due to the reflection (I also turned the pumps off to take this shot).
Does anyone have any idea what this event is ?
We were watching the tank this evening right before going to bed and right after it was fed with DIY "coral chow". We noticed that one of our blue tipped (w/ green polyps) acros seemed to have a pinkish tint to it's base, when a flashlight was shined onto it. A couple of minutes later we noticed some smallish red sheres floating in the water column and after a while alot floating on the top water surface. They were coming out of the polyps of the acro, literally. We watched as they were pushed from the polyps as eggs from a chicken, and the polyps were producing more than one sphere each. The polyps appeared to be unharmed by this action (I checked since I was worried about a parasite or something). We fished a few out and looked at them under a magnifying glass. There were very sticky and appeared to move to form themselves into the sphere shape. Each sphere was comprised of many smaller spheres clumped together to form the larger sphere shape (kind of reminded me of a volleyball the way you could make out the individual shapes from the grooves where they were joined together)
Here is the coral colony with the pinkish/orangish objects visible in various stages of emerging from the polyps.
And here is a picture of them floating on top of the water,kind of hard to make out due to the reflection (I also turned the pumps off to take this shot).
Does anyone have any idea what this event is ?