<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13965251#post13965251 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Rickyrooz1
Does your Red Planet still have the green in it or did it turn all red? I am getting one in tomorrow and I want to keep the green color. Should I place it lower in my tank? I heard the green goes away in high light.
Mine is still a young frag, so I still have lots of green... but you can't go by mine anyway as I use 384 watts of PC lighting (until I can afford to get an ATI Powermodule)
The PC's have enough light for SPS (I have a Montipora hirisuta frag and a frag of Mike Paletta's Purple Porites growing on the sand 18" below the lights for months now) and I've had to move most of my LPS to the sand bed to avoid color loss, but the spectrum is wonky IMO... the bulbs just aren't anywhere near the quality of T5s in spectrum or life
I also have a crap ton of macro algae, so I'm using Brightwell's NeoZeo method and dosing heavy on the carbon and bacterial source to try and starve out the macro... keep your fingers crossed that it works :lol:
Most of my corals have nice color, but pretty much anything that should be purple is brown... greens are fine, reds/pinks are fine, blues are good to so-so, but purple just won't show more than a hint at the edges (Purple stag is brown with a little purple on the coralites and my blue and purple A. gemmifera turned an interesting green with purple-tinted brown coralites, go figure)
FWIW, my Red Planet is about 10" below the lights with nice red tips, about half the coralites are red and the base is a very nice green so far... as me again in a month or two
Oh, and muzz, corals are identified by skeletal structure only, not color or polyp shape... to fully ID a coral, they remove all skin... really, we can guess all day, but without having a taxonomist do a definitive ID on a large enough piece of skeleton, we can't really call any of these anything other than Acropora sp. with any kind of certainty... here's a good article on that subject by Eric Borneman
Need Help! Coral ID? Part I. Taxonomy of Stony Corals
EDIT: Ok, so there ARE some cases where polyps are involved, but very few:
"Alternately (and in even fewer cases), the living polyp can be used to identify a species where skeletal features may not. An example is with the genus Euphyllia, where both skeleton and polyp are required to affix a species name."
