My sun coral spawns (pale rink-orange, possibly T. faulknery) survived being in the unfed sump or tanks for a months, in QT with medications (antibacterial and antiparasitic), just stopped to grow until conditions improved.
Sun corals and their non-photosynthetic relatives:
Common are (ID is questionable, but likely):
Pale pinkish-orange Tubastrea faulknery:
Bright orange T. coccinea:
Pure cold yellow T. aurea (higher flow and whole organisms - like mysis, not chopped sea food - at beginning):
and
Black sun coral, compact growth, T. diaphana (if starved, could be slow opening at first, greedy eater later):
This and lemon-yellow one could be on the same rock with orange sun corals, for one price, or a single polyp on a rock with scleronephthya.
Less common:
Black sun coral, Y-shaped branches, arboreal growth, T. micratha. Photo is
here. Coarse for a small tank, impressive in the large.
This one:
- Considered rare seen in trade, but it largely depends of LFS (some have them time from time, some haven't them).
- Usually described as living only in very high flow, like for dendronephthya - and they grow sometimes together in the wild - but in my tank it is together with other suns, under Micro-Jet powerhead without troubles.
- Again, frequently described as very sensitive, but when I used bad batch of salt after fragging (alkalinity 17 dKH, finest cloudiness), it ignored all this, when durable T. diaphana (other black sun) started to strip tissue on main colony (but recovered later).
- You can see how it recovered from almost as bad situation as your is
here and
here.
Not Tubastreas, but same family and same care:
Very questionable ID, could be Dendrophyllia gracilis:
If bought healthy and continue to be fed - as any other sun coral.
Same with Cladopsammia gracilis, miniature polyps, low growing bush shape:
Recovers well even if bought half dead.
The closest I could find was Dendrophyllia cornigera, yellow branching (it was donated also half dead, now recovers - even chopped on halves single polyp):
All together, after having hard time when access to the tank and observations was blocked:
All of them had price, similar to usual sun corals, and are not open all day long.
More about Tubastrea color varieties in
this thread.
But there is a very common, but 4x more expensive firecracker dendrophyllia: much large - and only several for $150 - polyps, open all day long. Could be Dendrophyllia fistula. Most say that it is durable and reliable.
HTH
