SDE - One thing worth noting if you're relatively new to reefing (I'm not assuming that, btw) is that very little of what's for sale in the LFS and online is wild-collected anymore, especially SPS and softies like zoas. There's some exceptions - SPS from Australia are all wild-collected, though in a highly regulated, sustainable manner.
The whole colonies of SPS and zoas that you typically see online from a seller like Live Aquaria are mari-cultured in Indonesia and Fiji. There may be a few exceptions, but they're typically priced in the $100 range for a baseball sized colony at retail. That's far, far below the prices that are typically asked for frags by coral slingers, which are typically $60 - $80 or so for a 1" single-stick frag, and sometimes multiple hundreds if the color combinations are deemed desirable.
So this encourages what Mucho's discussing - so-called "chop shops" that buy a $25 - $50 baseball-sized colony wholesale, and cut it up into 10 - 20 1" fragments that they sell for $50 - $150 each. To support this sort of thing, there's a lot of questionable marketing going on, including the appellations of "rare", "limited edition" and so forth.
If you choose, you can avoid this by buying a box of maricultured colonies through a distributor like Livestockusa.org; the typical price structure is about $700 for a box of 15-17 colonies of acropora where you specify the species/color. So about $45 for each colony, typically baseball to softball sized.
