Just as a reminder to everyone, never ever EVER throw away your “dead” coral. No matter how “dead” you think it is. I have a piece of my button polyps that broke off when I originally got them (these were the first corals I ever got) and sat in the bottom of the bag…for weeks. I took that piece and said Eh what the heck, I’ll throw it in this tub I’m cycling live rock in. There it stayed in darkness, in horrible water conditions, sky high salinity and basically freshwater (for days at a time each), temperature fluctuations from about 50F to 80F, amist dirt debri and whatever else for about 3 months. Then I took out the live rock and distributed it to the FOWLR and reef tank and it STILL sat there, in a tub with no heater. Then I failed in my frist attempt at top off jug with kalk and dumped the remainder of those contents into that tub. Then I poured all of the water out of the tub to clean it out. There I found my little piece of button polyps that had sat in that tub of death for so long, looking dead as all he11. So I threw it in my QT tank where it was being over run by pods and I eventually thought it was going to stink up the QT so I threw it in the reef tank. About a month later…the polyps opened up! Albeit they lost a bit of their color they live.
Here they be, horrible picture, they are on the very white frag plug (center of pic)
Mother colony
In our 75g tank a few years ago we had a chili coral that died off. Literally gone without a trace. I believe it was when we were infested with green bubble. We lost a few things to that freakin green bubble. A good year to year and a half later after bubble invasion gone. I noticed a tiny red fleck on the rock where the red chili coral was. Sure enough it was growing back. And it’s alive and do well! Better than ever in fact. Seemed a bit unusual to me, but what do I know. So you never know if something’s dead or not. Has this ever type of thing ever happened to any one else?
I have always preached not to throw away corals over and over and over again. My first sps ever died, but I left it in the tank as a reminder that I tried to move to quickly and perhaps was not ready. 6 months later the polyps popped back out again and it was alive!
When I worked at DPA I used to chuck dead corals in a slow flow refugium which only had a salt incrusted old PC bulb hung very high above the tank. Sure enough plenty of coral skeletons sprouted up new life.
I have also purchased many dead and dyeing corals in the past many of which my gf said was ugly and I should throw away. Later on she claimed some of them were the most beautiful corals I have.(not there is a large risk in bringing dead and dyeing corals into a display tank which may carry a coral disease or post. I use qt tanks which I monitor and treat carefully)
I have also fragged the heck out of many corals and only have tiny little pieces left and had full recoveries. Parts of a zoanthid polyp. A 1mmX1mm slice off the corner of a mushroom polyp. I have in my frag tank a 1cmX2cm frag of both finger leather and toadstool leather which are now growing. (note when you cut things this small there growth almost seems to be stunted and the frags are easy to loss so it is probably not the best idea, just attempting to support the fact that any speck of flesh from a coral is capable of growing into a large colony.)
I’ve had a carnation coral completely die off - was a coral skeleton for over a year before it sprouted a new polyp one day. It is slowly becoming a complete coral again as it regenerates.
Like Yeah! I just scraped most of the coraline off the front glass of my old. old 75 with a putty knife. and when the dust cleared i spied what looks like an altantic anemone popping out of the bottom of a 10 year old rock. (or is it a big aptasia?) IDK~ I used to have 2 of those, about 7 inches tall in another smaller tank. a couple cells might have come over on some frag rock when i moved them. we shall see. the old ones were very fast. drop food on them and they grab it and contract as fast as a bungee cord. its only about an inch across the head now. the big old ones spread their tentacles about 6 inches wide.
Weird stuff always shows up when i change the biological balance of the tank. I’m still working on cleaning this one up and ridding some invasive macro algae by cleaning, and fugeing.
