well I bought a elegance today

[bprewit]

I have read many many posts about the problems with elegance corals the last few years and almost all of them dying. So far have read J. Sprung saying its a bacterial infection and others saying it needs to be on sandbed covered with seagrass, and various other opinions on why they do so poorly. I got it for $15 and figured it has a better chance in my tank that in LFS even though that chance is extremly low. Anyone have a idea to try and keep this thing alive??? :huh

[cpreefguy]

We had one at Fin Addict for a long while. We kept it in the sandbed in a low-medium flow area, and acclimated it to our lights VERY slowly. We also target dosed the tank it was in with DT's regularly.
hope this helps

[NaCl_H2O]

Fine sandbed, moderate light, low flow, handle with extreme care ... but then mine died too after a fw months :( !

Read some older reefkeeping literature and they are described as hardy, and easy to keep. Theory I have heard is that the hardy shallow water elegance corals were all harvested long ago. Specimens harvested nowadays are deep water and don't adjust well to light, flow, and temp in a typical reef tank.

[cpreefguy]

Theory I have heard is that the hardy shallow water elegance corals were all harvested long ago. Specimens harvested nowadays are deep water and don't adjust well to light, flow, and temp in a typical reef tank.
plus one
This has happened with many corals and is still happening.

[GaryP]

I can remember the first time I walked into an LFS after setting up my first reef tank. The first thing that cought my eye was an Elegance and a Gonipora. Luckily I held off on that type of impulse purchase until I was further along the learning curve. That's not to say I didn't make some other poorly advised purchases along the way. Did anyone say Australian Sea Apple?

Anyway, Brent I wish you the best of luck with the Elegance. They truly are a magnificent coral. I just wish I could have gotten my hands on one of those shallow water colonies years ago. Please keep us informed of your success and/or problems with it.

The down side to all of this is the economics of such corals. As long as there is some unknowing rookie reefer to buy these corals, there will be a market for them. Brent is clearly not in this category, and I applaud him for making an attempt to rescue this particular colony. If he hadn't bought it, someone with a lot less chance of success would.

I have been told by LFS owners that wholesalers will slip these type of corals into shipments to unload them. As long as this continues to go on, they will continue to be depleted in the wild and continue to die in unsuspecting hobbyists tanks. I don't have the answer to how to stop it, but maybe that is something that needs to be discussed at a MACNA type event. Perhaps its something that needs to be addressed by CITES. Banning the export of these types of corals will surely stop it. Collectors with these corals piling up in their holding tanks will bring it to a quick halt.

The truly unfortunate part of this is that there is always going to be a few skilled individuals that are able to keep them alive. Stories of these corals seem to almost take on the status of an urban myth. We always seem to have sufficient ego to think that if the other guy was able to do it, so will I. This assumption is often based on a total lack of information as to what conditions the coral was kept under. The problem with that is that it may take up to a year for one of these corals to die. I think that is often the case with goniporas. The guy that claims success after six months is rarely heard from on that topic after 12 months. Human nature dictates that we rarely want to announce our failures as loudly as we do our successes.

[gjuarez]

I kept an elegance for about 2 years. It did great and grew like crazy, too big for my 29g that I had to sell it. Well I didnt sell it, but I took it to a lfs to sell on consignment an it only lasted two weeks in their tank. I felt I was pretty successful with it but I really dont know why. I also tried a goniopora, not because I wanted to prove that I could keep it, but because I didnt know any better at the time. It died on me after a month. I guess all I can say is that I got lucky with the elegance. It was under strong lighting and medium flow. I never fed it.

[GaryP]

So you are the guy that started the urban myth about elegance huh?

Obviously, there are always exceptions, like the madarins that eat frozen food. Unfortunately, while you were lucky to get a good colony, that is rarely the case and the exceptions do more harm to the species then good. Its fate at the LFS is a perfect example.

[gjuarez]

Funny thing is that later I bouth a smaller colony and it didnt last as long.

[GaryP]

Its like playing Russian Roulette with 5 bullets in the gun.

[LoneStar]

*BANG* Did I win??

[GaryP]

Please play again! Wait, you can't! Well, at least the coral can't.

[hammondegge]

for those of you who have not seen this. excellent thread on ellegance problems.
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=310425&perpage=25&pagen umber=1

[Isis]

We have guy coming to MACNA who can not only keep gonioporas alive, but he can slice them up to make hybrids. Oh, did I mention that he will be demonstrating this technique at the fragging demo at MACNA? :)

[Richard]

Got a pic of the elegans?

[brewercm]

We have guy coming to MACNA who can not only keep gonioporas alive, but he can slice them up to make hybrids. Oh, did I mention that he will be demonstrating this technique at the fragging demo at MACNA?

I'd love to see that but there is no way I can make it to MACNA unfortunately. I have one that I've had since I set up my tank back around July. I got it from a guy that lived by me and was moving and gave me that and several other corals/fish. He told me that he had it for about eight months at that point which would put it around Nov 04 (take that for what it's worth). If this piece does survive longer (I'd say another year) I'd sure like to know the method to see if it is possible to propogate these in our tanks if we could get a good healthy species.

Here is a not so decent picture of this one. BTW, this was in the tank when I had my temperature problem a while back where my tank went down to around 56~58 degrees overnight. Long thread a while back.

[bprewit]

well hmmmm the elegance looked big and nice the first two days and then swollen oral disk and stubby deflated tentecles for a couple of days and now is starting to look nice again. I stuck it on the sand bed in a medium to low flow spot with medium lighting far away from everything else so we will see what happens. I will keep my fingers crossed until something changes.