A Coral that can live both with light and without? Are my eyes fooling me here?

Been in the hobby now for about 12 years. For the last 5 I happen to have had huge stands of Echinopora lamellosa in both my main tanks(we'll come back to this later). Long story short, last year I had about an 80% total loss after treating (carefully I mind you) flatworms.

After this loss, I noticed 2 interesting things. First that SPS coral frags that had broken off main colonies and fell into dark areas behind rock survived. Second, months later as I was growing everything back, that I had a piece of live rock in my refugium full of Caulerpa that had about 6 weird looking polyps on it. I kept an eye on them, moved the rock from the bottom of the tank which is lit with a only home depot flourescent T12 light, up to the top. I also fed these polyps with mysis shrimp which made them grow and multiply to about 10 polyps.

Now for the strange part. I took that rock back in january and put it down low in my main 135 tank. The polyps that were out of the shadows then started to exibit less height and within a few weeks, appeared to be plating out some. I am still continuing to watch this happen as there is now a full 1" plate coming from the left side of these polyps that were in the light, whereas the ones in the shadows are still exibiting a taller form with the yellow rim and blue dots like they all used to have.

It has now grown big enough and as I look in the earlier pictures I can see the remains of a skeleton that they are growing on. The conclusion I've reached was that this used to be a piece of Echinopora Lamellosa that I had moved to the refugium as the disaster was occurring last May. I thought it and all the others that I put in there were just plain skeletons until I saw this one with the polyps back about Jan 1.

Has anyone ever heard of this? Can a single coral specis go from a hermatypic form to an ahermatypic one and back?

Take a look at the pics and I continue to take more as it grows.

Part of me wants to take a larger piece and toss it back in the refugium to witness the loss of the plate, down to just the single polyps or eyes.

Its really got me for a loop.
Any thoughts if others have seen this?

 

Interesting! I have no clue, but will give you a morning bump.

 

seems plausible, if the coral was able to get its nutrional requirements without light then i dont see why it wouldnt grow,

 

Coral are remarkably resilient as long as the water parameters meet their needs, so I would say no need for new glasses yet.

 

any coral has the potential to grow without light as long as it gets lots of food. indirect lighting may have helped too.

 

Welcome to 3Reef!!

If a coral is stressed, it can die, bleach, or do polyp bailout. If you are confidant that it was dead, then the growth has to be from polyp bailout of another echinopora. The polyp will eventually start putting down it's own skeleton on top of the dead skeleton.

Another possibility is that it bleached and didn't die (or at least a couple polyps survived). When a coral bleaches, it still retains a small portion of it's zooxanthellae. Now that it's zoox is gone, the coral has to get all of it's food from other methods (zooplankton, bacterioplankton, dissolved organics, particulate organic matter, etc). If it gets those, once favorable conditions return, it will start growing again.

That's why I never throw away coral skeletons....one just never knows. I've seen many corals "come back from the dead".

 

I just happened to run across this recently. I wonder if it's possible that your ID may have been mistaken? Not that I'm arguing with it or any other opinions here. In particular Kevin Kohen's posts about Schizoculina are particularly interesting.

Schizoculina fissipara - Reef Central Online Community

I'm not sure if this is the same genus but at least it seems to indicate that some coral can tread the line between a/hermatypic life (maybe not forever though).

 

my Purple pocillopora went to bare skeleton with a patch that had about 2 polyps on it and then the skeleton aglaed over. I left it be and my emerald crab started cleaning it... It is now about 80% covered in polyps again... yay