Morphology and color of Caulastrea furcata

Hey guys,

I was doing some general tank work today and I look at my candy cane coral and thought about something. When I bought it in June of '09 it looked like this:



So today I happened to move it and a thought popped into my head. Whats the deal with this coral looking so different from when I purchased it?

Recent picture


Of course coral grown and split and whatnot, but I was stumped as to why the heads were much smaller and the color changed to a more fluorescent green. It's healthy and puts out it's feeder tentacles every night. There's nothing wrong with it. I was just wondering what could cause these changes as this coral grows?

 

My guess as to the smaller polyps is that as they split, they are obviously smaller but b/c of the environment in the tank, light, food etc. they split before they get as large as before. (Maybe b/c they have enough extra food/energy to split again) As for the color, that's b/c of your lighting. Corals readily will change colors depending upon the lighting, this is true especially with T5s as each tank can have slight differences in the total spectrum.