Monster Arms Branching Green Star Polyps
The spooky story of my truly branching green star polyp colony....
On a wiltingly hot day in Miami over a year ago I drove to the airport and picked up a few boxes of corals that I had imported from Indonesia. One of these corals was a big combo rock full of of zoanthids, small leather corals, and a small patch of green star polyps. After 24 years in the hobby I didn't pay much attention to it, it's green star polyps no big deal!
Months went by and it slowly grew, I was actually surprised that it didn't overtake the whole combo rock after I sold most of the corals on it, but I didn't think much about it. I gave it its own rock to take over and after about 6 months it was about 3 inches across. I noticed it was even brighter than my other chunk of encrusting green star polyps, but it still looked pretty standard at this point.
Once it started to closer to the 9 month mark I saw it was growing tubes from the main body of the coral, I've seen regular GSP do this when its running out of room on a rock and trying to spread, but I thought it was odd that this one hadn't encrusted all over the glass beneath it (I run bare bottom reef tanks) and had stayed contained on the same rock. After awhile I upgraded it to a larger rock that it slowly covered and the tubing growths became even longer and more abundant.
All of the frags I make of it encrust a little on the tiles but they also quickly begin creating long, tubing branches. Lo and behold, I have a truly branching green star polyp variant. These tube/branches will grow very long and just sort of float in the water. It's funny that this unique coral came as just a little after thought on a coral combo rock and I'm glad I didn't overlook it since it has grown into a really cool colony.
Coral Care:
This type of green star polyps is much slower to encrust the rock that its on; my colony has tissue all around the bottom of the rock, but it hasn't encrusted onto my glass at all. It seems to prefer to send out branches over encrusting on things. It's just as easy to keep as regular green star polyps, it does great in moderate flow and lighting. My tank runs on the low nutrient side and it still grows well.