Video:Saltwater Aquarium Coral 101

Transcript:Saltwater Aquarium Coral 101

Hi, I'm Joe Caparatta, owner of Manhattan Aquariums in New York City, here for About.com. Today we're going to talk about corals that you're going to encounter when you go to the store or shop online, that you're going to consider putting into your reef aquarium.

Hard Versus Soft Aquarium Corals

As you can see in this tank here, we have a multitude of life. From hard corals to soft corals -- I'm going to try and instruct you on what I would recommend starting off with when you get your first salt water reef aquarium. In a nutshell, there's hard corals and soft corals. Hard coral has a hard skeleton. A soft coral doesn't have that bone structure. It thrives and lives on rocks, dead skeletons from once-living hard corals, and sometimes it'll even grow right on living corals.

Beginner Saltwater Aquarium Corals

"LPS," or "Large Polyp Stonies," like these elegance corals, or anything that is really fleshy and wavy, those are easier to keep, than a hard coral with very small polyps. As a general rule of thumb, soft corals are much easier to care for than hard corals, due to their less intense requirements. They're more accepting of environmental changes, so if your pH or your temperature swings a little bit, the soft corals can handle some of the changes in that environment.

In this tank here, we have a red Mushroom Coral -- these come in red, and if you look behind, you can see them in a beautiful purplish-blue. They come in green, they come in all different colors. Those are what are known as Colonial Mushrooms, they do very well and do not need intense light, and they're a good indicator that you're keeping your system where it needs to be.

Over here, we have Zoanthid Polyps. These are also a soft coral - up here we have the same guys in green. I recommend buying a little fragment with maybe four or five heads on it, and that will cost you anywhere from $15 to $50 dollars, and they'll grow and spread out over the rocks in your tank.

Advanced Aquarium Corals

Once you've mastered those, you can try some of the hard corals that do okay in captivity, like the Fungia Plates, the Frogspawn Coral, the Brain Coral. There's different types of Brain Coral, this one's a Red Lobophyllia. Over here is a Hammer Coral.

Fragment Corals for Aquariums

It's very popular nowadays to get fragments of corals. Instead of buying wild, collected colonies, you can buy, sell, or trade clippings of corals. And that's the direction that this hobby is headed, to become more self-sustainable and to ease the pressures on wild, collected specimens.

Thanks for watching. To learn more, visit us on the Web at About.com.