Leptoseris Coral

Care at a glance

Overview

Leptoseris carries sweeper tentacles that reach out roughly an inch, enough to irritate anything encrusting right up against it, so give it a little clearance even though it is not a heavy stinger. It is mostly photosynthetic and does not need target feeding, though it will take up fine zooplankton, amino acids and the dissolved nutrients in fish waste. It is popular for its metallic, fine-lined color patterns and strong fluorescence, and is often stocked and sold alongside true chalice corals for that reason even though it is not closely related to them. It frags easily by cutting the plate with a bandsaw or bone cutters, though gluing a thin fragment down takes a generous bead of gel superglue to hold well.

In the wild

Leptoseris grows across Indo-Pacific reefs, including Hawaii and the Red Sea, with most aquarium colonies collected from Fiji, Tonga, the Solomon Islands and the Great Barrier Reef, where it forms thin, folded, encrusting plates over rock. Several species in the genus are also among the deepest-living reef corals known, thriving in dim mesophotic water far below where most stony corals survive. In the tank it wants low to moderate light, roughly 50 to 125 PAR, making it one of the few plating corals suited to a shaded spot that would bleach an Acropora. Give it gentle to moderate flow on a sloped rock face or ledge at 24 to 27 C and pH 8.1 to 8.4, with room to spread without being crowded.

Good to know

Leptoseris is a small polyp stony coral in the family Agariciidae, sometimes called the thin plate coral for its delicate, folded, laminar growth. Some Leptoseris species hold the record for the deepest photosynthetic stony corals ever documented, collected as deep as 172 m, where they run on a tiny fraction of surface sunlight. It grows quickly for an encrusting stony coral, which is part of why it frags and spreads across rock so readily in captivity.

Did you know

The popular Jack-O-Lantern color form, with jet black flesh between glowing orange ridges, is what put this otherwise obscure genus on the map in the reef hobby, and its resemblance to a carved pumpkin is exactly where the name comes from.

Related species

• 

  Cactus Coral

  Pavona cactus

  11.8 in (30 cm)20 gal (75 L)75–81°F (24–27°C)

• 

  Potato Chip Coral

  Pavona decussata

  11.8 in (30 cm)20 gal (75 L)75–81°F (24–27°C)

• 

  Leaf Coral

  Pavona frondifera

  9.8 in (25 cm)20 gal (75 L)75–81°F (24–27°C)

• 

  Lettuce Coral

  Pavona varians

  9.8 in (25 cm)20 gal (75 L)75–81°F (24–27°C)

• 

  Maldives Pavona

  Pavona maldivensis

  7.9 in (20 cm)20 gal (75 L)75–81°F (24–27°C)

• 

  Shoulderblade Coral

  Pavona clavus

  19.7 in (50 cm)26 gal (100 L)75–81°F (24–27°C)