Broccoli Tree Coral

Care at a glance

Overview

A sessile branching soft coral that grows by extending its main stalks and can be fragged by cutting off a branch and mounting it to rock. It competes for space mainly through fast growth and mild chemical activity, so give it some separation from touchier corals and run activated carbon in a crowded mixed reef. It gets most of its nutrition from light but takes in fine planktonic food, and once it settles into a tank it is considered one of the more trouble-free soft corals to keep.

In the wild

Litophyton grows on reef slopes and hard bottoms from the Red Sea across the Indo-Pacific, where its branching, broccoli-like head can reach close to a meter tall in the wild. In the aquarium it wants moderate to strong light, roughly 100 to 200 PAR, and medium to strong flow to keep its branches open and free of debris. Mount it on a stable horizontal rock rather than a steep slope, and give a new colony a few weeks to settle in, since this coral reacts more to shipping and relocation stress than to everyday tank conditions.

Good to know

Litophyton is a soft coral in the family Nephtheidae. The genus Nephthea was folded into Litophyton after genetic studies in 2016, so the two names refer to the same corals and both are still used interchangeably in the trade. It is a separate genus from Capnella, the Kenya tree coral already in this catalog, even though hobby sources sometimes lump every branching tree-form softie together under one name. It draws most of its energy from zooxanthellae and produces a waxy film that it periodically sheds to clean itself.

Did you know

A newly introduced Litophyton often sulks for a week or two after shipping, closing up and looking rough, which leads some keepers to give up on it too soon. A colony that gets past that rough patch usually turns into one of the hardiest corals in the tank.

Related species

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  Colt Coral

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• 

  Elegance Coral

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