Meteor Shower Coral

Care at a glance

Overview

A generally easygoing stony coral that still throws sweeper tentacles at night, so leave 2 to 3 inches of clearance from its neighbors. It does best in low to medium light; starting it under 100 PAR and raising intensity slowly, if at all, tends to bring out better color than strong reef lighting does. It only needs gentle to moderate, indirect flow, just enough to keep detritus from settling on the colony, since buildup underneath can kill tissue over time. It draws most of its energy from its zooxanthellae and does not need target feeding, though it will take phytoplankton if offered, and it is a fast, easy grower often recommended as a first stony coral for someone moving up from softies.

In the wild

Cyphastrea serailia is widespread across the Indo-Pacific and Red Sea, growing on reef flats, lagoons, and turbid inshore reefs where light and water quality swing more than they do on a pristine outer reef. That tolerance for variable conditions carries over into the aquarium: it does best in low to medium light, under about 100 PAR, with gentle to moderate indirect flow, which makes it one of the few stony corals suited to shadier lower spots that would leave most SPS pale and stressed.

Good to know

Cyphastrea belongs to the family Merulinidae, the same family as the brain corals in genus Favia, and it builds a dense, encrusting-to-knobby skeleton studded with small, closely packed corallites. The meteor shower trade name describes a color pattern seen in some Cyphastrea serailia colonies, a dark blue-to-black base scattered with small, bright red or orange polyps that reads like streaks of light against a night sky. Color shifts with lighting and nutrient levels, and a colony that arrives pale or brown often recolors within a few weeks of settling in.

Did you know

Meteor shower Cyphastrea earns its name from the pattern itself, small bright red or orange polyps scattered across a dark base like streaks of light against a night sky, and the coral is tough enough to hold that color in the shadier, low-light corners of a tank that most stony corals cannot tolerate.

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