Rapunzel Coscinaraea

Coscinaraea sp.

Also known as Coscinaraea

SaltwaterCoral

Rapunzel Coscinaraea (Coscinaraea sp.) — "Sydney coral - Coscinaraea mcneilli" by Marine Explorer is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/. · CC BY-SA

Care at a glance

Temperature: 75–81°F (24–27°C)
pH: 8.1–8.4
Adult size: 11.8 in (30 cm)
Minimum tank: 20 gal (75 L)
Temperament: Peaceful
Social behavior: Solitary
Swim level: Bottom
Difficulty: Medium
Breeding: Medium
Rarity: Very rare
Reef safe: Reef safe
Origin: Western Pacific reefs, aquacultured in Palau
Family: Coscinaraeidae

Overview

Keep it under moderate to high light in moderate, indirect flow, placed low to mid rockwork with open space around it, since the long tentacles reach further than the encrusted base suggests. It is a hardy, willing feeder, and offering fine plankton foods when the tentacles are out during the day supports steady growth. Care sits at the comfortable middle of large polyp stony keeping, though supply is currently limited to occasional aquacultured releases.

In the wild

Coscinaraea encrusts reef rock across the Indo-Pacific, forming colonies with a distinctive ridged, gently meandering surface, bumpy and nodular in the shallows and more plating in deeper water. It handles bright, turbid inshore conditions that many stony corals avoid. The Rapunzel line is an aquacultured Biota Palau release, blue green under actinic-heavy light with unusually long, flowing tentacles.

Good to know

The genus is accepted in its own small family, Coscinaraeidae, but molecular work has scattered several of its best known former species into Psammocora and Cycloseris, so trade colonies are honestly labeled only as Coscinaraea sp. The corallites sit in a maze-like arrangement with ridged, granular septa that give the surface its texture. Unlike most stony corals, it commonly feeds with tentacles extended in daylight.

Did you know

Most stony corals wait for darkness to feed, but Coscinaraea trails its tentacles in open daylight, and that habit is exactly what the Rapunzel name is pointing at.