This week’s installment of the AquaNerd Picture of the Week features a stunning mushroom coral. Most mushrooms don’t look anywhere near this good. Their colors are often muted greens, dull purples, and the like. This mushroom, however, features a vibrant green with hot pink accents around the edges. I was actually stunned when I saw this particular specimen at a local fish store, and I obviously had to share this beauty with the reefkeeping community. I didn’t even bother to ask a price because the mushroom was in a display tank that the owner never sells out of and the store is sort of known for their higher prices. What I found to be most interesting was the fact that there was the same morph of mushrooms in another part of the aquarium, but they looked nowhere near as vibrant as this individual. The lighting wasn’t any different and the flow was similar enough, but for some reason the colors were much more muted. Perhaps they were being shadowed and only recently moved into a brighter spot of the aquarium, but who knows.
