This is less of a tip and more of a mild rant, so bare with us. We hate it when vendors list prices on corals as “price per polyp”. Instead of just putting a final price on a high end frag, they usually show an image of a small coral colony and list some God awful price per individual polyp. At this point, the transaction can go one of two ways. The coral listed with the per polyp pricing might be of the “what you see is what you get” variety, and the hobbyist has to do a little math and potentially a little interpretation to figure out just how much it will cost. Since pictures don’t always tell the whole story, you may see four polyps and put the coral into your online shopping cart only to realize that you’re being charged for 5 or more. This is a big issues for the higher end corals, especially those with double digit prices on their polyps. To make it even more confusing, there might be baby polyps that you may not consider in the price (as they shouldn’t be) but the vendor might.
The other issue this practice creates is that it can be a bit misleading, as the coral pictured is a mini-colony that the vendor frags from, meaning you’ll never get a WYSIWYG coral. We are huge proponents of WYSIWYG corals, and we believe that every online vendor should sell in this fashion. It is more time consuming, but customers will get exactly what they want and there is no room for misinterpretation.
