Curiosity question regarding corals

[Sophie"s mom]

Good morning all! So my curiosity question is when you see those beautiful long term reef systems with what looks like wall to wall different corals, how do they survive that close to each other? I am very new to corals, and always read about how they get into battles with one another for space, and they release toxins to do this. So how does a tank get so full of beautiful, ultra healthy coral? What am I missing in the equation? I know to a lot of you, this may seem like a dumb question, but I am just curious. I currently have a 90 gallon with 10 different corals, all very spread out to give them room to grow. I want to get more, but I do not want to see them get hurt, if that makes any sense.

 

[maroonclown65]

You often have to group peaceful ones together, If you have corals that will be aggressive with each other you wouldnt have them next to each other, remember, it's type by type however, and there's more aggressive species than others like hammer corals for example can be considered aggressive so if your seeing tanks with lots and lots of corals tightly packed together chances are there organized a certain way so they don't have issues but even then they can reach out with sweeper tentacles quite far to sting coral