My Experience with the new Purple Monster

[hunterallen40]

It's an amazing specimen no matter the lineage.

Thank you very much! I couldn't agree more!

 

[C. Eymann]

I remember paying $120 for a 3/4" frag of PM from Tyree/ Reeffarmers back in the mid aughts ~2006 $120 for a tiny frag was unheard of back then, yet there was a waiting list to get the opportunity to buy one.

Over the years I have seen people try and pitch imposter purple loripes and such as the real PM, one of the best ways to tell was that loripes had much larger corallite openings, also the real PM always had light green polyps towards the base/ encrustment and white polyps otherwise.

The species of PM has been long debated, Veron even mentioned to Tyree that it could be a weird morphological growth type of A. valida.

I long thought it to be A. longicyathus, and when I discussed it with Jake Adams on one of the occasions he visited the farm he confirmed that it was indeed A. longicyathus via his friend Tim Kelly who runs the main export in the Solomons. This species has a wide range of growth forms / morphology and when it grows in other locales it doesn't quite resemble PM

We got one colony from the Solomons of a wild PM a 6 months ago, but during its trip through the stressful multiple stages of QT it has greened out and hasn't grown at all yet/ stalled for now

Here is a terrible cell pic of the colony right after we acquired it.

The issue with current day reefs is, purple monster won't really develop it's best coloration unless it's under strong fairly crisp white 10-14k lighting schemes, it's not going to look pretty in a "Windex" tank

 

[hunterallen40]

The issue with current day reefs is, purple monster won't really develop it's best coloration unless it's under strong fairly crisp white 10-14k lighting schemes, it's not going to look pretty in a "Windex" tank

Yes! It's also just not worth it IMHO to get one in a blue-light only tank. We run 10000k halides in we the system with our colony.