I have had my tank running for about three months now. I have two ocellaris clowns and I am ready for some corals. I have been researching for weeks on corals and everyone has their own opinion on what is the BEST STARTER coral. I was heading towards green star polyps but I am not sure if I want a coral that will spread so fast as my FIRST coral. What do you guys think of the green star polyp? I know most people say mushrooms are hardy corals and good for beginners, but WHICH mushrooms? I don't want to start off with toadstool. What do you think about the red mushroom? Also, what do you think about zoas? I would really appreciate all of your advice and opinions:dunno:
if you start off with GSP - see if you can get a nice mature patch from a local fellow reefer. I wouldn't buy a big block of it from a LFS - just too expensive.
Toadstools are not mushroom corals - they are leather corals. I think you were the one that bought the Borneman book - the beginner mushrooms are the genus Actinodiscus (=Discosoma) at p. 201. There a whole plethora of colors and varieties (pin stripped, dotted, hairy). The husbandry for them are the same.
The nice thing about leather corals and mushrooms is that they can actually thrive even if your water chemistry and tank condtions are far from perfect. As an example, today I found a frag of mushroom that my tangs dug up which i had given up for lost - it was all shriveled up and probably buried or stuck under the rockwork for weeks. I put it in the nano tank and in a few hours it opened up as if nothing happened. They are also ridculously easy to frag. I have a frag box in which i have some green pinstrips. Everytime i pull them out of the frag box - there is a little residual flesh of the stem that remains. In a few months i get a new mushrom from the residual flesh.
I think zoa's and palys are a little less forgiving in terms of water and light conditions but I would still put them in the beginner category.
I would stay away (for now) anything with a calcium skeleton (SPS/LPS) because they require much more management (low nitrates, low phosphates, suitable cal/alk levels). All of which you have to monitor and maybe install reactors to manage. Euphyllia's (frogspawn,anchor,torch,hammer corals) are probably the exception - I would put them in the easy category.
And don't even think about non-photosyntheic corals (sun corals, gorgonians).
At the end of the day its whatever you want to decorate your reef tank with.