i also wanted to know why the change in the care levels. so about 5 years or so ago i did a little research on these corals too. did not experiment with them though. it was the time eric started his project so i gave him some money for it, many did, and just did a compileing of work already done. sence that time i have only got a couple updates, only on equipment he was buying nothing on the coral itsself. i have heard of many troubles going on with eric sence the project started, form his tanks crashing, to a possible issues with goverment/navy owned corals.. anyway i dont think any info will ever come from that project eric started. that donation i made for the project is probably in his lawyers pocket by now. anyway being in the local i am and haveing been a beach gaurd for sometime, long ago, i know many people working around the beaches and ended up visiting and talking in great detail to those at the public aquarium in cabrilo beach, pacific aquarium of long beach and of course sea world. i found out many things about them. its a long story i will post more later if i can find the paper i was writing(i forgot the name of the file and cant find it)but, for a little intro; the corals form deap waters get most of there nutrients form plankton and stuff they trap and eat. surface elegances tend to rely more on photosynthesis, this may also be the reason for flow variations. they both do both but one relies more on one proccess than the other. the dkh of the water comes into play here. in waters(shallow) with higher dkh they rely on photosyntesis as their energy source. in waters(deaper) with lower dkh they tend to rely more on stuff floating by. here is where is gets difficult to get info because most of the work that has been done focusses on a certain area/region and the impacts on that coral from that region on that region. not much on comparing various regions. you have to research projects done at variuos regions and depths than compare and contrast the results. a long and tedious adventure of sorting through it all. i am sure you found that deap water specimens are normally found attcked to rock and shallow waters you find them in the substrate. possible related to their nutrient needs. high flow rates for deeper water and mild flow for shallow. i never finished after talking with those at sea world. i found its best to reseach the coral based on the region it was collected from to best understand that particular corals needs. flow wise, in part, i think the extra mucus produced from shallow water elegance corals feed many bacteria and algeas. so they dont need the same flow becasue the food is coming to them. deaper water species need the flow. just a extra something on the flow thing i have noticed.
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Originally Posted by mps9506  I question this theory simply because these corals are not adapted to move. Therefore any evolutionary advantage to having different "skin" thickness would not exist. From my understanding corals do not adapt to differing light condtions by growing thicker or thinner skin, but by altering the amount of pigments to maximize or limit the amount of light absorbed by the zooxanthelle. |
your right, but a little off. they dont move and have to acclimate themselves. they do alter their pigments aswell, but they do aslo adapt to their surrounding. this is going to be a little dificlult for me to explain. i can see how "elegance coral" could be see the skin as being thicker. but its not the skin. the corals will secreate it mucus when irritated to protect itself from the sun. after time goes by and the continued mucus production, for protection, the mucus membranes become inflamed and do thicken. its not that the skin is thicker, it just appears that way. the mucus membranes which my appear to the naked eye as "thicker skin" is just inflammed membranes. these longterm inflammed membranes changes things. how to say this ok, its kinda like someone with COPD(chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) over time those with it have adapted to breathing in a different way. normally a degrease in O2 stimulates breathing, for those with COPD it is a elelvated CO2 that stimulates breathing. give a person with COPD lots of extra O2 and their respiration become depressed because elevated O2 will decrease the saturation of the CO2, the trigger for COPDers to breath and thus with no trigger their breathing is suppressed. so corals from shallow waters have different triggers. i know i suck at explaining sorry about that, i hope you get what i tring to say. its like comparing those that live in cities or smoker lungs to mountian dwellers. they both need gas exchange but have different ways of regulating how/when they need it aswell as different tiggers that tells them when they need to increase or decrease things. much like the elegance corals and their mucus city dweller/smokers lungs secreations change and altered their triggers regulating gas exchange, the corals have adapted to thier environment in a similar fashoin. life dont you love it.