“Sir, how much is this coral?”
“It’s about $80.”
“!”
I quickly sorted out my feelings.
When you keep a tank, there are a few big events. Bringing in new equipment is one, and changing the aquascape is another, but personally, bringing home new livestock feels like the biggest one.
Usually I study quite a bit before bringing something home. I look up whether it can live with the livestock I already have, whether it fits my tank size, and whether the difficulty level is too much. Sometimes I spend more time thinking before buying than I do actually keeping it.
But this candy cane coral was a little different. I had absolutely no plan to bring one home, and on the way to the aquarium shop I did not even know there was a coral called candy coral.
What I mean is, to start with the conclusion, I brought it home because it looked like the cheapest and easiest option.
The coral I was originally looking for was something else
The reason I went to the aquarium shop that day was simple. My tank already had a lot of green and reddish corals, so I wanted to add a slightly different color.
It had been a while since I visited an aquarium shop, and after only seeing the tiny corals growing at home, I got excited seeing large corals that had grown for a long time in a good setup. Then one white, jewel-like coral caught my eye.
“Sir, how much is this one?”
“It’s about $80.”
“?!”
I knew large corals were expensive, but since this one was small, I thought the price would be lighter. I was wrong.
I gave up right away and started looking for another coral, then found one with a color I liked.
“Then this one…?”
“That one is about $2,000 ^^”
The price was scary, but what was scarier was that the first coral, at about $80, was starting to look cheap.
So I picked the candy cane coral
That was when the candy cane coral came back into view.
It was not a coral I had picked out from the beginning, and it was not a coral whose name I knew before going there.
But at about $20, the price was easy to accept, and even though its color was still on the green side like the star polyps, torch, and leather corals I already had, I liked that it looked like a little tree.
More than anything, the cute one was also cheap.
I brought it home without really knowing what a candy cane coral was
Honestly, even when I brought it home, I did not really know what kind of coral a candy cane coral was.
It was just round, the color looked fine, and most of all, the price was less scary than the other corals. So I thought, “This seems good enough?” and brought it home.
After I got home and looked it up, candy cane coral turned out to be an LPS coral. It has parts that look like round heads, and apparently when it is doing okay, the flesh puffs up nicely.
If I went deep into the theory, I could probably explain more, but what I first felt was simple.
It is cuter than I expected.
It is not a coral that sways dramatically or has a huge presence, but once the lights come on and the flesh puffs up, I keep finding myself looking at it. Maybe because the heads are so round, it is a slightly different kind of fun to watch compared with the other corals.
At first, I brought it home because it looked cheap and easy. But after watching it for about a month, I realized that “easy” did not mean I could pay less attention to it.
If anything, because it was a coral I brought home without much pressure, I ended up looking at it more often. Is it a little puffier today? Is the color still the same? Is it too close to the coral next to it? I keep checking those little things for no real reason.
After two months, it was more fun to watch than I expected
It is not a coral that waves around beautifully like a torch or leather coral, but after keeping it for a while, it has its own fun.
The branch-like parts look a little different under the lighting, and inside the overall color of the tank, it feels like it fills an empty spot.
At first, the price was what caught my eye.
But bringing home a mini coral frag again after a while made me realize that even a little growth is noticeable, and that makes it fun to watch.
Is it a little puffier than yesterday, is the color okay, is the spacing from the surrounding corals okay? When I look closely, the small differences show up, and that is pretty fun.