Branching Hammer Coral - Euphyllia ancora

Purchased on June, 4th 1999.

This picture shows the branching hammer coral during its first week in the tank. This is just a single live head on what was probably a real nice colony. I picked up this coral for only $5.

Life started out hard for this coral, it’s bag lost all water during shipping. When that happens you have no need to acclimate. Just toss it in the tank and hope for the best. Within minutes it showed a few polyps.

The head of this hammer coral when the polyps are expanded is no bigger than a US quarter.

This shows the coral 8 months later. You can see it has shown excellent growth. The skeleton was re-oriented to point upwards towards the light and the coral has been given weekly feedings of diced cocktail shrimps and frozen prawns.

Although hard to see at the base of the hammer coral are several daughter colonies starting to develop.

My fat and plump mandarin can be seen in the lower corner of the picture.

This coral is rapidly becoming a monster of a coral as this picture shows it 20 months later. I have it stuffed in a corner to keep it away from my much larger octobubble coral.

This is a macro shot showing the polyp detail of the hammer coral. These polyps are very typical of your average hammer coral. An anchor coral tends to have little curls at the end of the polyp.

This macro shot shows a very odd polyp – one that has split in two. This was the only one I could find in the entire colony of this hammer coral.

The hammer coral is in the lower left squished against the glass on approaching other near by corals.

NOTE: August 2002, This coral out grew its section of the tank. It was constantly battling against the much larger Octobubble coral near it (and it was winning). I snapped off a branch to keep and grow out again and traded the coral to a LFS. This coral was very large. Weighed almost 10 lbs and was transported in a 5 gallon bucket.

This little thing is all I kept of the massive parent colony shown above.