Chalice Corals: Care, Placement and WYSIWYG Chalices for Sale

Chalice corals are where pattern collectors end up. A plating or encrusting sheet with scattered raised mouths across the surface, usually ringed in a contrasting color — and the eye-catching ones command real money for patterns that only show under blue light. “Chalice” actually covers several genera the trade treats as one: Echinophyllia, Oxypora and Mycedium among them. What they share is the sheet growth form, the scattered eyes, and the temperament.

Shopping for chalice corals? Browse current chalice listings, or compare larger pieces in our WYSIWYG coral colonies collection. Open each listing for its exact photographs, size, price and availability.

Care at a glance

The temperament is the thing to plan around. Chalices carry some of the longest sweeper tentacles in the hobby, reaching six inches or more, and a chalice placed politely between two other corals will eventually clear the space around it. Shaded, low, and with more room than looks necessary is the placement that works for years.

Less light than you think, too. A chalice under SPS lighting bleaches from the plate edge inward; the deep reds and golds develop in the shade. If the colors are washing out, move it down, not up.

The colors you are buying depend on the light you are buying them under

This is the thing about chalices that costs people the most money and almost nobody says out loud. The pattern you fall in love with is fluorescence, and fluorescence is a response to the light hitting it. A chalice photographed under heavy blue at 450nm and a chalice sitting under a whiter, more balanced spectrum are not showing you the same animal.

So before you spend real money on a pattern, find out what it was shot under, and be honest about what your own tank runs. If you keep your display closer to daylight because you like how the fish look, a chalice sold on a blue-heavy photo is going to arrive looking flatter than the picture, and the coral will be perfectly healthy while you are disappointed. That is not the seller cheating you. It is physics, and it is worth knowing before the box arrives rather than after.

The same goes the other way. A dull-looking chalice under a store’s white lights can be a completely different animal once it is under blues at home.

Sweepers: the longest reach in most tanks

Chalices put out sweeper tentacles at night that are longer than almost anything else people keep, and they come off the edge of the plate in whatever direction there is something to reach. A chalice will burn a torch, an acan or a montipora that looked safely spaced during the day.

Plan the space around the mature size, not the frag you are holding. A 1-inch chalice frag becomes a plate, and the sweepers extend from wherever that plate edge ends up. If you have to choose, give it a shelf with open water below and nothing directly downstream.

Why yours is not growing, and why that is normal

A chalice frag encrusts before it plates. For the first stretch it is laying tissue down across the plug or the rock and putting nothing outward, so you watch it for two months and swear it has done nothing. Then it lifts an edge and starts building a plate, and from there it moves.

The mistake at that stage is moving it because it looks stalled. Chalices dislike being relocated more than they dislike most other insults. Put it somewhere you are willing to leave it for six months, at moderate light and gentle indirect flow, and let it get on with it.

About the names

There is no registry for chalice names. Nobody has the authority to say what is or is not a Miami Hurricane or a Watermelon, and two vendors can use the same name for animals that came from different colonies on different sides of the world. Names in this genus are trade descriptions, not lineage.

That does not make a named chalice a bad buy. It means you judge the piece in front of you rather than the label: how many mouths it has, whether the tissue runs cleanly to the edge with no bare skeleton, whether the pattern holds across the whole plate or only in one lucky corner, and what light the photo was taken under. Our WYSIWYG chalice listings are the exact animal, photographed in our own systems.

Chalices in stock now

Photographed individually under the light they are grown in — the photo is the exact piece that ships.

One thing to know before you order: the $10 Box & Handling Fee is charged by the box, not by the coral, and UPS Next Day Air is one flat shipping charge per order. A box holds several corals for the same $10 Box & Handling Fee and the same overnight ride, Florida orders under 6 lb ship UPS Next Day Air for a flat $30, and livestock orders of $349 or more ship free. If this page puts one coral on your list, it is worth seeing what else belongs in the box — start with corals under $100 or the newest WYSIWYG pieces.

Our stony corals are either aquacultured at the shop in Key West under Florida Aquaculture Certificate #AQ0254072 or conditioned in our Key West systems before they ship, and the photo on a WYSIWYG listing is the exact animal that ships. Corals ship UPS Next Day Air every Tuesday and Wednesday. If you are ever in Key West, come see the raceways.