Goniopora: The Flowerpot Coral, Conditioned — Care and Colonies for Sale

Goniopora carries the worst old reputation in the hobby and deserves it least. The flowerpot coral — a dome of long, swaying polyps, each ending in a little daisy of tentacles — used to die by the thousands as wild imports that arrived starving. The animal was never the problem. The supply chain was.

Shopping for Goniopora? Browse Goniopora frags and colonies, or view the XXL Green Goniopora colony. Each listing shows its current price and availability.

Contrary to popular belief, goniopora is easy — when it is conditioned. Ours have grown for years in our Key West systems, and colonies are held and observed here before they are listed. A goni that is already eating and growing in captivity is a different purchase from one that came off a plane last week, and that difference is most of the genus’s bad name.

Care at a glance

One ID note: goniopora polyps carry around 24 tentacles; its close cousin Alveopora carries 12. We stock both — alveopora is here — and everything on this page applies to both.

The commitment is food. Gonis are heavy feeders of fine suspended plankton, and steady fine feeding plus stable water is the entire recipe — stability matters more than exact numbers. The technique is the same one that works for acans: spot feeding, done properly.

Goniopora or Alveopora? Count the tentacles

These two get sold as each other constantly, and the tell is simple enough to do from a photo if the polyps are open. Goniopora polyps carry 24 tentacles around the mouth. Alveopora carries 12. Count one polyp on a clear picture and you have your answer.

The practical difference is the look. Alveopora polyps are shorter and stiffer and the colony reads as a tight cushion; goniopora polyps are longer and hang in the current, which is the swaying meadow people are actually buying. Neither is harder to keep than the other. But if you paid for a goni and a photo shows twelve tentacles, you paid for the wrong animal.

Where to put it, and why the sand bed often wins

A goniopora extends to feed. Those long polyps are reaching into the water for particles, and the coral will only put them out if the water moving past is gentle enough to reach into. Point a powerhead at one and it stays balled up, month after month, and you conclude it is unhappy with your light when the problem is a jet of water.

That is why a lot of gonis do better on the sand or on a low ledge than up on the rock. Down there the flow is turbulent and indirect rather than directional, which is the condition the polyps open into. Give it somewhere the sand does not visibly move but the water is clearly changing over, and leave it alone. They resent being shuffled.

One caution on the sand: a colony sitting flat on a fine bed can trap detritus underneath and rot from the base. Set it on a small piece of rubble so water gets under it.

Feeding, honestly

Most of a goniopora’s energy still comes from light. Feeding is not the difference between alive and dead, and the people who lost gonis in the old days were not losing them for want of a target feeder — they were getting animals that had already been starving for six weeks in a supply chain.

That said, this is a genus that visibly responds. Small particulate foods are what those tentacles are built for: fine pellets, oyster eggs, phytoplankton, and the general drift of a tank that is fed properly. You do not need to target feed every polyp, and you should not dump food at a colony that is closed up. Feed the tank, watch whether the polyps stay out longer over the following weeks, and let that tell you.

What actually kills them is chemistry that moves. Alkalinity that swings a couple of points between doses will close a goni before it closes anything else in the tank. Stable and slightly nutrient-rich beats pristine and swinging, every time.

What melting looks like, and when it is recoverable

A goni in trouble stops extending first. Then the polyps that do come out get shorter. Then you see skeleton at the base of the colony, and from there it climbs. The word people use is melting, and it is not sudden — it runs over one to three weeks and it is visible from the first week if you are looking.

Caught while the top two-thirds of the colony is still extending, it is usually recoverable: find the parameter that moved, put it back, stop touching the coral. Caught when bare skeleton is halfway up, it usually is not. The honest answer is that a wild-collected colony that arrives already receding rarely turns around no matter what you do, which is the whole argument for buying one that has been eating in somebody’s system for months.

Goniopora in stock now

Conditioned, eating, and photographed individually — the photo is the exact colony 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.