Trachyphyllia

An open brain is bought with your eyes and kept with your hands. Nearly everything on this page is WYSIWYG, because nobody buys a Trachyphyllia sight unseen. The pattern on the specific animal is the entire reason.

Wellsophyllia and Trachyphyllia radiata are the same argument taxonomists have been having for decades. What matters to you is where the coral sits: on the sand bed, not on the rock. The skeleton is heavy and rounded underneath and it will roll if you perch it. One that lands upside down at night and stays there through the next day will lose tissue on the buried edge.

Low flow, moderate light, and food. They have large mouths and they use them. A weekly feed of mysis, or a pellet placed on the oral disc after lights out, puts mass and color on an open brain faster than any lighting change.

The most common way we see one go backward is flow. If the fleshy skirt is pinned flat or flapping, move the coral. It should breathe, not fight.Open brains, and the sand bed ruleTrachyphyllia and the corals sold as Wellsophyllia are free-living open brains that sit loose on a sand bed rather than attaching to rock. That is not a preference, it is how the animal is built — the underside is a rounded cone designed to sit in soft substrate. Put one on rock and it will not seat properly, tissue gets damaged on the skeleton edge, and it declines.Buy on inflation. A healthy open brain inflates well past its skeleton in a broad, even dome. Look for damage or recession at the outer margin where the tissue meets the skeleton edge, which is where problems start.Care, in numbersLight: 50–120 PAR. Low to moderate.Flow: low. Enough to keep detritus off, not enough to move it.Placement: sand bed, with space around it. They inflate to more than twice their skeleton footprint.Feeding: they take food readily and grow visibly for it.Common problemsNot inflating like it did in the store photo. Give it a week. Open brains deflate in transit and take longer than most LPS to return to full extension.Tissue damage on one edge. Usually from being placed on rock or against a hard surface.Questions we get askedWhy do some sit in a dish? Keepers use a shallow dish of sand to give a stable seat on a bare-bottom tank. It works fine.Straight answer on shippingOvernight air on a livestock box costs us about $30 in Florida and $45 to $75 out of state. Our charge is $30 and $50 respectively, so the longer the route the more of it we absorb, and past a $349 livestock subtotal there is no charge to you at all. Everything goes UPS Next Day Air on Tuesday or Wednesday out of Key West, never later in the week, so nothing risks a weekend in a warehouse.