Montipora

Montipora for sale — plating caps, branching digitata, setosa, palawanensis and encrusting varieties grown in our Key West systems. Monti is the ideal first SPS: fast, colorful, and forgiving. Ships UPS Next Day Air, live arrival guaranteed.
Aquacultured in Key West: the corals we grow are farm-raised under Florida Aquaculture Certificate #AQ0254072 — captive-grown, sustainable, and traceable, never wild-stripped or “chop-shopped.”Named Montipora morphs, and what you are actually buyingMontipora splits into three growth forms and the name on the label usually tells you which one. Plating types (M. capricornis, M. undata) grow outward in sheets and whorls. Encrusting types (M. setosa, M. confusa) creep flat across rock. Branching types (M. digitata, M. spongodes) put up thin upright fingers. Buy for the form you want in that spot, because a plating monti will not give you a branch and a digitata will not give you a shelf.Tropic Thunder, Kung Pao, Beach Bum and the rest of the named morphs are trade names for specific color lines, most of them plating or encrusting. Color on these is light-dependent and every one of them will shift over a few weeks in your tank. A morph that looks dull in a seller photograph under white light is often the same animal that looks electric under 20,000K.Montipora spongodes is worth calling out separately — a branching form with thick, knobby tips that tends to be mistaken for a digitata. It grows faster than most branching monti and frags cleanly.Montipora care, in numbersLight: 150–300 PAR. Montipora is the forgiving end of SPS and will live across a wider band than Acropora, but color intensity tracks light closely. Move it up gradually rather than all at once.Flow: moderate to strong, and turbulent rather than laminar. Plating forms in particular collect detritus on the upper surface in weak flow, and that is where tissue loss starts.Placement: middle to upper rock for branching and encrusting; give plating types clear space, because a capricornis will shade everything under it within a year.Water: alkalinity steady between 8 and 9 dKH. Montipora tolerates a wider nutrient range than Acropora and often colors better with nitrate in the 5–10 ppm range than at zero.Common Montipora problemsMontipora-eating nudibranchs. The single biggest reason a healthy monti collection collapses. They are small, white and well camouflaged, and the first sign is usually bleached patches spreading along a branch or sheet. Dip every new frag before it goes in the display, and inspect the underside of plating forms.White patches at the base. Usually flow or detritus, not disease. Blow the piece off with a turkey baster and check whether the patch stops spreading.It grows but stays brown. Nutrients too high relative to light, or light too low. Montipora browns before it dies, which makes it a useful early indicator for the rest of your SPS.Questions we get askedIs Montipora a good first SPS? Yes, and it is the one we recommend before Acropora. It forgives a swing that would burn an acro, it grows fast enough to show you whether your tank is working, and a frag costs a fraction of the price.How fast does it grow? In a stable tank, a branching frag will visibly lengthen within two months and a plating frag will start laying down new margin in about the same time.Can I frag it myself? Easily. Branching forms snap and glue; plating forms cut with bone cutters. Both encrust onto a plug quickly.