It Ain't Easy Bein Green (actually, it kinda is)

Green Toadstool Leather Corals are among the most popular corals in all of the marine aquarium hobby. We still believe them to be under-rated.

There are lots of different Toadstool Leather Corals and they are all in the genus Sarcophyton. Their natural range is throughout the tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans. They are a common coral throughout this range. They tend to thrive in places where reefs have been disturbed, or in relatively shallow areas where nutrient levels are higher than average. In the wild, the vast majority of them are brown, with browner, and some extra brown. However, there are pockets of habitat where specimens grow with very cool colors, and over time, these have been chosen for culturing and now the hobby is flooded with neon green, white and even yellow ones. We're here for it. The Neon Green Toadstools from Japan are some of our favorites.

Neon Green Toadstools have been popular for decades. Sarcophyton in general were one of the first corals to be kept successfully in aquariums because their preferred wild habitat is one that is fairly easily reproducible in the home aquarium. While they do need flow, they don't need nearly as much as many more demanding corals. In regard to tank size, you can keep a Toadstool in a five-gallon aquarium, and it would look amazing, but it will outgrow the space. A favorite display in a partner Local Fish Store here in LA once had a 120-gallon cube and the only coral in it was a massive Neon Green Toadstool that took up a huge amount of the space! So, these corals can get pretty big. Luckily, they can also be trimmed, split and fragged and so their total size can be managed to fit in the space where you would like them to be. We'd suggest starting with a 40-gallon tank and moving up from there. Their growth form will obviously be like a big mushroom, so they'll need an environment that allows them to grow out their roughly circular fringe.

Sarcophyton are incredibly durable corals, and as such, they have no real outstanding care requirements. They'll be fine in aquariums that live within normal marine aquarium parameters. Keep your temps in the mid 70s Fahrenheit, your SG in the 1.025 range, and keep up with your water changes and your Neon Green Leathers should be happy and grow quickly. They are tolerant of elevated levels of nitrate and phosphorus in a way that few other corals can tolerate. In fact, they do best in systems with slightly elevated levels of a variety of dissolved nutrients as this is one of three ways, they get food. They are also photosynthetic, recent studies have shown that we have over emphasized the importance of this fairly wildly. Some recent peer reviewed studies have shown that some toadstools actually grow faster with better color under lower intensity lighting. We have found that all Leather corals do much better and maintain brighter colors when they are fed supplemental foods. They can be maintained without food, as long as the lights are good and your fish are well fed, (giving them fish waste to consume), but we dose their tanks with Nutramar's Live Algae, and target feed new frags with the same. This results in better growth rates and their coloration seems more intense. You can feed them once or twice a week and get good results.

One of the reasons that Toadstool Leather Corals do so well in disturbed habitats is that they grow quickly and readily propagate asexually. This proclivity for being able to “self-frag” has resulted in Leather corals being very commonly aquacultured. As a hobbyist, you can feel assured about the sustainability of both wild harvested and aquacultured options available to you through your LFS and Quality Marine. Furthermore, should you want to, Neon Green Toadstool Corals make for a great introduction propagating corals, and maybe you have buddies who already does this! All it takes is a sharp razor, a string and a rock. Make a clean cut off the edge of the coral that is perhaps silver dollar sized and tie this to a small rock and let it attach. Seriously. That's it. Cut off a piece, let the original piece grow back and you'll have two Toadstools in time.

The only real requirement for Neon Green Toadstool Leather Corals (an indeed many “soft” corals is that they are “chemically aggressive.” While this sounds daunting, it just means that some care should be taken when choosing tankmates or filtration. In the ocean these corals will emit compounds that help deter other corals from living near them, which prevents them from being overgrown or out competed. In the home aquarium however, these same compounds are not diluted away by the massive volume of sea water and thus, if you want to keep other corals, chemical filtration like binders or carbon are required and should be replaced often. If you don't, other corals in your system may show a failure to thrive, but more often they just lose color and brown out. In severe cases, very sensitive corals could succumb to the chemical warfare and may die. This concern is most evident when adding new corals to a system where a Toadstool is well established. Conversely, mixing Sarcophyton with other corals happens all the time ad can be successfully managed just by utilizing some activated carbon in your filtration set up.

Neon Green Toadstools are amazing corals. Their understated beauty offers form, coloration and outstanding movement that is rare in any coral. In addition, they are incredibly hardy and flourish in conditions that are easily managed by even the newest aquarist. AND they are perhaps the best introduction to clonal production in captive aquaculture available! Give your LFS a call and ask about Neon Green Toadstool Leathers from Quality Marine today!