Ricordea pics from the ocean

[coralreefer]

Check out these pics if you haven't seen them already.

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=10824261#post10824261

[capman]

Nice photos. Thanks for the link.

I've seen Riccordea and zooanthid patches like these in the wild in person (at Looe Key, which is quite likely where these photos were taken, since the person's location was listed as Big Pine Key). They are even more spectacular in person, especially when viewed in shallow water in full sunlight.

I used to have zooanthids from the Keys (like the ones in the photo) in my tanks. I loved those zooanthids. No-one in the club seems to have them anymore, though I gave away a lot of them.

By the way, these photos also point out the amazing, exuberant, rich diversity of life one finds in natural marine habitats in the ocean. There are conspicuous sponges and a diversity of cool algae in every photo. I'm seeing a few tunicates as well, along with a variety of other things. Most reef tanks are sorry substitutes for the real thing, since so many of the really conspicuous, abundant, and important organisms from the wild are missing from our tanks. Most of our tanks amount pretty much to bare rocks (maybe with some coraline algae) and some corals sitting on the rocks like trophies on pedestals. Part of this has to do with the vision (or lack thereof) and objectives of the reefkeeper, but an awful lot of this is due to the fact that a large proportion of the sorts of organisms one sees in these photos from the wild simply will not grow in our tanks. Or, if they do grow, a few of them become pests that rapidly overwhelm everything else in the tank because our highly simplified captive reef systems lack the natural population control mechanisms (predators, etc) that maintain some sort of balance in the wild.

[SLPReefer]

Kinda looks like my tank...lol :rotflmao:
Nice link, thanks for sharing!

[Energy]

So true Cap Man- The biodiversity is what drew me into and keeps me fascinated with this hobby.