Some of the membership may know that the Elegance Coral was the coral that got me "into the hobby" so to speak. At the sight of it's stunning colors and structure, I was hooked and had to have a reef tank with one in it. Early on in my reefkeeping my desires were thwarted, and I lost two specemins to what was then hypothesized by Eric Borneman as an infections pathogen/syndrome. A well-known and well-written conservationist and coral taxonomist, Borneman began a study of Elegance corals to attempt to discover the nature of the species' low survival rate around the turn of the century.

He's finally completed his initial study with some very interesting findings. He offers a tentative name as Elegance Coral Syndrome (ECS) and provides data to show that these corals clearly are infected by some pathogen/disease. Although he claims more work is needed to truly confirm his findings, he believes the disease to be the result of a bacterial infection and the production of microscopic green rods within the tissues of the coral. These two pathogens in conjunction with each other seem to attack the coral from within, killing its zooxanthellae and puncturing its own nematocysts inside its own tissue. As a result the coral decays from the inside out and slowly dies.

The good news though is that these pathogens cannot apparently live long without a host and signs of infection are easily observed and avoided. While this article is a very long and quite technical read, I'd heavily suggest it for anyone planning on keeping one of these magnificent corals. Finally some light is shed on this situation.

This post has been edited by SkiFletch: Jan 7 2008, 05:03 AM

Thats really interesting! What's the whole deal with elegance corals in other parts of the world being healthier throughout the aquarium trade? I think I saw you mention recently that Australian aquarists have had much better survival rates with elegance than we have?

Having visited many collection sites and distributors, Borneman has noted that he has only ever seen instances of ECS in the holding tanks of Indonesian collection companies. Indonesia's primary export destination is the US and secondarily the EU. Australia does not allow imports of corals from Indonesian wholesalers, thus keeping their stock ECS-free. Recently Australia has begun very limited export of corals to the US, and since those corals have never been in contact with ECS, they arrive healthy here.

Borneman also notes that more recent shipments from Indonesia that were onc ECS-laiden seem to now be healthy. He surmises that Economics has forced wholesalers to "clean up their act". Once it became pervasive throughout the US side of the hobby that these corals were not doing well, likely to disease, the wholesalers were not getting as many orders for them. And when business drops off, why keep selling them?. If the wholesaler stopped collecting elegance corals, their holding tanks could be eliminated of ECS without hosts. And once the demand goes back up and the tanks are now ECS-free, the wholesaler can start collecting them again. Make sense?

Makes perfect sense! Thanks! Ive always really liked elegance coral, maybe now in the future I can have a chance to own one.

Man I see why you ended up getting into this is this pic is anything to go by

http://www.elegancereef.com/magazin/broj2/...anceproject.htm

Would love to own that reef!

Never seen that pic but damn!