Yah they're pretty variable in their tentacle length, but I've noticed that as they adapt to your aquarium, their tentacles seem to get longer. I'd bet that if yours does well, in 6 months or so it will look very similar to the ones pictured here.
If they're healthy, they're very robust corals. Easily one of the most forgiving and easiest to keep - it's why they got so popular and were over-collected. The ones that self destruct rapidly are usually sick with a specific disease, so in the absence of that disease, it should be fine. Thankfully, that disease doesn't seem to secretly lay dormant so if you've got it, you'll know pretty soon. If you make it a month with no symptoms I would be confident that it's going to thrive.
You'll never know what sort of conditions/holding facilities it was in along the chain of custody, but if you're looking for some peace of mind, you might want to call the store you bought it from and ask how often they house other elegance corals in the tank that yours was in at the store. I've had two now that were healthy and robust (the first was in my first salt water aquarium a few years ago) and one that came in with disease. The difference between the healthy and the diseased one (other than country of origin) that I could see (again, you'll never know how the wholesaler housed them) was that the diseased coral came from a tank that almost always has other indonesian elegance corals in it. I can't remember ever going in there and not seeing at least one, but usually several are kept in that display tank. The first elegance I had came from Big Al's Calgary, and the second from Red Coral in Edmonton, and the tanks they were in are primarily used from clams and other LPS frags/mini colonies. Those tanks rarely had more than one or two elegances in them at a time, and seemed to go months without any at all. As no one knows what causes ECS, it's hard to say how long the pathogen persists in a system (part of the reason why I've not replaced mine), but if the systems that they're housed in routinely run without any elegance corals in them for periods of time it can only hinder the spread of the disease.
Ultimately though, there's nothing more you can personally do than give it good water, appropriate flow, good lighting and isolate it from exposure to any possible future diseases. Anything that's happened has happened, so it's either going to (hopefully) thrive, or not. You'll know in a few weeks which it will be.
|