Red planet frag, how much????

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by lastlight

i just bought a 2" piece with prob 10 branches for $35 in town.

this coral grows like a weed it doesn't command the same price anymore as many have it...

+1. I just got some a few weeks ago and it's by far the fastest growing thing in my tank. In a way, this is a good thing - a super rare coral becomes democratized and the price falls because all the early adopters end up becoming producers over time. Imagine how cheap iPhones would be if simply by owning one, you could start to produce more of them in time.

What's even crazier is that the true red planet that's in half the SPS tanks the world over is all descended from a single colour morph of a single colony somewhere out in the Pacific. For all we know, that colony might have been the only one of the species with that particular colouration, which would mean there's probably more of it in tanks now than there ever was in the wild.

Red Planet would be a good case study to see what potential the informal trade networks of the reef hobby actually have for the conservation of coral biodiversity.