Since we had lots of great pictures of the original Mother colony for the Spotlight; I wanted go a different way for the close-up. I found this Synth thing a few months ago when I was looking for software to do the Reef-Farm Posters, but wasn’t sure how exactly to use it. A few months and a couple thousand pictures later I came up with it. The Coral Close-up.
You can use the embedded version after the jump, or you can find it at this link.
These “Synths” are giant composite images that are scrollable, zoomable, spinable, and just about anything else you can think of. When you view the synth make sure you click, drag and zoom around on the images as well as click on the highlights to see all of the amazing angles.
What you see here are (clockwise from top-left) a medium sized colony that is going to the calendar winners, a newly fragged third generation colony, and a second generation mother colony that will have one more growout cycle before being fragged herself.
This particular favia is very slow to return to its full glory, but when it does it is quite a sight. It should get high water flow (laminar is ok with some random pulse), medium light (not too bright or it will brown out), and always enjoys a good feeding. It is a medium grower for a favia, and does not seem to bud; instead it chooses to split heads and expand.
I will leave you with an interesting close-up.
