Hammer Corals: complete care guide
- Sep 07, 2020
- Anshika Mishra
- 1933 0 0
This is one of the coral that a lot of people talk about; the Hammer Coral. This is a great LPS coral to get started with corals. They grow pretty quick and come in a bunch of colors; they look lovely especially under the current blowing them around.
All about Hammer Corals
PRICE: it actually varies and depends upon what color you want to get. You can get the common one like purple at about $12 but if you want to have them in crazy colors like golds that can cost you up to $100.
CARE LEVEL: It is moderate and ain't too bad to take care of them though.
TEMPERATURE: You definitely want to keep them from 70 to 78-degrees.
dKH: 8-12
pH: 8.1-8.4
SALINITY: You want to keep it from 1.023-1.025
COLORS: There are so many varieties of colors to choose from, green tips, purple tips are some of the basic ones that you will normally see, gold tips are what a lot of people try to find, there are also metallic green tips, pink tips; the list is endless.
DIET: If you want them to grow fast and big you can feed them reef Rhodes, you can normally just mix them up in the tank water and pour a little bit above them and they will soak it in. Pallets are another great thing, they can actually eat the pallets, you just drop it on top of them, they will grab it and eat it up pretty quick.
ORIGIN: Usually they are from Australia and Indonesia, but a lot of places are now aquaculture then, you might not get one that is from the ocean.
VENOMOUS: They will sting other corals near it, but not other Hammers and Frog Spawns, they can be near it, right next to each other and nothing bothers them. Torches are another one that it can be near, but just don't put hammers near any corals that you don't want to sting because they will sting the fire out of it like Anemone.
You also don't want them to sting you therefore you should be cautious whenever you are going deep down.
PLACEMENT: You can really place them anywhere, they look awesome everywhere.
CURRENT: You definitely want to give them some current, because they like to flow around, it'll help them stretch their arms out. But if you give them too much current they will definitely shrink in.
TANK SIZE: Doesn't really matter, you can have them in any size tank. Just make sure they have pretty plenty of nutrients to get.
They grow by the head so normally, the new one will start getting really big and then you will start new branches popping up. It seems like you have one gigantic head of Hammer.
Fragging
They are pretty easy to frag, you can see how the branches split really good and you can cut right in the middle of the hard part and they will come right apart. But you want to make sure that the hard part is really hard and you can start seeing the sand running down. You do not want to cut that skin right there, it can really hurt them.
You want to cut the wood because that's not even connected to something that can feel.
They need some pretty good lighting but nothing crazy. Keep the calcium and alkalinity up that will help them to keep splitting and getting branching ou bigger. So, don't make it too hard.
Keep the calcium about 420 and alkalinity 8-12, and you will see plenty of growth from them.
Something to watch out for
Notice that they are not doing well, heads can just completely detach, they will just fall off the branch. This means that they are going through a very large amount of stress which can be caused by fish picking at them or your water level are really bad it might be because salinity went too high or ammonia spiked. In a nutshell, if you see the heads popping off you should know that something is wrong.
Moving them too much can also damage them, so you definitely don't want to keep them moving around and around. Just give them some time in the spot that it is in and if it does not want to come out, then move it a couple of days later.
Don't stress them out.
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