Ricordea florida (Ricordea Mushroom)

Source:

QUICK STATS

• Care Level: Moderate
  
• Temperament: Semi-aggressive
  
• Lighting: Low to Moderate
  
• Waterflow: Low
  
• Placement: Middle
  
• Water Conditions: 72-78° F, dKH 8-12, pH 8.1-8.4, sg 1.023-1.025
  
• Origin: Indischer Ozean, Indo Pazifik, Indonesien, Mikronesien, Philippinen, Queensland, Ryukyu Islands, Samoa, Singapur
  
• Family: Ricordeidae
  
• Insert Date: 18 September 2010

The Ricordea is a member of the order Corallimorpharia (Stephenson, 1937), and has short, club, or berry-shaped tentacles. It shares some similarities to stony corals, and is also termed a Disc Anemone. It is found in a variety of color forms. This type of mushroom is highly prized by the avid collector and makes a vibrant addition to the reef aquarium. Collected in small numbers, this coral is in very high demand by the discriminating reef aquarist.
It requires a low to medium light level, but metal halide lighting may be too bright, so when using halides, place the coral at the bottom of the aquarium, under an overhang. It prefers a low water movement within the aquarium. It is considered semi-aggressive and requires adequate space between itself and other corals. It reproduces by longitudinal fission.

The symbiotic algae zooxanthellae hosted within it provide the majority of its nutritional requirements from the light driven process of photosynthesis. It also eats plankton and smaller invertebrates such as crustaceans.

Through a forum I found someone selling his whole aquarium. We wanted to take a look and see if he had anything that we liked. His aquarium looked really nice, it was a big tank that wasn’t very high but mainly very deep. The rocks where all low, not really build up and almost every rock was covered in Xenia.
For the moment we left with 3 rocks filled with corals, maybe we are going back to get some more (fish maybe even, he had some nice ones). The easiest choice which I liked a lot was a rock with Ricordea mushrooms. My wife still likes Xenia and since ours is not much anymore we also took a rock with Xenia and some purple mushrooms. And last we also wanted a new Cabbage leather coral, so he torn one loose with a Kenya tree also on it.

Unfortunately there where no pictures of his aquarium.

18 september we bought a rock with these mushrooms on it. It was one of the first things I noticed when we wanted to buy something and I like the way it looks in our aquarium. The rock has 4/5 big ones and 3 small mushrooms.

Turns out that this is probably a ricordea florida instead of yuma. Difference between the two is the size. The Florida has a smaller polyp size (2-7cm) than the Yuma (6-16cm across).

These awesome mushrooms are still doing great. Nothing is bothering them and they are opening further and further.

Blocked by many Kenya Tree Fragments now :p

And removed some Planaria.

I found one of the mushrooms in the sand, so I moved it in a shotglass in the Fragtank for him to start a life of its own.

I cleaned a couple of corals from Planaria by giving them a tab water bath. Dipping the corals 10 seconds in tab water with the same temperature as the aquarium should remove Planaria.
One of the corals that got a bath where the Ricordea mushrooms.