Zebra Coral

About

Zebra coral (Oulastrea crispata) earns its common name honestly. The colony displays a sharp contrast of black tissue set against bright white septal margins, a color scheme that looks almost monochromatic compared to the vivid hues of most reef-building corals. The skeleton itself retains that same black-and-white pattern even when dried, which tells you the pigmentation runs deep. Colonies grow in a low, encrusting form and stay quite small, rarely spreading more than a few centimeters across. Up close, the corallites resemble a miniature version of Montastraea, tightly packed and uniform in size, with alternating long and short septa and well-developed paliform lobes that give the surface real texture. One charming quirk: the tentacles are sometimes extended during daylight hours, which is less common in many stony corals. In the wild this species turns up across a broad Indo-West Pacific range from Japan down to Australia and from Sri Lanka across to the Solomon Islands, but it shows a clear preference for subtidal, turbid environments where wave action is present. Not the crystal-clear water most corals are associated with. That habitat preference is worth keeping in mind. Providing moderate flow and high lighting in the aquarium reflects the conditions of its wave-washed rocky homes, and the species is generally considered a reasonable challenge for intermediate keepers comfortable with small-polyp stony corals.