Hey guys, I'm startin 2.5g soon and need some coral ideas. The lights that I have are 24w pc,
and I've been told that they will support softies, and lps. What corals would you guys recomend other than:
Zoas
rice
mushrooms
gsp

And a question: can rics and mushrooms be kept on bare bottom tanks? Like glued to the glass?

A small duncan frag? Blastos? Either one should do fine in a small tank.

never tried, but im sure you can put rics onto glass. But maybe they won't attach.

I have seen mushrooms growing on tank walls before. Only thing is I don't remember if it was glass or acrylic... Not even sure if it would make a difference. I'll see if I can dig up the picture.

When I buy my rics/shrooms, they always come on a TINY TINY rock frag.
You can just sit that down on the ground, no need to glue it...

Try and find shrooms that are on the "frag plugs" and get yourself a razor blade.
Slice the mini rock off the frag, and just place it where you want.
If you really wanna glue it, go ahead, but dont use much....
You will be able to get the mini rock off the glass with a razor blade if u use just a tiny amount of glue.
My emerald shrimp sometimes moved the rics around when I had them sitting without glue.
It was cute.

Never ever glue mushroom or ricordea to anything. They need to attach on their own and they need to be able to move if they want to. Usualy they will move around and leave a part of their foot and this will create a brand new mushroom. Mine have done this already twice in a month and half and I have 2 new babiles growing complete with mouth etc.. It did not go far, just an inch or so but each time it leave some part of it there.

I would not use bare bottom to put the ricordea or mushroom. I would put them on small rock at least, at the bottom of the tank.


A lot of coral like will grown on aquarium glass. Xenia, zoa, green star polyp, paly etc so I guess glass is an easy thing for them to attach to. It's just NOT practical to have ricordea attached to the bottom of the aquarium as if you need to treat them, you will not be able to remove them from the tank without hurting them by detaching them. NOT GOOD.

Why don't you attach your mushrooms and Rics to some of 1x1 tiles so then you can tile the bottom of the tank with them? They'll easily attach those and you'll be able to remove them if needed and you'll still be able to get the bare bottom going on.

My mushrooms don't like attaching to substrate (they will pick some up but will not properly open), but put a hard surface under them and they seem to do it, including smooth shells... so my guess would be they would stick to glass. I also haven't had a problem gluing them, though there is always rock fragments of some sort on the foot when I've tried. It probably just takes longer to take hold gluing directly to flesh, because it could eventually be treated as just a piece of rock.

As for the original question....

Blastos are a good suggestion, very colorful and easy to keep
Acans could work too, hard to say about lighting, but with a little feeding my guess would be they're fine
Galaxia may be a stretch, but if you started it in a corner and let it grow out a bit it could be an option

that'd be so cool if you could completely cover the bottom with ricordeas and nice zoanthids!

brain coral

brain coral