After the stratospheric rise of the colorful ‘Bounce’ Ricordea and jawbreakers, another color morph has popped up to grab our attention – the bean bag yuma ricordea. The showy orange-to-pink ‘Rics’ have long been popular for their bright colors and hardy care requirements, but this new strain of corallimorph is not only more wildly colored than the usual shrooms but it looks like something out of a sci-fi film.
Mushrooms, or corallimorphs, are a special type of coral that do not create a hard skeleton like LPS and SPS corals. Instead, they are fleshy polyps that grow as single heads and can reproduce by longitudinal fission. This means the polyps will develop multiple mouths and eventually “pinch” into two independent heads that can be separated from each other.
These polyps thrive in a variety of lighting conditions, although they do best with medium to high light levels because they naturally grow in shallow water where there is more sunlight. They also do well with low to medium flow rates. However, it is important that the flow be gentle enough to not blow them around or get sucked into a powerhead.
In terms of feeding, mushroom polyps will feed on tiny foods such as thawed frozen mysis shrimp or finely ground up flake or pellets. They can also be fed a steady diet of algae powders. Unlike many corals, these mushrooms do not need to be fed every day, but they should be fed at least once per week.