Your March "War!!!" Photo Contest Winner

[Len]

Reefs.org is pleased to announce the winner - by popular vote - the March Photo Contest Winner! 8)


Name: Wampatom
Photo title: Scouting Tentacle Preceding All Out War
Equipment: Nikon D100, Nikkor 105mm f2.8 micro
Location: 75 gal, Chicago
Comment: The brain must smell a problem. Once the tentacle makes contact with the offending acro it sends out an additional hundred to complete the job.

 

[Anonymous]

great pic.

Keep them coming!

B

 

[seatom]

Hello Len,

a very nice pic !
Is the left coral a Platygyra spec. ?

 

[fishfanatic2]

Congrats!

Seems like this months photo contest isnt much of a hit, though. :wink: :lol:

 

[Len]

Hello Len,

a very nice pic !
Is the left coral a Platygyra spec. ?

It's hard to tell from the photo, but Platygyra is definitely a possibility. Perhaps the photographer Wampatom knows for sure?

 

[Wampatom]

Thanks. This was a hard contest. Fish are always difficult to photograph, and capturing the exact moment they are showing aggression is even tougher. I think there were many good photos that did not make the final 5. Selecting them is always somewhat subjective. I thought the shot of the cuttlefish picture was excellent. I think its problem was that it was too small. A dimension of 640 pixels is already rather limiting, so a photo that is even smaller, is hard to judge.

I shot this photo for the contest. When the contest was first announced, the brain shown here was busy killing a piece of Xenia on it’s left side. It had about a hundred tentacles out, and the hapless Xenia was all yellow and shriveled. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a good shot because a large sarcophyton prevented shooting perpendicular to the glass. So I moved the acropora close to the brain and waited. After a few days the tentacle appeared. To get the tentacle to show up well I used an external flash placed above and behind the corals, partially backlighting the tentacle. The background of my aquarium is black and I used photoshop to further clean up the background. I them moved the acropora away. The brain is one of my favorites and I didn’t want to risk loosing it even thought I suspect it would win the battle.

As for identification of the brain coral—well, I don’t know. I bought it described as a “brain coral” about 5 years ago. Looking in my books I don’t see an identical match. I have a close up picture, as well as its pictorial history shown in the advanced aquarist Nov. 2003. http://www.advancedaquarist.com/issues/ ... uarium.htm
It is probably in the family Faviidae. I could be Platygyra spec but there are several other genus that also look close.

 

[ozadars]

congratulations, excellent picture :wink:

 

[Anonymous]

Nice work!

 

[liquid]

That just turned into my new wallpaper on my pc.

Shane

 

[MLVA123]

Dig those green acro polyps!! Sweet picture!

 

[Baianotang]

great pic