Eclectus Mushroom

The Eclectus mushroom is a marbled Discosoma that wears several colors on a single disc — swirls and speckles of green, purple, orange, and rust red blend across a bumpy, textured surface. The name comes from the Eclectus parrot, whose plumage mixes the same improbable palette. Every polyp patterns differently, and a mature disc can carry colors that look painted on. Like the Jawbreaker mushroom it is often grouped with, the Eclectus belongs to the slow, deliberate end of the mushroom family, and prime specimens have held collector pricing for years.

Wild Discosoma live on shaded reef rock and rubble in the Indo-Pacific, often in lagoons and on reef slopes where light arrives filtered and water movement stays gentle. In an aquarium the Eclectus asks for the same treatment: low light on the bottom glass or low rockwork, and low, indirect flow. Strong flow makes the disc fold and can lift it off its rock entirely, and a loose mushroom drifts until it lodges somewhere dark. Give each disc a few inches of room — Discosoma sting on contact, and an Eclectus will quietly overgrow or burn a weaker neighbor sharing its rock.

Care is forgiving. The mushroom feeds itself from the light, tolerates a wide range of conditions, and shrugs off the small swings that trouble fussier corals. Occasional feeding with a fine coral food or a mysis shrimp placed on the disc speeds growth, and the disc will fold around the meal. Reproduction comes by pedal laceration and slow splitting: the foot creeps, leaves a fragment behind, and the fragment rounds up into a new disc. A keeper waits months for that to happen, and the mother colony of a good Eclectus is worth far more intact than fragged.

Field notes — what keepers report: The marbling shifts with the light. Keepers running heavy blue light report deeper purples and brighter orange speckle, while whiter light brings the greens forward. Several keepers note their Eclectus walked off frag plugs repeatedly until it was given a rough piece of rubble to grip. Growth reports agree across the board: slow, with new discs appearing a few times a year at best in a settled tank.

Photo: Emőke Dénes (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. The photo shows a Discosoma colony in a public aquarium; aquacultured Eclectus discs are selected for the marbled color described above.