Route 66 Merlin's Staff

Route 66 Merlin's Staff is a named Acropora strain from Route 66 Marine, the Southern California coral house whose collection Reeffarmers drew on for its Route Editions in the last months before the business closed. The strain survives in the record through a single unusually complete source: the Reeffarmers Route Edition page, which gives the coral's earlier name, the reason for its new name, its colour in words, the fate of its parent colony, and its first-edition price. Strains from this era usually reach a database as a name and a photograph. This one arrives with a short biography.

At Route 66 Marine the coral was called Gold Finger. Reeffarmers renamed it Merlin's Staff for two reasons it states plainly: the branches grow in a staff-like, almost staghorn shape, and the blue of the coral matches the blue gem set in Merlin's staff in a television series about Merlin that was current at the time. The growth form earns the name — flared corallites packed very close together along upright branches, a staff rather than a table or a bush.

The colour description is the lineage source's own, and it is specific. The flared corallites are solid bright blue, packed close along the branch. Polyps at the branch ends are bright white-blue. The radial polyps along the branches carry a stranger pattern: each polyp's centre is golden yellow while its tentacles are dark. Reeffarmers adds the property that made the coral notable among keepers of blue Acropora: the blue pigmentation is very easy to maintain in captivity, which the page calls very unusual in itself. Blue is the colour class that most often fades to brown or green in home systems; a blue that stays blue was the strain's selling point in 2015 and remains its defining claim.

The golden centres behave the opposite way — they are spectrum-dependent, and the lineage page describes the effect carefully. Under the blue halides of the period the yellow-gold centres were initially difficult to see. Under T5 or LED lighting they grew much more intense, and the page's seed photograph, taken under 20,000 K halides, shows intense golden pigment in the polyp centres. Reeffarmers expected the seed, with those pigments showing under 20,000 K, to show even stronger colour under blue LED light. A keeper reading this entry should take the practical point: the gold in this coral is a lighting reveal. A frag that reads as a plain blue stag under one lamp can carry the full blue-and-gold pattern under another, and judging the strain from a single photograph under a single spectrum will mislead in both directions.

The lineage has a hard ending, and the entry records it because it shapes what a frag offered under this name can be. The parent colony was never pulled out of the Route 66 Marine facility before the business closed — Route 66 Marine shut its doors on July 3, 2015, a date a sibling Route Edition page records — and Reeffarmers believes the colony had died before then. It was a fairly large colony, so Reeffarmers assumes a few fragments were distributed by Route 66 Marine while it lived. Reeffarmers itself maintained a seed section of the coral in an eight-foot Raceway Gyre BiZonal system, naturally filtered, with a semi-cryptic zone and a reef-flat exposed zone; the seed sat where it received moderate-to-strong light and moderate water current. The first edition fragment was sold to Brian Schneiderman, and the suggested list price on April 18, 2015 was $145 for a small fragment. The strain page carries no edition number and no edition release date, so in Reeffarmers' own system this is an Exclusive Edition rather than a numbered Limited Edition — the Route Editions index lists R66 Merlin's Staff Acropora under Exclusive Editions, in the batch of Route Editions Reeffarmers made from fragments picked up at Route 66 Marine in March 2015.

The line did not vanish with the shop. A Maryland keeper-seller, Graham's Aquaculture, offered WYSIWYG frags from his own mother colony in December 2024 — a 1.5-inch frag at $180 and a 1.75-inch frag at $160, the mother photographed for reference and not for sale — and a hobbyist's 25-gallon build thread records an "R66 Merlin Staff" frag arriving in a Pieces of the Ocean order and encrusting with the rest of that order. A 280-gallon Brooklyn display profiled as a Tank of the Month in November 2019 lists "Route 66 Merlin Acropora" among its SPS. The modern trail is thin, photographic, and mostly commercial, and the entry says so rather than dressing it up: no keeper has published a growth timeline, a parameter set, or a loss account for this line.

Care follows the staghorn Acropora pattern with the strain's own seed record attached. Give it strong, randomized flow and high light in the upper half of the rockwork, with the standard two inches of clearance for a branching coral that will grow tall. The lineage source's seed conditions — moderate-to-strong light, moderate current — sit a step gentler than the genus default, and the one modern care table under this name (New Dawn Aquaculture, recorded in the fences) asks for high light and strong flow in a mature, stable system. The honest summary is that the strain was kept successfully at the gentler end by the people who named it, and the name is sold today at the stronger end; the entry's care card follows the stronger modern rating while the field notes keep the seed record whole.

Three naming warnings close the notes, because this name now travels widely. AquaSD and Cherry Corals have both sold a "Tyree Merlin Staff" — no source read ties the Tyree prefix to the Route 66 line, and the Cherry Corals colony was reported a fast grower, a claim this entry does not borrow. Reef Builders reported in 2020 that the common Acropora donei strain fragged and sold all over the country goes most popularly as "Merlins Staff" (and as "Firework" Acro); that coral is pillow-shaped and most commonly bright purple with pink polyps, a description that does not match the blue-and-gold Route 66 record. And one veteran keeper who grew this strain beside Battlecorals Space Laser voted the two the same coral, a judgment recorded in the field notes as his opinion, with his invitation for a different one attached. A frag sold as Merlin's Staff may belong to any of these lines, and only a lineage statement from the seller separates them.

Field notes — what keepers report

The keeper record for this strain is thin, and the field notes say so plainly before they say anything else. The lineage record is strong; the keeper record is one veteran's photographed colony and same-coral opinion, one hobbyist's frag arrival, two keeper-sellers holding mother colonies, and a show-tank livestock list. No keeper parameter set tied to this strain, no growth-rate record, and no keeper loss record for it exists in the sources read — both keeper passes looked for each of those across Reef2Reef, Reef Central, Nano-Reef, and keeper blogs, and the empty results are part of the record. Reef Central and Nano-Reef returned no thread about this coral at all.

- jda's colony (Reef2Reef, 240-gallon Acropora rebuild thread, post last edited January 14, 2022; opened in full by both keeper passes). The senior keeper record. Jda photographed three corals in sequence — Gonzo's Cookie Monster, his Route 66 Merlin's Staff, and his Battlecorals Space Laser — and wrote: "Merlins Staff under just a bit more light. Put me down for these being the same coral — would like to know if somebody has both and has a different opinion. One of these might have to go." His position is an opinion of sameness, offered as his vote and explicitly inviting contradiction; no provenance for either of his specimens is given, and no reply confirming or contradicting the view appears in the opened page after the post. The post gives no colour words, no growth rate, and no PAR value for the Merlin's Staff piece; the "bit more light" clause is the only comparative condition note. His tank context from the same thread page, given in answer to a direct question: alkalinity kept around 7, wandering down to 6 and up to 7.2–7.4; phosphate at 1–3 ppb on a Hanna Ultra Low checker; his lighting is halide (14k Phoenix, 8× HQI fixtures). Those are two parameters and a lamp type for the system the colony lived in — a partial context, not a strain parameter set. A second keeper in Bubba's SPS Journey is reported at snippet weight saying the Merlins Staff is darker like the Space Laser; the snippet is recorded here at that weight and no more.

- PR_nano's frag (Reef2Reef, IM Nuvo 25 Lagoon build, opened). A hobbyist ordered from Pieces of the Ocean and photographed the labelled arrivals: POTO Iceman, Oregon Tort, POTO Cherry Blossom, R66 Merlin Staff, POTO Heat Check. The set opened up and expanded polyps on arrival; a follow-up says his pieces were "doing great and encrusting" with the exception of the POTO Iceman, which had gone pale — the pale piece is expressly a different coral. Every parameter set and PAR map in that thread belongs to a new, then-empty lagoon tank he was cycling, not to the older tank holding the R66 frag, and none of it is attached to this strain. No R66-specific colour, growth, or loss statement appears.

- Graham's Aquaculture's mother colony (Reef2Reef WYSIWYG sale thread, post last edited December 2, 2024; opened by both passes). A Maryland keeper-seller holds a mother colony of "Route66 Merlin's Staff," photographed for reference and not for sale, and offered two frags from it: 1.5 inches on a 1.5-inch plug at $180, and 1.75 inches at $160; neither is marked sold in the opened text. His stated sale context: everything WYSIWYG, acro-pest free, photographs under a mix of G5 Radion, T5, ReefBrite, and Kessil light. No growth, colour, loss, or parameter statement for the strain appears in the thread. The same listing priced ARC Fireworks frags separately at $100 and $120, so the two names were kept apart by this seller.

- Michael Shur's display (Tank of the Month profile, November 2019; opened). A 280-gallon Brooklyn SPS display (with a 120-gallon sump, five Orphek Atlantik V4 LEDs, four MP40s, alkalinity held stable by a KH Director and doser) lists "Route 66 Merlin Acropora" — the shortened name form — among its livestock. No placement, growth, colour, or loss detail for the coral is given; the record is presence in a mature show system.

- The seed account (Reeffarmers, opened in full). The naming house kept its seed fragment in an eight-foot raceway with gyre flow, natural filtration, and a reef-flat exposed zone, at moderate-to-strong light and moderate current. Two claims from that account anchor the care discussion: the blue pigmentation is very easy to maintain in captivity, and the golden polyp centres strengthen under T5, LED, and 20,000 K halide light after hiding under blue halides. The same account is the source of the parent-colony record: the colony stayed at Route 66 Marine, the business closed, and the colony is believed to have died before the closure, with fragments distributed earlier assumed rather than counted.

- Unassigned records, kept unassigned. A September 2026 Reef2Reef post by ReefBottoms describes a Merlin's Staff, about a year and a half old, in internally contradictory words — "hasn't grown not even a millimeter, but it's shooting up branches from where it's been encrusting" — with no lineage prefix; the parameters in that thread belong to a different poster, and the record cannot be assigned to the Route 66 line or to the donei strain. An October 2024 build thread records an unprefixed "Merlin's Staff Acro" arriving from Golden State Corals in a mixed-reef tank, with no follow-up detail for the piece. A California pack sale lists "Route66 Marlin Staff" [sic] among thirteen pieces at $650 for the pack, packs recorded sold, no per-piece price. These sightings show the name in circulation; none of them adds a fact about the Route 66 line.

- Exclusion note (interim material, do not re-import). The first draft of this dossier carried four items that appear in NO consolidated final: (1) a November 2022 jda revisit assigning roughly five percent confidence to telling the two corals apart, with fuller colour words (royal blue, brighter under Radions) and a complete parameter set (alkalinity 6.8–8, calcium 425+, magnesium 1400+, potassium 425+, nitrate 0, temperature 75.5–77.5 °F, a 06:00–23:00 light schedule, daily trace dosing) — both keeper finals cover jda's thread and contain only the January 2022 post and the two-parameter context recorded above; (2) a Battlecorals product-page account in which its owner collected the Space Laser seed colony wild in Bali in 2013 and priced frags at $99 and grown-out pieces at $275 — the vendor final found no Battlecorals page naming this strain, and the Space Laser connection in the finals is hobbyist opinion at snippet weight; (3) reeflex nutrient figures (nitrate 2–10 mg/l, phosphate 0.03–0.06 mg/l) attached to the Fauna Marin listing — the vendor final's opened Fauna Marin page carries temperature and size fields, not those figures; (4) a claim that no post-2015 price exists for the Route 66 line — superseded by the Graham's Aquaculture prices in the finals. All four are excluded, for the same reason as in the Bennett and Ice Fire corrections earlier today: interim progress reporting is unverified until a final lands.