Strawberry Shortcake Acropora

Strawberry Shortcake is the hobby's best-known Acropora microclados — a short, thick-branched acro in soft pink, carrying green polyps and pale growth tips that give the colony a frosted look. The "shortcake" name fits the structure: branches stay stubby and crowded, building a dense little cake of a colony rather than a staghorn thicket. Australian microclados collections brought the species to prominence, and the pink-and-green selection has been aquacultured in the US for well over a decade.

On the reef, A. microclados occupies shallow, high-energy zones, and the aquarium version keeps the appetite for light and flow. Mount Strawberry Shortcake high under strong, blue-heavy light; the pink pigment is light-driven and fades to tan in the shade. Flow should be strong and alternating, enough to keep the tight branch structure swept clean. Like most microclados, it reacts badly to alkalinity swings — hold alk steady in the 8–10 dKH range and acclimate new frags to light over a couple of weeks rather than dropping them straight onto the top rock.

Growth is moderate and mostly outward: the colony thickens, tables slightly, and adds short branches around the rim. It feeds from the light, picks up fine particulates, and shows its best polyp extension at night. Fragging is easy on paper — the branches snap cleanly — but fresh cuts of microclados heal slowly, so cut generously sized pieces and keep them in the same light and flow as the mother colony while they encrust.

Field notes — what keepers report: The green in the polyps comes and goes with lighting; keepers under heavy actinic light see neon green, while keepers under daylight spectrums describe a mostly pink coral. Several keepers note this strain sulks longer than average after shipping — a week or two of closed polyps before it settles is a common report. Slow, steady growth after that is the norm.

Photo: Paul Muir (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. The photo shows a wild Acropora microclados colony; the Strawberry Shortcake strain is an aquacultured selection of this species, chosen for the pink body and green polyps described above.