As part of CR's commitment to add tools that reef keepers can use, we have developed the CR Coral Collector. Coral collector is not only a way to show off your corals, but also a way to find corals you're looking for. Coral Collector is a powerful application that can be used for identifying, collecting, and trading corals. The more we corals entered into Coral Collector, the more useful it becomes.
Links to Coral Collector are located on the navbar menu under Reef Tools. From there, you can browse, search, and add/edit to your coral collection. When you add a coral, you should only complete one coral per entry. For example if you have 10 zoas, you would complete one entry for each zoanthid...so you would have 10 different entries. (Don't lump them together into one entry.) The reason for this will be more obvious as you start using Coral Collector.
Here are some quick links to get to the different areas of Coral Collector:
Browse Corals
Search Corals
Add/Edit Coral
The search is mostly driven by drop down boxes...with a simple click of a drop-down menu, you will instantly have the results you are looking for...continue to narrow your search down using the various drop-down menus. Here is a screen shot of the search page.
Lets say for example you are looking for a zoanthid, your not sure of the name, but you know it is primarily pink. Simply select zoanthid and pink and the corals meeting that criteria are displayed. You can also search to see if anyone has frags available for sale...or that may be open to fragging their colony.
Or as another example, lets say you have a tank with lower lighting and you are wondering what new coral would work for your tank. Using the Coral Collector search engine, you can select low lighting from the lighting requirements menu and instantly have a list of corals that may work for your tank. Of course, you can further narrow that down based on what you are looking for.
Another feature of Coral Collector is that you can upload up to 8 photos. There are two photos at the beginning for identification and then up to six additional photos can be included to show things like growth comparison, photos with sweepers out, potentially disease or pest issues...basically up to six picture that you consider relevant for that particular coral.