BUYING GUIDEUPDATED JUL 2026

The most-hunted acros of 2026.

A handful of Acropora names come up year after year — the ones that sell out in the first minute and that half the hobby is hunting at once. This is my short list, not the whole field — a few worth knowing, with what each has actually been doing across the vendors I check. It's a collector's list — pieces people chase for years, that command real money as colonies and vanish in minutes as frags. The kind you grow into once your tank's settled.

The market line under each is live — the lowest in-stock price across the vendors I check, pulled as the page loads, not a number I keyed in once and forgot. These names move and stock comes and goes, so any that isn't listed right now says so rather than flash a dead price. The one I keep half an eye on most weeks is Walt Disney.

The ones I'd wait for.

BigR Walt Disney Acropora

Mike Biggar bought a plain green tenuis frag at a Florida swap and hardly looked at it. Two years of nothing, then it turned — pink corallites, blue tips over green. By 2015 a frag ran $800 to $1,000.

JF Homewrecker

Jason Fox's tenuis — the one that kicked off the whole neon-rainbow-tenuis craze. Green base, blue-purple tips, neon-pink corallites. Sizable frags once cleared $2,500; it got copied so widely that the price came down, and the original's worth seeking out by maker.

ORA Red Planet Acropora

A red tabling acro, aquacultured by ORA since 2006 and the canonical "Red Planet" — a name other growers use too, so check the prefix to see whose you're getting.

PC Rainbow Acropora

Red stag, orange inner, blue-rimmed tips — the acro that put rainbow morphs on the map. And it nearly got overlooked. Its keeper found it in the sand tearing down a tank in 2006 — colored up like never before.

GARF Bonsai Acropora

Solid purple skin with bright green polyps, an Acropora valida grown out by Top Shelf. The lineage runs back to GARF — the Geothermal Aquaculture Research Foundation, one of the 1990s pioneers of captive coral propagation — which developed the Purple Bonsai strain it came from.

Tyree Pink Lemonade

A classic Tyree limited edition and one of the old-guard named acros — lime-green branches under pink polyps.

Catching one before it's gone.

These move. The realistic play is knowing roughly what one goes for before it lists — so you can commit in the seconds you get — and letting the free morning email keep you current on what's dropping across the shops I check, instead of living on a dozen stock pages. For the names that swing on price, the price history tells you whether today's number is a genuine deal or just an ordinary Tuesday.

And if you're newer to acros, don't start here. Start with a piece you can afford to lose while you dial in flow and light, then come back for the chase corals once the tank's stable. A Walt Disney is a heartbreak coral in a system that isn't ready for it.

What am I missing.

There are names I've left off — some on purpose, some because I haven't caught them trending yet. If there's an acro you think belongs on this list, or one you're hunting that I'm not tracking, tell me. I add the corals people actually chase, not whatever an algorithm decides is hot this week.