What WYSIWYG means
WYSIWYG, short for what you see is what you get, means the coral you are looking at in the listing is the individual animal that will be packed into your box. Each piece is photographed on its own, assigned its own inventory record, and removed from the site the moment it sells. For corals this is a meaningful distinction: within a single named morph, individual frags vary in size, polyp count, encrusting progress, and color saturation, and a photograph of a different frag only tells you so much.
WYSIWYG versus almost-WYSIWYG
Both labels appear across our catalog and they mean different things:
- WYSIWYG — one photograph, one physical coral, one unit of stock. Used for colonies, one-off specimens, and collector pieces where every individual differs.
- Almost-WYSIWYG — a representative photograph of a batch of closely matched frags cut from the same mother colony. You receive a comparable piece rather than the exact one pictured, which is how we keep popular corals consistently in stock.
Neither is better; they suit different corals. A fast-growing digitata produces near-identical frags by the dozen, while a mature acropora colony or a hand-picked zoanthid garden genuinely cannot be duplicated.
How we photograph and grade WYSIWYG corals
Every WYSIWYG piece is fully healed on its plug before it is photographed, so you are seeing a settled coral rather than a fresh cut. Shots are taken under consistent, standardized lighting rather than heavily filtered blue-only conditions, which means colors can be compared fairly from one listing to the next and reflect what the coral will look like in a normally lit reef. If your own reef lighting runs a very different spectrum, expect the coral to read differently in your tank.
What to expect on arrival
A WYSIWYG coral will be the piece you chose, but it will not look its best immediately. Shipping causes most corals to retract polyps, close up, and lose some color saturation, and recovery typically takes one to two weeks for softies and LPS and two to four weeks for SPS. Acclimate slowly, dip if appropriate, and place the coral lower and dimmer than its intended final position before moving it up gradually. Judge color against the listing photograph after a month, not after a day.
Browsing WYSIWYG pieces
Because each listing is a single item, the WYSIWYG selection turns over constantly and rewards checking regularly. Compare established multi-head pieces in coral colonies, look through named lineages in signature corals, or browse the full range of live corals for sale.
