Coraline growth

Where does coraline growth actually come from? is it possible to develope it without actual corals, and only live rock?

 

Yes. Think of it like you're a farmer. If you want to get a wheat harvest, you have to plant some wheat seeds and provide the proper amount of sunlight and nutrients. If some of your live rock has some coralline on it, then you have the seeds. If you keep your Calcium, Alkalinity, and Magnesium (and Strontium) at proper levels, then you have your nutrients. If you have lighting strong enough to grow softy corals, then you have your sunlight. You have to have all 3 factors taken care of.

 

Nice analogy lol

 

IME you need the daylight lights just to help you out some more..

on my 30 gallon i had alot of the bluer spectrums in my tank and had no to very little coralline, i took out one of my purple bulbs, put in a daylight bulb and BAM had coralline growing everywhere..to a point where im tired of scraping it off the front glass every couple days..i even had no coralline with a 20k halide..idk why but the white daylight spectrum made it take off

but yeah you just need a piece of rock that already has it on it...and once you start seeing some, you can take a tooth brush and scrub it and little pieces will settle and start growing there too..it is a calcifying algae so you need your params spot on

 

I beleive that elevated magnesium levels help encourage coraline algae growth.I a use Tropic Marin Bio Magnesium to reach the Mg level that I want. In addition to magnesium, it is also important to make sure that the calcium and alkalinity are all in check within the system.

 

Coralline algae grows on basically everything except the corals – so I would need to agree with the response above.

Coralline can be seeded into your tank by getting scrapping from another – the various colors makes the rock more attractive in my opinion – red, green, blue, purple, pink and even white.

Coralline varieties prefer various degrees of lighting, so definitely not one size fits all. So when it comes to lights it’s a difficult answer. The average response is about 1.5 watts per gallon utilizing 10,000K and actinic.

Calcium should be maintained around 400ppm, strontium should be dosed (and tested – never add anything to your tank that you do not have the ability to test). Alkalinity around 10DKH, the acceptable range is 7-12 but I found most success in the higher range. Nitrates and phosphates are big coralline killers – so these need to be kept in check.

There are some natural predators to coralline as well, some snails crabs and urchins eat it. Just something else to keep in mind.

 

I agree with what others say, however, most salts are too high when it comes to strontium levels. So, most aquariums seem to be elevated way above NSW to begin with, as it isn't used particularly fast compared to the big 3. You may want to test your strontium levels, but NSW is about 8ppm, significantly more than that can be toxic.

 

When I used 10000K MH on my nano, my coralline grew like wildfire. When I switched to 14000K, it slowed down considerably. Curt hit a homerun with his analogy.