Feeding corals crab meat?

I bought some fresh crab meat today and had the idea that maybe my some of my corals might like it too... I have Ricordeas, Shrooms, purple/pink Toadstools and bali xenias.

Any opinions?

 

Coralimorphs primarily feed off of bacterioplankton, photosynthesis, and Dissolved Organic Material. However, if the meat is VERY small, you might get your shrooms to take a little.

Scientific studies have never found ANY outside food source inside xenia. Possibly making it the ONLY coral that doesn't "eat".

Your toadstools will have difficulty ingesting the meat unless you ground it up real fine.

Speaking of grinding it up real fine, you might want to consider making a blender mush and feeding your fish and tank with that. I find blender mush superior to most store bought foods and your crab meat would be a good ingredient to add to it.

Here's how I decide how to feed my corals. FOOTNOTE: I hate my post because it generalizes so much. However, hopefully it shows the thought processes I go through with my corals and how/what/if I need to feed them.

Depending on bioload, flow, etc. many LPS can utilize larger meaty foods. For instance, I would periodically target feed Euphyllia (hammer, torch, frogspawn, etc.) with PE or Hikari Mysis Shrimp in my softy tank. This was necessary because I didn't have good enough flow in it to keep wastes suspended.

The key is, look at the size of the "mouth" and look at how much tissue is supported by that "mouth", look at the length of the 'tentacles' of the polyp, look at the color of the coral, and see if the animal is colonial (which share nutrients). Obviously, a larger mouth is capable of ingesting larger foods. Longer tentacles on a polyp tends to indicate better prey-capture abilities. Zooxanthellae is brown. Corals that stay brown tend to have a LOT of zoox in their tissue. Even though some species might have a lot of tissue, it might not need much in the way of additional feeding due to the quantity of zoox. (Look at the size of the tentacles as a clue).

Examples:

Frogspawn....each "head" is one animal. It is not colonial and it doesn't share it's nutrients with any other "head". There is a lot of tissue to each animal and the "mouth" is fairly large. Depending on how your tank is set up, this animal might appreciate periodic target feeding of meaty foods.

Most SPS....this animal is colonial and what hits one polyp is shared by the entire colony. The "mouths" are very small and most SPS tissue is only 2 cells thick. I feed them good flow to get fish poop and other detritus covered with bacteria to the polyps as well as good lighting. When I would see colors lightening, I would feed my fish more for a couple of days.

Zoanthids....very tiny mouth, not colonial, medium amount of tissue. Sure, there's plenty of tissue for each animal but how on earth are you going to feed that tiny little mouth? Answer, you don't need to. Photosynthesis, DOM, and bacterioplankton will feed them just fine. Just to show you the variation in the same family, yellow polyps (parazoanthids) have a medium size mouth, much longer tentacles on the polyp, and should be fed. The 0length of the 'tentacles' is a clue. Protopalythoa have good-sized mouths and medium length tentacles. They will close up on any small or medium sized food you give them. I've seen them close up and eat foods as big as mysis shrimp before.

Colt coral....Cladiella has a lot of tissue, is colonial and each polyp shares nutrients, has medium sized polyps. If you have decent flow, you probably don't need to feed these much. Particularly, tan or brown specimens. Zooxanthellae is brown. Brown corals typically have a LOT of zooxanthellae and get much of their energy budget from photosynthesis.

For your Toadstools, there is a lot of tissue but the polyps are very small. What one polyp gets is shared with the entire animal. Most have a very high concentration of zoox. Therefore, it's not going to need a whole lot of food but if it is given small enough foods, whatever it captures is used by the whole animal.

 

Thanks for all that info.... I get the idea of it now. I have heard of people feeding shrimp pieces to ricordeas, thats why I was asking, but I went and fragged them tonight so no need to even try it. Shrooms on the other hand, I started with 4 or 5 and now have like 20+. I have seen them close on flake before (ocean nutrition prime reef). I also fragged my toadstool, now I have 8 of them anybody wanna do some trading soon?