HELP: Need advice from experienced favia/favites keepers

About 4-5 months ago, I purchased what I think is a favites (maybe a favia)... Since then I have been trying to figure out the best location to put it to keep it healthy and happy. As you can see, the top middle looks okay, but the rest is not looking so good.




First, some background:
- 65 g tank - 36Lx18Wx24D
- 2 x 250 watt MH plus 2 x 65W PC actinics
- Parameters are perfect:
- Ammonia 0
- Nitrate 0 (sulfur denitrator)
- Nitrite 0
- pH 8.3
- dKh 13
- Phosphate 0
- Ca 400-420
- Mag 1400

I have tried the following placements for this coral:
- mid tank height - full light - moderate flow
- mid tank height - shaded - low flow
- bottom of tank - full light - moderate flow (tried 2 spots)

No matter where I place it, about 1/2 of the coral seems unhappy/unhealthy. There has been no tissue loss, but at least 1/2 of the coral has it's tissue retracted to the point where I can see parts of the white skeleton. The other 1/2 seems okay.

Anyone have some advice for me?

Z

 

It needs to be target fed. It's starving slowly.

 

Yes and no. You just have to be patient because it might not eat. It was not uncommon when we got a shipment in for 3/4's of the various types of brain corals to be in a semi-starved condition. I just put all of them in a frag tank in the Quarantine warehouse. Since the frag tanks weren't in public view I didn't really care that I was overfeeding them. After a couple weeks I could move them down to the store. The first couple of nights, only some of the polyps would send out feeders tentacles, then the next night a few more, and so on. By the time I got all of them in excellent condition, I was actually able to sell them for a much higher price.

 

What food do you recommend?

I've tried target feeding it with Cyclopeeze and a commercial dried phytoplankton... on several occasions. I've never seen the longer feeder tentacle that I've read about (check many times throughout the night). I have seen very short tentacle extend around each polyp - but I was just dumping the food mixture into the tank (not target feeding).

Z

 

A $1.99 turkey baster from the grocery store will serve you well.

I tended to put a tiny bit of food in the tank once the lights went out. Due to chemoreception, that would trigger the feeding tentacles to come out.

Then I would go back an hour later when my cyclopeeze, frozen baby brine, frozen mysis, etc. had thawed in a container. I would suck it up into the turkey baster and GENTLY squirt it onto the corals.

Very few corals eat phytoplankton. They will react to it due to chemoreception and they may even take it into the polyp. But few will actually digest it. Almost all photosynthetics corals are meat-eaters, not plant-eaters. Now if your were running a non-photosynthetic species tank, the phyto would be fine. It might be useful at the beginning if you find that your coral reacts to the "smell" in the water to get the feeder tentacles out, but once they're trained, you don't need to use it anymore.

There is a sticky at the top of this forum on coral feeding.