Help with Coraline Growth

I have aprox 200lbs of live rock. Part of this rock came out of my 65 gallon and was covered in coraline and I even purchased some that was covered. I just cant seem to get it growing anywhere else. Its been in my new tank for about 2 months and I havent even seen a spec of it on the other rock I have purchased and put in there. I have replaced all of my bulbs and my water quality is good. Have numbers written down at home.

Any suggestions to help. Ive seen that Purple Up stuff and its about 50/50 weather it works or not.

 

This might help..

I started dosing more Magnesium and iv noticed a HUGE increase in growth.

How do you encourage coralline algae growth?

 

I used Purple Up for the first few months and if you take a look at my tank thread you can see the huge difference in only a few months time. So with that being said I know for a fact Purple Up works.

+1 Biocube. With all the being said, the main ingredient in Purple Up is Magnesium. But it also contains other minerals like Strontium, Calcium and some Kelp extracts.

If you know what your doing it would probably be more cost effective to just purchase some Mag supplements, but since this is my first SW tank and I'm still a newb even 11months in, that is why I picked up the Purple Up. Kept things simple at the time and did a wonderful job.

I know my tank is only 29g, but you can check out the pics in my signature.

Good luck hope this info has helped.

 

I have a question for you, how often did you use the purple up? Weekly?

 

If you decide to dose purple up, you are gonna want to start testing for everything else that it provides. You should NEVER, EVER dose for anything you aren't testing, it's a good way to crash a tank and can happen in a hurry. As for purple up, do a quick search on here, there is tons of info available, I'll let you make your own mind up but it will never touch my tank.

Best way to get stuff to grow is to keep your params stable and where they should be. What are your params, including cal, alk, and mag, these three are very important.

At 2 months your tank is still very new and params may be fluctuating a little. As it ages and stabilizes, things should take off.

 

Well probably since my tank was brand new and I only had a CuC I dosed the suggested directions which are 5-10mL per 55g each day until target Ca and Alk are reached. So for me since I have a 29g biocube I was dosing about 3ml or roughly a cap ful a day. Again I was new at the time and yeah probably weekly would be recommended but I never saw any bad test results from dosing daily. I wasn't dosing anything else and I figured the coraline, CuC, and other organisms would use the Ca that I was adding.

My whole tank is purple now and I am working on the bottom edges of my glass turning purple. Really like the look of a tank with the edges of glass grown over with crusty purp.

 

coylee just curious how old is your tank and could you post a FTS? I just want to see how Purple your tank is and compare the ages of our two tanks. I would assume you're right, being an advanced aquarist you should be able to just keep all params in check and over time the right stuff will occur.

But being a newb and wanting to see results in front of my eyes I went ahead and dosed with Purple Up. My tank had no significant lifeforms and I had great success with Purple Up. So to each his own but I would recommend it to someone who has a new tank and wants to get a good boost going for their coraline to start growing.

These pictures were taking today (2-29-2012 at around 12:00pm)






At this point however I do not ever add Purple Up - I usually will place a new rock every month or so in my DT and in my fuge. They turn purple and look amazing then I take them to the LFS for store credit since they would rather sell purple rock than normal LR for their DT tanks

 

Purple up also contains Iodine, which is extremely toxic, and if you are not monitoring the levels of this you can nuke the tank.

 

There are much better, cheaper, and safer ways to get the desired levels IMO.

 

Ash, I'm not saying you shouldn't use purple up, I'm saying you shouldn't dose for what you are not testing for. When you used purple up, did you test for iodine? strontium? I doubt it. A quick search like I suggested will reveal plenty of threads where problems have arose from not testing.

My tank is 6 months old, Started will all base rock, two months ago I added a piece or live rock rubble the size of a silver dollar, now each rock, each wall of the tank and each power head have at least one spot of coralline growing, many have more than that. I am doing no dosing what so ever.