NPS Coral That Thrive On Phytoplankton

Im going to start a culture of phtyo and i plan to feed my tank everyday with it, are there and NPS corals that will survive and grow on phyto and dont need chunks of meaty foods floating around all the time to survive.

I dont mean that i will have a system and constantly supply phyto to the tank 24/7 i just mean spot feeding it to corals every day.

Thanks,

 

whats a NPS? i've never heard that one before.

 

non-phytosynthetic corals

 

Maybe you would be better off using the phyto to grow rotifers and feed the rotifers to the tank.

 

ah! i was in the "LPS" and "SPS" frame and couldn't sort it out. my bad.

 

AFAIK most corals in the LPS/SPS categories do not filter feed on phytoplankton directly. I think there are some softies that do but I'm not a big softy guy so I'm not sure exactly which ones do. There are some types of gorgonians that do so that might be worth looking into as well.

I believe what happens a lot of the time when people dose phyto is that the corals may not actually consume the phyto directly but it may feed the populations of small zooplankton in the tank (assuming you have a population to begin with of course), and the corals then end up feeding on those populations.

Either way I would take it slow, I've heard it's easy to overdose and end up with lots of extra nutrients in the tank.

 

very true. early on, i was dumping Phyto in twice a week due to the advice of the LFS guy. all i was doing was fouling up my water something fierce. a little phyto goes a long way

 

So would there be a better food source to feed the phyto to that would be bette rfor my tank?

 

Not a lot of coral actually "require" food of any kind to be floating around all the time. Most of them just require good light and good water conditions (low nitrates/phosphates, proper calcium, alkalinity and magnesium).
Unless you specifically have some non-photosynthetic coral you need to care for but then you need to make sure you have the proper food type for each one, there's no blanket answer for that.

What corals do you have or plan to have? Maybe that would be a better place to start trying to figure out what they might need.

 

NPS Corals That Thrive On Phytoplankton - Reef Central Online Community

I posted to your thread on RC but I can take the answer here if you like