Steve Wright's SPS takeover

Great color development congrats

 

I would love to know what the coloration of the piece was in the wild. I mean did the color change happen in response to a change in type of zooxanthellea, or did the zooxanthellea change color.

In one post we briefly touched on the sharing of zooxanthellea among corals. Is the color change a result of shared zooxanthellea? Does one zooxanthellea more readily spread than another? Is it all just a reflection of the type of light and if so what part does vitamins and other additives play in color development.

 

Steve is neglecting to tell you that this all started when he hung one of those disco mirror balls in the room.;D

 

welcome M - Ocean Man

Thank you John

my opinion after watching an almost flourescent green coral gradually becoming a blue tinted coral is that lighting plays the most significant part in which colour dominates on the coral
basically at present I struggle to get any plain white or cream coloured coral to be anything other than purple or blue as it colours up
if I buy a green coral or a yellow coral, they tend to maintain that colour
but in any corals lacking pigmentation or browned out, then the Zoos I do get colonising, seem to be from the dominant blue and purple Zoos established in other corals?

maybe- I tried reversing 2 corals position in the tank -moving the one that was upstream, down stream (one is purple , other is green) and hopefully I will learn from that if the green one starts developing purple or blue coloration now, I will be more convinced the Zoos are moving from coral to coral and thus sharing colour potential and the dominant ones take over the coral

its all theory for now, but its a lot of fun experimenting.

thats an idea - maybe a mini one dangling in front of the blue LED
For a Saturday night fever reef set up

Steve

 

wow, love the way everythings coloring up! congrats!
and the fact that you can encourage the colors you want is even more exciting

i have a question tho, the piece thats turning blue rapidly because of the blue spotlight... if you had to guess, do you think that if you were to now remove the spotlight, would that piece loose the blue its gained, keep most but maybe loose a little or stay its new colour and continue to blue further just much slowly?

 

Thanks Chappy

it would lose some of the blue intensity if the blue LED was removed
I actually saw this occur in an LFS tank a year or so ago
they had a blue LED - low power fixture angled on a coral and it was intense blue
a few weeks later it had been removed
coral was still blue, but it no longer popped as it had previously

Steve

 

thats very intriguing, i think i'll have to do some more reading on the subject thanks

 

The confusa is plating quite well, Steve. As always, your tank is great to look at. Keep up the diligent work--I know a lot is involved.

 

Thank you ReefSparky

the TM-01 greatly reduced the amount of hands on effort required on a daily basis and I am now going to make the Zen dosing comments public
we talked about 12 months ago

I checked my sanity out with Inwall75 and he did not indicate my problem was madness - so here we go


In general - the normal sequence of events is
1 - Test your water
2 - dont dose anything for 3 - 7 days
3 - test water again, and from that you have learned your demand
4- compensate for the drop in levels experienced
5- set up doser etc to compensate on a daily basis for the ions being used


Zen dosing
I started this based on a theory that
ions being added to the set up, are more freely available to the corals and coraline algae for a brief period, before they are bonded with other ions in solution and become part of the overall SG
elevated mag levels have been studied and found to make it difficult for SPS and coraline to extract the calcium and alkalinity ions they require (RHFarley)

thus my theory was "whilst the ions are free, having been dosed into the aquarium, there was a good chance that more of them may be utilised)

methodology

I wanted to find out if - dosing reflects utilisation or dosing can create utilisation
in other words if your test kits told you, you where losing 10ppm calcium and 0.5 DKH per day
and you dosed just this amount each day - you would achieve a maintained system
but if you slightly increase the amount you dose, yet the test kits each week do not reflect any level increases
then extra demand has been created as a result of extra ions being available

with the above in mind- I increased the amount of fluid my timers would release on both calcium and alkalinity
but not by so much that would actually register on a Salifert test kit

I was doing 250mils of solution per day mixed to compensate for 5ppm calcium and another solution (not the same solution) mixed to compensate for 0.25 DKH per day

whilst maintaining same strengh of solution mixed
I gradually increased the duration of my timers
I worked in 10 mil incriments and continued to test every 3 days to ensure the levels did not increase

I am currenty dosing 300 mils of solution of both types
and yet my parameters have remained constant
and I am not experiencing precipitation

the coraline is developing faster
the corals are growing quicker

I will continue this experiment

as I have not dissmissed the possiblity that my increased dosing may have coincided with a period of additional demand, rather than in actual fact created said demand


Steve

 

Very good methodology Steve, I would expect that you will reach the saturation point eventually if you are increasing your dosing faster than the corals can grow.