pale colours sps
 

Wicked weather here in Whistler.Anyways, I recently got back into sps and bought a bunch of frags. They all started off beautiful but have lost the intense color. I dialed my illumina down to 40%. My alk is at 9, ca is 500. No detectable phosphates or nitrates. dosing a splash of mb7 everynight and started 5 drops of amino acid . reef is a 93g cube. 250 ml of biopellets. Thoughts? cheers

Would drop alk a little, and Ca a lot.

Really? and that would affect the colors?

possibly, perhaps as a secondary factor. Ca never needs to be anywhere near 500.
If they've just moved into new lighting, that could do it. If they were in substantially less light, mild bleaching over a couple of weeks could result.

Different water as well. Not good or bad, but just significantly different
could throw them off for a while

Thanks Brad, I guess patience will work. I have good PE so not overly worried.
Hope to see you at Richs for the swap!!!!

Yeah +1 what brad said.

And just wait a couple weeks. Fresh cut frags seem to loose color IMO. And lighting and water from other tank.

Some pieces could take a month to color up. My red planet went yellow after tank transfer. Grows like a weed but still waiting to regain its glory and its been 4 months

I am not sure why you would dial down your lighitng, especially LED. I have found that SPS coloration improves with specifically more UV light, I doubled the UV LED's in my tank, and color improvment is significant.

If we were talking about LPS like chaliace then yeah put it low, but SPS, specifically Acropora or Milli, need intense light.

If they came from a tank with dual T5 and went under a LED at 90%, they'd bake in about 3 days :) Dialing down to match the source lighting is a good idea. Then slowly ramp up

They came from a tank with dual 250 mh, and one with 6 T5's

Hmmm That could explain a few things :neutral:

For how long you have BioPellets? I have same problem Illumina, BioPellets with pale SPS colors. Reading through forums I've got a feeling it can be due to BioPellets combined with intense light from Illumina. Do you have UV module? I was advised do not go more than 20% for UV module. After 3 months I have removed BioPellets from system. Have few days - no improvements yet :) so cannot confirm

i've been running pellets for a year. i'm going to lower my ca and alk, increase light a bit, and watch and wait.

ok. keep us posted as I am dealing with same issue and very curious to know the outcome. Thx

One thought I'd like to put out there, if you're running biopellets then mostlikely it's a low nutrient system. Most of my friends including me run alk at 7-8 with BP.

Another thing when buying and keeping sps, frags will brown out from transfer to a new system. Depending on the sps some more than others, my Red planet didn't lose colour after putting it in my tank, my blue milli went green and now starting to colour up. I have about 30 new sps frags and while some have coloured up some have coloured down. I wouldn't worry about your new frags as it could take a month for them to get use to your system. Pale sps means you can feed abit more but watch them close, if they're all turning darker then back off the feeding.

I feed 3-5 times a week and very sparingly and found that its a good balance, all sps is growing fast and colours are good. If a coral came from a t5 tank to led be very carefull as you could bleach it under led, lots of people under estimate the power of led including myself and have learned the hard way. I now use t5 so it's deffinately less intense than led but loving the sps colours.

+1 to everything suggested so far..

let me know if you want to sell me your biopellets.

Out of curiosity, why drop alk? Isn't alk supposed to be around that number? My alk is at 10 and I have always kept it at 10.

I completely agree on dropping Ca to around 400 or a bit higher.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

When you run a probiotic system like Biopellets it is recommend to keep your alk lower, around 7-8 is ideal. Of course, you can run alk higher if you want, but again, that is typically not recommended.

Zactly!

But for non probiotic system, then 9 or 10 is perfectly fine, correct?
That explains the confusion.

Yes, I used to keep my tank 9 - 11 before using Zeo. I even let it get that high now, but it's best to set a baseline when trying to figure out a problem like this.

My general rule of thumb with new corals going under LEDs in to a low nutrient system - only take their starting colour as a general guideline for what they will eventually look like. And it can take months for a coral to get to a new colour equilibrium in your system.

The process when I add frags to my system is pretty much always the same now that I have too many other well adjusted and happy corals to want to mess with the lighting in the tank to acclimate one or two new frags:

If coral is browned out when I get it -
1. Over the course of 2 or 3 days, the corals fades drastically, often to almost white. Whether this is due to the lighting, the low nutrients, or both, I don't know.
2. Starts plating, usually right away.
3. as new growth begins at the tips, the tiniest hint of it's 'actual' pigments begin to emerge, usually within 3 weeks.
4. within 1-2 months, the body will darken again to it's 'natural color' (often totally different from when it started)
5. 4 months later the coral looks exactly nothing like when I got it, and is either a pleasant surprise or a total bust.

If the coral is not browned out when I get it but came from a different lighting and nutrient regime -
1. coral loses it's 'brilliance' over the course of about a week-10 days
2. sometimes continues to fade out badly, often looking pretty washed out
3. begins to adjust, colours return to the max brilliance and shade possible for that species under my lights and my nutrient regime, which is sometimes less awesome than when it started, and sometimes way, way, way more awesome than when it started. Depending on the coral, this whole process can take either 3 weeks to 4 months.

If you're running BP and have phosphates under control, your corals will almost certainly take on a much more pastel-esque shade than in a higher nutrient system. On some corals that's an improvement and on others it's really not the best look. Some corals also just don't look as good under LEDs as they can under T5s or Halides, while others look way better. Even that is a crazy general statement given the different outcomes that the different LED diode mixes can produce.

But all the advice for the others here is pretty much bang on - if they're not dying and they're still relatively new, the best bet is to wait and see. They will still be sorting themselves out for a good few months. If your'e finding after a few months that you're losing something in your corals that you really really like and none of them are getting 'it' back, pay closer attention to the lighting and nutrient management systems of the tanks in which your favourites look they way you want and try to emulate that. Trying to convince a red planet in an ULNS LED lit tank to look the same as a red planet in a higher energy, T5 lit tank will be a losing battle.

Agreed and this is SPOT ON:
If coral is browned out when I get it -
1. Over the course of 2 or 3 days, the corals fades drastically, often to almost white. Whether this is due to the lighting, the low nutrients, or both, I don't know.
2. Starts plating, usually right away.
3. as new growth begins at the tips, the tiniest hint of it's 'actual' pigments begin to emerge, usually within 3 weeks.
4. within 1-2 months, the body will darken again to it's 'natural color' (often totally different from when it started)
5. 4 months later the coral looks exactly nothing like when I got it, and is either a pleasant surprise or a total bust.

I often compare my red planet to a T5 red planet.... it makes me very very :sad: how can I achieve this redness with LEDS?!

My RP is bright and solid red under mine, I'd look at other factors, maybe placement of coral?

high lighting + low nutrient = pastel color in corals. Some look good that way some look bad that way.

Feed your corals, they are probably anorexic for now. Give them zeovit amino acid, coral vitalizer and Fauna Marin coral food. It is a long shot but they will regain beautiful colors if you feed them right and not let them starve.

Read Coral magazine article ''is your reef anorexic''. it is a good article about low nutrient and starving corals.

My red planet is striking, very red and green at the base. I have about 5 ppm nitrates and .1 phosphates, so it's far from low nutrient. The way I see it, the only advantage of a ULN is not having to deal with algae. The inconvenient is pale pastel corals and problem with LPS and gorgonians.

This is bang on. I'm all over the low nutrients because I like algae less than I like darker colours on my corals. My red planet is more of a 'pink planet', but it's growing like a weed and it's still quite striking nestled amongst a bunch of corals that are practically luminescent yellows and greens that only took on those shades under my lights/nutrients. I took a tiny frag of the red planet and put it on the other side of the tank at the bottom completely in the shade where it grows much, much slower, but it gives me the green base that it's so famous for - though still a pink instead of a red body.

Subscribed. I'm only 4 months into keeping sps and things are not going well for the few pieces that I have.

If you're not having exactly the same issue, you might want to start a new thread detailing your particular setup. The advice here may not apply to your tank.

My apologies. I had no intention to hijack or sidetrack. I am experiencing similar issues, perhaps not exactly. Just trying to learn.

Sorry, didn't mean to suggest that you were hijacking (I knew it would come out like that!). Just that often if issues aren't the same, the thread goes in two different directions.