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Old 10-04-2009, 02:10 AM
chris88 chris88 is offline
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The post about actinic being use only for appearance and not used for photosynthesis couldn’t be more wrong. Corals use a large portion of the color spectrum from actinic and beyond. They use purple, blue, red, yellow, etc. If you look at most studies corals use blue and purple better then most colors, and guess what color actinic falls under, blue and purple. Corals have adapted to using blue light because water filters out the majority of reds and other corals and at the depths where most corals are found the majority of light is blue.

Also, t5’s are just as effective as Mh at growing corals. This has been proven a 100 times over. To answer you question directly your corals do not need actinic light to photosynthesis, but yes they do use that range of nM. 10k still has a large portion of blue so your corals will be fine. They keys is to give coral a broad range of the color spectrum at the right intensity. This is why T5’s have an advantage of Mh because of the choice and variety in bulb combinations.
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