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Old 04-23-2013, 08:18 PM
ScubaSteve ScubaSteve is offline
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I have 8 RB, 4 CW, 2 OCW and 4 TV over my 14G Biocube.

I run the LEDs at:

RB: 75%
CW: 45%
OCW: 80%
TV: 75%

I also run them from 8 am to 11:30 pm, with the light peaking between 10:30 and 5:30 pm. Whites and OCW are off by 7pm. RB and TV taper off slowly through the night. How long are you running your LEDs for? Maybe the LEDs just aren't on long enough?

The only filtration I am running in the LED Biocube tank is filter floss and a small bag of HC-GFO. I change 30% of the water weekly with water from my main tank. That's all it gets for maintainance. I am growing 5 acro colonies and 2 plating monti colonies, in addition to a few zoas. The montis are off to the sides in lower light areas. Believe it or not, the SPS in this little tank actually look better and are growing as fast as the colonies in my main tank (in fact the Red Planet in the little tank is out growing the RP in my big tank). I attribute this success to just having a stupid amount of light in a small tank.

Another thing to consider: What optics are you using? Maybe your light isn't penetrating enough?

In regards to the plating montis - I had a huge green cap colony that did well for the longest time but then began to struggle. I spent tons of time trying to fix whatever seemed to be causing the issue with it with little success. One day the tissue did this weird thing and turn sort of crispy, and then eventually died. A couple months later I got a new monti frag. It sat there for months, doing nothing... even began to struggle a bit. I explained this to a friend of mine who is a marine biologist and he looked up a few papers for me. He found that montis are more demanding for potassium than other SPS (I unfortunately don't have the links to the papers anymore to share then with you - I'l see if I can find them again); we tested my water and found it was almost depleted of potassium. I started dosing ZEOvit Potassium Iodide Fluoride Concentrate, BAM!, monti starts to take off and grow like mad. My potassium is now at normal levels with daily dosing. I'm not saying with certainty that this what caused the change but I didn't change anything else in my daily care of the tank in at least the past 8 months. I started dosing the potassium 2 months ago and it has only been within that time that the monti started to take off. Maybe look into that as a cause?
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