Milad's 72in LED build

[ScubaSteve]

Originally Posted by Milad

Thats good too know. Ill keep it in mind when im doing the testing. Im going to be testing several different versions of intensity of the 660nm mixed with the 45nm. Its supposedly proven by their biologist to work but I want to test it out in person to see if its smoke and mirror or what.

660 nm makes the corals grow, yes... but... it does so by promoting the growth of zooxantellae, which in turn the coral feeds on. Unfortunately zooxantellae is brown which makes the corals brown out. It's kind of like giving a plant a ton of nitrogen fertilizer: yes, it grows fast but ends up all long and leggy... You get the effect you were looking for but you lose out elsewhere.

If you break out the physics textbook you can figure out how much red light there actually is at a certain depth where you find the corals. You loose a lot of red quite quickly as you go deeper. We are essentially keeping our corals in tide pools compared to their natural habitat, so to get the best behavior out of them you want to simulate the spectrum of light they experience at the depths they naturally reside rather than giving the zooxanthellae what they want (more red).

If you tell me what corals you are experimenting with, I can take a pretty good stab at which zooxanthellae clades are in your corals; from this I could give you pretty much the exact spectrum that clade absorbs (most importantly the absorption peaks). I'd echo the above comment of trying more green than red.

One thing to bare in mind is that all of this will make them grow better but not necessarily look better. You see the coral based on whatever light is not absorbed by the coral (it's own pigmentation + the zooxanthellae) or the light that is re-emitted through florescence. You need to strike a balance between the coral's health and growth and this left over amount to get the best of both worlds.