frustrated with colour...

[marie]

I have to second the nutrient poor comment. I have always fed sparingly and kept a very low fish load to keep the nutrient levels down but I have noticed a huge improvement on colour just since I started over feeding my tank in an attempt to stop my angel from eating my corals.
Coral growth has always been good but lately its been great and the only difference is the amount of food i've been feeding that rotten regal angel

pics of my old 75g with 175w metal halides, notice the green monti at the top of the tank


pics of the same green monti in the new tank before overfeeding...now under 250w metal halides.


here is a pic of the same monti now



Oh and did I mention growth is fantastic

[Ruth]

The 2 biggest things that have caused me endless headaches with SPS is nitrates and heat.
Because I have struggled with Nitrates I decided to try and go fishless on my SPS tank. After just over 2 months I added fish as my corals were doing nothing - no growth - no color improvement (if anything losing some color) - no nothing.
Sooooo - I added 2 small fish......well actually I added 7 new fish but 3 of the firefish jumped and the 2 remaining killed the other one. I now have 2 firefish and a mandarin. I feed sparingly as these are the only fish in a 110g tank - with a sump/fuge that probably holds another 40g. of water. I also have 3 cleaner shrimp - 3 peppermint shrimp - 3 camel shrimp and numerous snails. I also have 5 clams in there.
My coral growth has never been better and color is outstanding. Because I ship all of my corals they often arrive browned out or brown out a bit just from the shock of shipping. Everything has colored up so nicely. One acro that arrived totally brown has since turned a bright green and now the tips are showing signs of turning a lighter shade of blue/green. Even my pale yellow acro with purple tips is maintaining it's color.
Every day I dose this tank with Pohl's coral vitalizer and amino acids. I feed phyto about once a week for the clams and also add some of those bottled "pods" (can't remember what they are called right now but from OA). I also feed a variety of flake and homemade frozen mush with frozen cyclopeeze added.
I guess the point of all this rambling is that while corals do need a certain amount of nitrate in order to thrive be very careful as it is just so easy to push this over the top and end up with brown/dead corals.

[Joe Reefer]

Kwirky, do you feed any type of coral food? You may want to consider supplementing them something.

[kwirky]

Originally Posted by Joe Reefer

Kwirky, do you feed any type of coral food? You may want to consider supplementing them something.

I have some kent coral food (dropper bottle) but I bought it before I got the SPS and never noticed any results when using it then. Never bothered using it when I got the SPS because it didn't seem to help with the softies/lps I have.

I could try dosing it again. what about cyclop-eez? think that would be good to use too?

I feed my LPS with frozen mysis using forceps twice a week already. helps with growth but hasn't really improved colour.

I'm going to try dosing the kent coral food again, and I'm going to feed my fish a little more too. I have fish that aren't finicky at all, so I feed them new life spectrum marine flake once daily and frozen mysis twice a week when I feed the lps (i give them the leftovers).

Should I increase the flake feeding or the mysis feeding?

What nitrate levels should I start to worry then? It's undetectable now, do I slow down the heavy feeding at 0.4ppm? 1.0ppm? 3ppm? or higher?

also there aren't any phosphates in the tank because I've been using a phosban reactor for at least 6 months. Don't even think it'll have any in the rocks n such because it's been running for a while. Heard some coral use phosphates too. Maybe take it off?

[Renegade]

just a though but make sure your carbon does not leak phosphates back into the water some variates do. If so then your phos-ban reactor is going to waste. I stopped using carbon b/c i found it was exausting my media to quickly. I'm now using cemi-pure quite happy so far.
http://www.jlaquatics.com/phpstore/s...t_ID=bd-cpre10

[marie]

I wouldn't let the nitrates become detectable but I would slowly increase feedings until nitrates start to become detectable or you get a small algae bloom and then back off on the amount a little bit.

Also feed an assortment of food... cyclopeeze, frozen mysis, finely chopped squid or oysters ect.