frustrated with colour...

[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.