Colouring up wild brown acro

[Paulb89]

Apart from stable parameters, enough flow and correct lighting, is there anything else which can be done to increase or pull out different colours from acro?

I live in Western Australia and so we don't have access to indo stuff anymore or other acro from overseas.

However I constantly see posts and shops selling acro they have cooked up and experimented with to gain insane colours and I just wondered how they are achieving this apart from the common advice of keeping things stable and keeping trace elements at the correct levels.

We have access to heaps of browned out and green wild colonies from North WA and I am curious to see what could be pulled from these given certain conditions?

Is anyone able to offer any advice on how these experiments are carried out?

 

[Jason_MrFrags]

Stable water and good lighting

 

[Timfish]

I wouldn't worry about color initially but once it seems to have acclimated and is feeding and growing then I'd initally start playing with lighting. Brown could be it's normal coloring under the conditions in your tank but it could be an issue it has (melanin is an important component of it's immune system) and in time may color up on it's own without any changes on your part. Another possibility is as it grows you may get some hints of color in different parts of the colony that can give you an indication of what to change, ie, better color on the side with better flow or higher or lower parts of the colony. Keep in mind bright colors may also indicate a stressed coral. See my post in this thread:

QUESTION OF THE DAY - Do colorful corals mean you have stressed corals?

I don' think so. If they were so stressed out they wouldn't grow well so I think that when we have good color and good growth, they are probably thriving. I think our lights don't actually mimic sunlight and that we now provide the right spectrum to support colorful corals, but not full...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[o2manyfish]

The good news is that it's very rare that a brown coral is harvested from the ocean to be sold. So a browned out corals means at one point it has color.

I have been 'reviving' brown acroporas for 20 years. I cheat by having outdoor sunlit frag tanks. And the sun can turn a brown coral into a colored coral in a week to 10 days. Within 2-3 days you see some color showing up. And within a week there is color throughout the coral.

Within 3-5 weeks corals are multi-colored and beautiful.

Having seen some colonies when they come in from the wild under blue lights, that then go brown, that then go into the sun, that then color up - The colors are seldom identical to the wild colors that arrived. But that's not to say that all wild coral colors are maintained in captivity either.

After doing this for over 20 years I can say that I have colored up 1000's of brown corals, whether for myself, or to recolor for a fish store, or even batches of corals for local wholesalers. Of the 1000's and 1000's of corals I have colored up there is a small percentage that just don't color up in captivity - whether tank lighting or sun lit.

It's probably 2-5% of the corals that just won't get any color back in them. They are healthy, they are growing, but they are not pretty. Even those brown corals goto good homes because we donate them to schools and college research projects.

My wife and I donate lots of corals every year (maybe 1000 frags a year). We don't ever sell. We have given away lots of brown frags over the years - that we couldn't color up - and sometimes someone has gotten back to us to say the brown coral colored up for them. But it's a rare occurence.

Dave B

 

[coral reeftank]

In my experience, coloring up brown corals has to do with extremely stable water chemistry, flow, and feeding.

These corals go through a extremely long and complex supply chain leaving them very stressed and resulting in them “browning out”. They’ve probably been in multiple systems within a relatively short time frame. They don’t get a chance to adjust and are exposed to many parameter fluctuations.
Prior to you receiving a brown coral you want to make sure that your system is ideal too, meaning that your tank isn’t going through many parameter fluctuations as well. Then, you need time for the coral to finally adjust to it’s new environment. This can be difficult depending on the health of the coral. It’s paramount that you don’t have any major swings for the first few weeks/month in order for the coral to adapt.

Now that the coral has adapted to your system, good PE and new growth is apparent, you can start to mess around with lighting intensity. Prior to this, I would not “blast” any coral with light. If you give them too much light before they can adapt to your tank this will stress the coral even more which might kill it. You want to incrementally increase the lighting intensity it receives over time and monitor it’s health. Whether this is through upping the power on your lights or relocation in the system.
During this whole procedure, you also want to make sure that the coral is receiving adequate nutrition. In the ocean, the water is filled with food particles and organisms for the corals to eat. So, in order for them color up and have optimal health we must feed!
This means that the overall system is well fed but not filthy. This is easier said than done. If your tank is not properly equipped to export waste or is not mature enough then you might run into algae issues or nutrient spikes. I achieve this by keeping a heavily stocked system with a lot of fish, and an oversized protein skimmer. This allows me to feed my fish and corals heavily without worrying about waste decaying and fouling the water quality.
I’ll provide two examples of my own systems.

1) ~ 160 gallon display ~ 8 years old

5 tangs
8 wrasses
1 royal gramma
6 clownfish
1 damsel
1 goby
Plus dozens of snails plus hundreds of baby snails and other critters and filter feeders

To feed this system I prep a 2x2 inch piece of rod’s food (or any other frozen food I have on hand), 4x4 inch sheet of nori, and a few pinches of pellets. I’ll feed all of this throughout the course of the day. This allows me to make sure all the food is eaten and that the water column has a continual supply of food particulates. I’ll also use 1-2 mls of Fauna marin Min S every 3-4 days as well.
As you can see, I feed alot and have a packed tank. As a result I run a Bubble King Supermarin 200 as my protein skimmer. I extract about 100 mls of dark skimmate (Looks like very dark tea) a day from this system.
I also run a calcium reactor to keep my elements stable and do weekly 10 gallon water changes.
I use radion g5 blues with 2 blue plus and actinic t5s.

2) ~125 gallon display ~ 20 years old

In this tank, I have
5 tangs
5 wrasses
2 gobies
1 blenny

This tank has a lighter bioload, and I feed this tank the same foods as the previous example but with about 3/4 as much. I have a lot of sponges and other filter feeders in this tank since it is so old and they are able to process all this food. It’s crucial that you feed the maximal amount that your system can process, otherwise you’ll run into unwanted issues.
I use a vertex omega 180 skimmer on this and run a very very dry skim. The gate valve is pretty much open and the skimmate I pull out is the consistency of mud. It cakes the inside of the skimmer and I’ll have to go in and scoop it out now and then. The reason I run this tank like this is due to the amount of corals and filter feeders there are in the system. I let this system naturally process all the food since I know it’s capable and let the corals process it all.
In this system I also run a calcium reactor and do weekly 10 gallon water changes. On this tank I only use radion g5 blues plus 1 60 inch reefbrite xho.

 

[Paulb89]

I really appreciate all of the incredibly informative replies

My tank is 130 gallon tank is 3 years old now, I run a mixed reef which consists of 50/50 lps and sps
I try and shade the lps under the sps rock work to give them dappled light and once they were happy and settled I decided to dip my toe into sps and I haven't lost any in over a year so now I'm venturing further.

However, again being in Perth which is incredibly isolated and with the cost of living going through the roof, many reefers are shutting down their tanks and access to different varieties of livestock is definitely decreasing, I find now the local shops get in what sells to keep them going.

People here generally buy acro from queensland as it is generally already colourful and no one really looks at the WA stuff, my LFS collects it and its always deep brown or green, I was told this is due to the iron content of the water in the North due to the iron ore mining that happens.

I just thought this could be an interesting thing to do but I wanted to do it correctly.
I'm excited to see what can be achieved, I'm not sure if anyone has done this here before or if they have and it hasn't been worth it but surely the acro here can't all be green brown or dull purple!! Very few people buy it and it must go for export, I don't know if that's because people don't have time to do it or if they know something I don't.
I don't understand how only QLD and indo stuff is colourful and the stuff here is vastly different, it has always intrigued me to know if that's how it is or if they are diamonds in the rough which need some love.