Coral food

Ajh3nick · Apr 13, 2020

I am new to salt water and just got a few corals (blasto mushroom war...) now I want to make sure they stay alive. What is the best food to give them? I know about pods but haven't got them yet. There is reef roids and others like but what works best to keep the color and growing?

Thank you in advance for your reply

AceShadow_Reefer · Apr 13, 2020

The VAST corals are primarily photosynthetic, but constantly feed from the water column on whatever is available. They have a symbiotic relationship with zooxanthellae dinoflagellates which feed off of light, and provide food for the corals as well. This means they don't need food to survive at all! When I first got into the hobby, I didn't feed my corals anything and they grew just fine but slowly. I didn't have pods either. Now what I've found after some experimentation with mysis and other types of food is that Reef Roids is actually the most growth and color promoting coral food I've used. I learned from a fellow reefer to put about a teaspoon of the powder in a shot glass and use a syringe to add about 5ml of water and stir it up and then suck up the paste and squeeze a tiny amount on each polp. This is a much more concentrated amount of food but it ensures you can feed every polyp by hand instead of hoping the polyp catches food when you dust over it. If you get an anemone, I also feed my nems RR, as well as frozen raw shrimp pieces. Make sure they're frozen and raw not cocktail shrimp or anything like that. I've heard of people feeding silversides and other small fish but I've found that the shrimp is easier to digest for the nem. I hope you have great success with your corals! Make sure to post pics! We love that in this forum

AcroNem · Apr 13, 2020

AceShadow_Reefer said:
The VAST corals are photosynthetic. They have a symbiotic relationship with zooxanthellae dinoflagellates which feed off of light, and provide food for the corals as well. This means they don't need food to survive at all! When I first got into the hobby, I didn't feed my corals anything and they grew just fine but slowly. I didn't have pods either. Now what I've found after some experimentation with mysis and other types of food is that Reef Roids is actually the most growth and color promoting coral food I've used. I learned from a fellow reefer to put about a teaspoon of the powder in a shot glass and use a syringe to add about 5ml of water and stir it up and then suck up the paste and squeeze a tiny amount on each polp. This is a much more concentrated amount of food but it ensures you can feed every polyp by hand instead of hoping the polyp catches food when you dust over it. If you get an anemone, I also feed my nems RR, as well as frozen raw shrimp pieces. Make sure they're frozen and raw not cocktail shrimp or anything like that. I've heard of people feeding silversides and other small fish but I've found that the shrimp is easier to digest for the nem. I hope you have great success with your corals! Make sure to post pics! We love that in this forum

I disagree. There is not a single coral that receives all of its energy from Zooxanthellae, every polyp has a mouth and is searching for food constantly. They feed all the time regardless of your feeding schedule or if you directly feed them.

While the lights we use are great and provide a lot and they get quite a bit from catching other foods in the water column, corals will usually do better when fed some form of supplemental food. There is a lot of research into herbivory in corals, a good mix of phytoplankton species will feed almost everything in your system. Along with phytoplankton there are a broad range of small particle powdered foods that will work with most corals. Other than that things like frozen rotifers, copepods, brine shrimp nauplii are great smaller foods for most corals. For bigger corals mysis shrimp, enriched brine, pacific krill and pellet foods work well. Feeding a couple to a few times per week is a good schedule.

AceShadow_Reefer · Apr 13, 2020

AcroNem said:
I disagree. There is not a single coral that receives all of its energy from Zooxanthellae, every polyp has a mouth and is searching for food constantly. They feed all the time regardless of your feeding schedule or if you directly feed them.

While the lights we use are great and provide a lot and they get quite a bit from catching other foods in the water column, corals will usually do better when fed some form of supplemental food. There is a lot of research into herbivory in corals, a good mix of phytoplankton species will feed almost everything in your system. Along with phytoplankton there are a broad range of small particle powdered foods that will work with most corals. Other than that things like frozen rotifers, copepods, brine shrimp nauplii are great smaller foods for most corals. For bigger corals mysis shrimp, enriched brine, pacific krill and pellet foods work well. Feeding a couple to a few times per week is a good schedule.

I never meant completely photosynthetic so I changed my post to reflect that! Sorry if that's the impression I gave.

Ajh3nick · Apr 14, 2020

Thank you both for the information.

hllb · Apr 14, 2020

I fed reef roids once a week but didn’t see much effect. It did contribute to algae issues. I started using bright well coral amino and my corals are growing faster now. Could be a coincidence but I don’t think so