How long until you place corals in new tank?

[Dkmoo]

Corals dont care about tank age, corals care about stable params and good light. The purpose of "aged tank" and stable microfauna is to help maintain tank stability and prevent nuisance algae/pests from harming the coral.

While its certainly easier to wait add corals later, and it generally has higher success rate, it is certainly possible to have success adding corals on day 1 if you understand how to achieve the said stability.

On the flip side, I've see 2 year old ranks that still have troubles with even the easiest corals bc in during the tanks 2 year period, too many different things was done to the tank for the sake of "quick fix" that caused too much swings and caused the tank to still not reach natural stability even after 2 years

 

[Timfish]

Thank you for your insight! So if filling a tank with corals before uglies start will they have the upper hand over competing algae and in turn stop the ugly phase from even happening?

You're going to have the uglies to some extent. Using a quality maricultured live rock or wild live rock if you can find it also helps alot. See Aquabiomics article here. One thing I think is important to keep in mind is while corals and sponges are esential for the proper cycles a reef system still has to be grown irregardless of how much is initially added. Anything that disrupts a ssytem will require going through the uglies again and a resetting of the cycles. An excellent example is just moving a tank. YouI can move a tank and not change out anything but maybe a small water change and you're going to get the uglies to some extent.

 

[Timfish]

Those are interesting links but the abstract for the pub med link surrounds algal concentrations increasing on the reef and how exudes can help algae outcompete coral.
"We hypothesized that algae and coral release compositionally distinct exudates that differentially alter bacterioplankton growth and community structure."
Rates of bacterioplankton growth and DOC utilization were significantly higher in algal exudate treatments than in coral exudate and control incubations with each community selectively removing different DCNS components.

So what I take from this paper is that algae exudes in an immature system dominant in algae will aid algae gaining a foothold over the coral. Running a system without livestock may help mitigate this

If you dig into the research you see see reefs that have been severely impacted simply because the large or primary herbivores have been removed. (The corals in the Caribbean are an escellent example, with steady decline of corals since the loss of Diadem sp. urchins in 1983.) Corals need nitrogen and phosphorus as badly as algae does. Herbivores provide an important role by converting the nitrogen and phosphorus bound up in algae into nitrogen and phosphorus available for corals as well as reducing the DOC (DCNS is a subset of DOC) that promotes pathogeninc shifts in coral microbiomes. So I would say it's important to add fish (and other herbivores) as they provide urea and ammonia (both preffered by corals over nitrates) and phosphorus. I would encoruage you to get a copy of Forest Rohwer's "Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas" (kindle is ~$10) It's an excellent introduction to the various roles of DOC in reefs systems and there's a list of almost 100 refferences if you want to dig into it deeper.