LPS not looking the best

[reefmartin]

Hi everyone,

I have a Reefer 250 running for about eight months now. While my corals don't exactly look terrible, they don't really seem to behave normal either.
For example my Acanthastrea and Trachyphyllia: they have their tentacles out all day and look pretty swollen. Also my mushroom corals are heavily swollen and their color is a little on the brown side.
My candy cane coral polyps look fine where they get less light, the ones on top are less inflated and don't look ideal to me.
My first guess was too much light but I've already reduced my AI Hydras to what seems a really low level to me. I've attached my lighting settings and pictures of said corals.

Heres's my water parameters:

Alk: 7,5
Ca: 425
Mg: 1350
Nitrate: Close to 0
Phosphate: Barely any, if at all

Trace elements are fine, I've had an ICP test done recently.
I have tried adding phosphate which might have had a slightly positive effect but even after
dosing quite a lot for a couple of days my phosphate test shows pretty much no reaction.

I'm running out of ideas now so I hope you can help me out.

Thanks,
Martin

 

[Reefer40b]

ALL those corals look healthy! Tentacles out on Acan/trachy all the time means they are hungry, feed them

 

[reefmartin]

Thanks! I feed them regularly which doesn't seem to change anything regarding their tentacles. But I'll try feeding more often and see if that helps.
What concerns me about the candy cane is that its polyps on the top are so wrinkly and small compared to the lower ones (it's a bit worse than it seems on the photo). This makes me wonder if I should change my lighting settings. What do you think about the spectrum and intensity I'm using?

 

[DeniableArc]

i have Had so many problems with near 0 nutrients from algae to coral just not growing or showing much colour. I have 4 ai primes @ 70 blues 10 r g w. I have 5ppm nitrate and 0.04 phosphate and my tank is finally taking off with little to no algae

 

[reefmartin]

How have you managed to raise your phosphate levels?

 

[Hermie]

Well from my understanding a coral can tell what "time of day" it is based on the spectrum of light, and I don't see any red or yellow in your spectrum, you could try adding some red spectrum in and see how they react. It's just a theory, but red light won't harm them, and algae can grow with blue light too anyway so there's not a huge reason to remove all red light. It's a myth that red light causes algae growth (all light causes algae growth, not just red).

 

[Hermie]

Oh yeah, and your corals look great. They don't look unhealthy at all. I wish mine had tentacles out all the time like yours.

 

[DeniableArc]

Reef roids alone have raised my phosphate, I target feed all my lps once a week and I couldn’t be happier