New to Acros & SPS

[Salt1972]

My daughter and I are new to acros & SPS and need some help / direction.

For 4.5 years, we ran a 55g and grew large colonies of Frogspawn, Duncans, GSP, Pulsing Xenia, Kenya Trees, etc. from small frags. In September, we started 125g mixed reef.

We transferred our Duncans & Frogspawn in September and then added frags of Red Setosa and Rainbow Paly's in October. So far, so good... I think. (see pics)

We purchased 9 frags last week from Cherry Corals (THANKS Todd!) and I'm wondering if we're OK?

Acclimation Process
1. Floated bags for 45 min.
2. Drip acclimated for 2 hours.
3. Dipped in ME Corals Wash Off for 8 minutes.
4. Rinsed with tank water.
5. Placed all frags on base crushed coral bed on the original plugs.
6. Turned the (4) Kessil 360WE lights to a 10 day acclimation mode starting at 10%.

Tank parameters
77.8deg
1.026 salinity - Reef Crystals
Alk 10 dKH
Ca 450
Mag 1365

Nitrates 7
Phosphates .03

We use BRS / Randy - 2 Part to maintain Alk, Ca, Mag

8x turnover on mains & (2) Jebao PP8 Wavemakers

We're a bit concerned because the Red Dragon seems to be getting lighter at the tip despite the low placement and light acclimation mode... Can you guys offer any suggestions or critique?

Thanks in advance.

 

[hybridazn]

Nitrates are a tad high, I recommend getting between 1-4.

With acros what I do is test the salinity and alk of the water they come in and that determines my acclimation process.

The red dragon is a finicky piece, if anything is out of whack it will be the first to go in the tank.

 

[Bpb]

The two main things I’d note are first, I’ve not personally had good luck with acropora in keeping alkalinity that high with nutrients in the range you’ve got them. Personal experience there. Running alkalinity at 10 dKH really requires HEAVY nutrients in the water to keep the sps from stressing and getting tissue necrosis. 0.03 po4 and 7 ppm nitrate is a range I’d keep alkalinity under 8 dKH personally.

Second. I’ve always had bad luck starting acropora off on the sandbed, messing with light intensity, and moving them around a lot. I’ve lost tons of acro frags doing this, but basically have a near 100% survival rate just placing them on their desired forever spots on the rock Work straight away and leaving my light schedule at normal. Once in a blue moon one will get pale for a day or two before regaining color.

One thing that will kill an already stressed coral is experiencing fluctuating light levels and being physically moved around. They really tend to do better if they get a chance to immediately acclimate to regular tank conditions. When you mess with the lights and move them around you’re not gradually acclimating them to your tank conditions. You’re forcing them to re-acclimate to new light and flow every couple weeks. Never works well for me when I do that

 

[Salt1972]

Nitrates are a tad high, I recommend getting between 1-4.

With acros what I do is test the salinity and alk of the water they come in and that determines my acclimation process.

The red dragon is a finicky piece, if anything is out of whack it will be the first to go in the tank.

Thanks hybridazn- Our refugium is building with Chaeto and Caleurpa so the nitrates are on their way down. The chaeto has been online for about 45 days, the caleurpa for about 14 days. It is a mixed reef tank with 13 Green Chromis, a pair of O Clowns, a Purple Tang, and countless inverts, but we should be able to keep nitrates under 5.

Cherry indicated that they keep Alk at 8-8.3dKH. We're fairly new to 2 part and followed what we saw on the forums and youtube regarding a goal of 10dKH. Should we rethink the goal?

 

[Bpb]

An alk of 10 dKH can improve color and growth or lps, low light and soft corals but tends to stress a lot of high lighting stony corals unless you have tons of nutrients in the water

 

[hybridazn]

Thanks hybridazn- Our refugium is building with Chaeto and Caleurpa so the nitrates are on their way down. The chaeto has been online for about 45 days, the caleurpa for about 14 days. It is a mixed reef tank with 13 Green Chromis, a pair of O Clowns, a Purple Tang, and countless inverts, but we should be able to keep nitrates under 5.

Cherry indicated that they keep Alk at 8-8.3dKH. We're fairly new to 2 part and followed what we saw on the forums and youtube regarding a goal of 10dKH. Should we rethink the goal?

Your alk level should be dictated by your nutrient levels. If you have higher nutrients your current alk levels are fine, but a longer acclimation process will be necessary for situations like these. If you get your nutrients down a bit more I suggest lowering your alk to 8-9. Sps can't handle higher alk in low nutrient environments

 

[Salt1972]

Your alk level should be dictated by your nutrient levels. If you have higher nutrients your current alk levels are fine, but a longer acclimation process will be necessary for situations like these. If you get your nutrients down a bit more I suggest lowering your alk to 8-9. Sps can't handle higher alk in low nutrient environments

I'll ramp the Alk dose down a bit and target 8. Would a 10 day period be sufficiently slow to reduce from 10dKH to 8?

 

[Vaughn17]

Your lighting seems low. I realize you're trying to acclimate, but IME good vendors like Cherry Corals keep their acros under strong (probably LED lighting). I would re-think the ten day acclimation period, especially if you see some of your frags turning brown.

 

[mic209]

I'll ramp the Alk dose down a bit and target 8. Would a 10 day period be sufficiently slow to reduce from 10dKH to 8?

From my experience, your ALK is determined by the salt you use (assuming you do regular water changes). If you're doing regular water changes with an ALK of 10DKH, you are going to have a hard time dropping it to 8 while keeping fluctuations to minimum.

 

[Salt1972]

From my experience, your ALK is determined by the salt you use (assuming you do regular water changes). If you're doing regular water changes with an ALK of 10DKH, you are going to have a hard time dropping it to 8 while keeping fluctuations to minimum.

Well, that would be true if our corals / tank weren't consuming Ca and depleting Alk on a daily basis. The salt we use (Reef Crystals) does mix to a certain dKH, but the tank 'consumes' 1.4dKH daily. We supplement alkalinity on a daily basis using 2 part from BRS in order to maintain our target alkalinity. We can easily target a lower dKH by dosing less alkalinity on a daily basis until we reach the lower target and then resume a dosing level that maintains the new target. Given the depletion rate of our tank, we could lower from 10 to 8 dKH rather quickly (~31 hours), but I believe doing so over a longer period (we calculated 2 weeks) would be better.

 

[happyhourhero]

I acclimate corals by taking them out of the bag, Bayer dip for 15 min, two baths in tank water at 10 min each and then place in tank.

 

[Salt1972]

Your lighting seems low. I realize you're trying to acclimate, but IME good vendors like Cherry Corals keep their acros under strong (probably LED lighting). I would re-think the ten day acclimation period, especially if you see some of your frags turning brown.

Our concern was that some of the acro frags were beginning to lighten / turn white at the tips. (See pic of red dragon). Given our inexperience with SPS corals and having read much about bleaching, we're hoping to learn from the community here. My thought was to lower lighting even further because I thought we were bleaching. I think what we've heard so far is that our Alkalinity was too high in balance with our nutrient levels. With that advice, we did some reading and found that the lightening / white tips are sometimes indicative of excess alkalinity. We made adjustments to our dosing schedule yesterday to target 8dKH instead of 10.

With regard to lighting, we made no deviation from the low initial placement and gradual acclimation mode in the Kessil controller. We did read BPB's response (#3) above and it makes sense. Given we'd already gone the (possibly incorrect) route of temporary low placement and stress indicators are present (white tips), I'm not sure if we should stay the course (avoiding further movement / acclimation) or opt to remove the frags from the plugs and mount them to our rock work in likely desirable places according to their lighting and flow needs. What little experience we have indicates moving slowly. So, we've opted to stay the course until we can collect more experienced recommendations. To be sure, we appreciate any and all input from this great community. We've learned a lot from y'all. (We're in TN).

 

[Salt1972]

I acclimate corals by taking them out of the bag, Bayer dip for 15 min, two baths in tank water at 10 min each and then place in tank.

Thanks. I now have screen name envy.

 

[29bonsaireef]

Water changes will be your best friend when getting into sps corals. IMO, If your parameters are getting off the numbers you want, or things are not looking right just do a water change. Don't rely on dosing to bring numbers back to where you want. Ive seen a lot of people struggle with sps, because they try and stick to some sort of dosing regime. Always chasing numbers up and down but ever keeping them stable. Until your tank becomes more mature WC are the easiest way to keep healthy sps, and stick to the same salt mix.

 

[Salt1972]

UPDATE:

Guys- We haven't crashed and burned, but we're a long way from success. Day to day, I feel like we're stable... and then I come to offer reports here and realize that we're still up and down on several parameters and lack months / years of stability. We need some help / suggestions.

Here's a Parameter History:
12/31/17 Temp-77.5 Sal-1.0255 Ca-566 dKH-10.4 NO3-10 PO4-0.092 Mag-1388
1/7/18 Temp-77.8 Sal-1.026 Ca-451 dKH-9.6 NO3-7 PO4-0.03 Mag-1380 -- 30g Water Change (Reef Crystals)
1/13/18 Temp-77.1 Sal-1.026 Ca-518 dKH-9.2 NO3-5 PO4-0.086 Mag-1410 -- Dropped Alk target from 10 to 8.2
1/21/18 Temp-77.8 Sal-1.0265 Ca-573 dKH-8.2 NO3-4 PO4-0.09 Mag-1400 -- 30g Water Change (Reef Crystals)
1/28/18 Temp-77.4 Sal-1.026 Ca-458 dKH-8 NO3-10 PO4-0.107 Mag-1350
2/4/18 Temp-77.4 Sal-1.026 Ca-441 dKH-8.7 NO3-7 PO4-0.06 Mag-1440 -- 30g Water Change (RC)
2/11/18 Temp-77.7 Sal-1.0255 Ca-532 dKH-8.4 NO3-3 PO4-0.117 Mag-1320

Here are pics of our SPS Corals:

The lights switched back to blue...


We have (4) Kessil A360WE lights.
9:30A - 10% Intensity / 0% Color
11A - 30% Intensity / 15% Color
12:30P - 80% Intensity / 15% Color
6P - 55% Intensity / 10% Color
7P - 15% Intensity / 5% Color
10P - 0% / 0%

 

[Salt1972]

I did something wrong with the rest of the pics... Apologies. Let me know if I should add them to a secondary post. Thanks in advance for any help! Have a great Sunday.

 

[Snyder1456]

I did something wrong with the rest of the pics... Apologies. Let me know if I should add them to a secondary post. Thanks in advance for any help! Have a great Sunday.

How are your corals now??

 

[Salt1972]

How are your corals now??

Thanks for asking. They're aggressively OK... the red dragon doesn't seem to be doing well and our red setosa is... alright. Not good, but hanging in there. The tort, echinata, maze brain, monti, leptastrea, and paly's seem to be doing well. Growth is slow, but that may be normal as we don't have anything to compare it to. Interestingly, we thought the smurf's paly's were dead, but I left the plug in the tank. Weeks later, they opened with 3 more heads than when we received. Our rainbow paly's have sprouted 2 new heads. The duncan's, torch, and frogspawn may overgrow the tank.

Our parameters have been very stable. We test each Sunday. We dose BRS 2 Part and grow caleurpa in a refugium and use GFO.

1.026 Reef Crystals
78 degrees

8.3dkH
450 Ca
1350 Mag

2 NO3
.06 PO4

 

[Snyder1456]

Thanks for asking. They're aggressively OK... the red dragon doesn't seem to be doing well and our red setosa is... alright. Not good, but hanging in there. The tort, echinata, maze brain, monti, leptastrea, and paly's seem to be doing well. Growth is slow, but that may be normal as we don't have anything to compare it to. Interestingly, we thought the smurf's paly's were dead, but I left the plug in the tank. Weeks later, they opened with 3 more heads than when we received. Our rainbow paly's have sprouted 2 new heads. The duncan's, torch, and frogspawn may overgrow the tank.

Our parameters have been very stable. We test each Sunday. We dose BRS 2 Part and grow caleurpa in a refugium and use GFO.

1.026 Reef Crystals
78 degrees

8.3dkH
450 Ca
1350 Mag

2 NO3
.06 PO4

Do u have any recent photos?

 

[RCS82]

Acclimation seems a bit much, more suited to inverts than corals. A quick float for temp, a dip and a rinse is all I've ever done. As mentioned above I've always left lighting as is and stuck the frags on the rock and they adjust fine. Everybody loses a frag or two but your commitment is top notch, that's real good. How is the flow in your tank with the 2 jabeos? Is it a 6' 125 gallon? Also have you tried your Kessils at something like 70 intensity and 50 or 60 color?