How long to wait before intervening

[maethuu]

How long should one wait with new acropora frags before messing around with moving them, adjusting nutrients, additives, etc?

I have new frags bought at the same time that are looking great; most of them are growing and starting to color up. There's one or two that aren't doing much of anything and have either browned out or haven't grown at all. They look healthy? The polyps are extended no issues with necrosis and no pests. Everything I've read says give it time as frags do weird things and it can take a long time for anything good to happen like color up and grow but how much time should you give it?

I'm only in 4 monthish with acropora but I feel like I'm doing well. From my experience with my other tank I've had longer with mostly softies it seems like the more you mess with your corals the slower they grow. So I'm contradicted.

 

[Reefer Matt]

I usually leave them be for a month or two as long as they seem okay. If they are browning out, it could be that they will need more light and flow to color back up, gradually of course. I also have a frag that has taken four years to start growing nubs, while others took off. Sometimes it may take a little experimentation to find the sweet spot too.

 

[RedReefer]

As long as possible until it's necessary to move.

 

[KrisReef]

In nature, when a coral moves it's generally by either a huge storm pushing giant boulders and everything smaller around. They may land upside down and that's not necessarily a problem, they adjust to the light they get and start growing to take advantage of that energy. If we come around 6 or 9 months later and decide to "upright" the upside down colony, we can tell ourselves that we "saved it" because it was probably dying and looking dead in the areas where it was resting on the substrate, light deprived. But what happens, as far as I can tell, is the colony on the dark side passes energy over to the light side and the light side thrives while the dark side gets dim or just dies from lack of energy from the sun.

So in saving the upside down coral, and moving back into its original position we may have negated 6 or 9 months of energy adaptation that the coral was handling internally to survive, at the cost of lots of now wasted adaptive energy that has to be redone, undone.

So generally, moving corals around doesn't work well with the natural adaptive processes that are innately present in every frag, ime. Every location on the reef has different flow, light, and daily temperature swings that impact the growth or death of a frag that gets moved there. Moving corals generally die if they cant get rooted down in one place, in my observations, ime.