Operating a commercial propagation facility has been a rewarding, humbling, frustrating, and often, exhilarating experience. Our staff at Unique Corals has amassed a significant amount of experience dealing with the daily challenges involved in producing large quantities of healthy, high quality, colorful corals, and we are constantly improving our techniques and honing our skills.
Not a day goes by when we don’t get a bunch of questions about our corals- how we grow them, what types of conditions we keep them under, etc. There is no reason for us to keep this a secret, because knowing the conditions under which your corals are grown will help you continue to maintain them in great health in your own systems. So I thought, it would be a good idea to start sharing with you exactly what conditions we’re raising your frags under!
Here’s a very brief, summarized look at where your corals come from. We hope to make this a periodic series, with discussion on each of our raceways, in the hope that sharing this information will help our customers enjoy the corals that they purchase from us even more!
Let’s start with a look at one of our SPS growout raceways, Raceway #2 (“R2†as we call it.)… This is where many of your Acros, Seriatopora, and Montis come from. We’ve really been enjoying the color and growth we’ve been getting out of our “SPS†lately, and judging by sales and positive feedback, so are our customers!
Like all of our raceways, this one is 30 feet long and has a total capacity (including it’s own sump) of around 2,000 gallons. Water is returned via a simple, elegant horizontal “gyre†flow designed by our friend, Jake Adams. With no annoying spouts, manifolds, and outlets, this creates very strong, indirect flow, which we feel has greatly benefitted our corals by providing increased oxygenation and keeping a clean “boundry layer†around them. We also feel that the strong flow helps promote more rapid healing, encrusting, and growth following imposed propagation (a fancy way of saying “fraggingâ€).
We illuminate this system with 400 watt, 20,000K “Radium†metal halides mounted in twin reflectors on motorized light movers, to achieve consistent, steady lighting throughout the raceway. We have discussed our rationale before for choosing halides- but suffice it to say, we feel that they give us the most economical return on our investment for our needs. Sure, fancy LED systems are really sexy, and they can grow Acros for sure- but for our purposes, nothing that we have tested thus far has outperformed our halides at this point, from an economic and performance standpoint, in terms of color, health, and “time-to-market†for our corals, very important in a commercial operation with overhead and other considerations!
The corals are grown on standard egg crate over acrylic that is about 6â€-8†under the water surface, and the lights are suspended anywhere between 12â€-16†above the water surface. We experiment now and again with height and adjust as needed to get the desired results. Like everything in reef keeping, commercial propagation is a constant learning/tweaking process!
Like all of our raceways, “R2†is independently filtered, which provides not only stability and control, but a safety factor should something go wrong. The risk of cross contaminating a grout raceway was something we considered at the outset, and central filtration for our coral systems was ruled out immediately.
We have been utilizing the “Triton Method†for almost two motnhs, and during that time we have noticed an obvious positive impact on the color, vitality and health of our corals. Regular visitors to our facility notice it, too, and we see positive changes in our corals weekly. One only need take a random sample of frags from our raceways to see the consistent strong color, health, and growth of the frags. We dose the “Base Elementz†four part balanced ionic/trace element solution continuously with dosing pumps controlled by our Apex system.
Everyone want’s to know the latest stats on the systems where their corals are coming from, so here’s what we were looking at as of the 28th:
Daytime pH- 8.18
Temperature- 77.9F
ORP- 320
Salinity -33.1 (1.025)
Alk- 8 Dkh
Mg- 1395
Ca- 534
P04- 0.15ppm
When we receive the results from our latest Triton 32-parameter analysis, we’ll share this, too.
Perhaps some surprises in these results?
Well, our alkalinity is right on target…Triton proffers 8 Dkh, which is where we’re at, and it’s very stable now. As you can see, we have really high calcium…Something that we try to adjust downwards at times, but with growing corals, and a lot of them, it’s a moving target. Magnesium fluctuates too; in the past week going between 1410ppm on the high side and 1380ppm on the low side. Our corals encrust quickly on their plugs, with very colorful growth tips.
You’ll see that our phosphate is possibly higher than you’d expect, but within our target parameters of 0.08-0.20. We’ve ran systems ridiculously clean, almost “sterile†before, in terms of phosphate- and our corals looked- well, crappy. Since we’ve “allowed†a higher tolerance for phosphate, and feed the heck out of our corals, they've never looked better. I can’t stress this enough: Corals need to be fed, and they don’t need perfectly sterile water to thrive.
We have not performed a typical water change for nutrient export in over a month, consistent with the Triton “Method.†Rather, we’ve utilized protein skimming, activated carbon, and growth of Chaetomorpha to assist with nutrient export. We top off our system or replace some saltwater with freshwater as needed to keep specific gravity in check.
Remember, we are looking at stability of numbers within a range, and try not to get too obsessed with any one number as a target. Chasing exact target numbers is a sure way to drive yourself nuts! We realize that these systems are nothing like a home aquarium, with many thousands of growing coral frags and colonies, and corals being removed and added daily as frags are made and others are sold, and the management of this large a volume utilizing a method like Triton is very different from what most reefers will do.
Quite honestly, the colors, growth, and encrusting that we are getting out of our “SPS†frags these days is tremendous. We have never enjoyed a greater degree of consistent quality with our corals as we have lately. We attribute some of this to Triton, and some of it to good old fashioned attention to detail and hard work. Managing a large grout system has fought us many things about corals. Having so many corals under propagation is analogous to a terrestrial garden: At any given time, many corals are thriving, some doing not as well as they could, and some not doing well at all. Over the past couple of months, this has smoothed out, with the vast majority of corals thriving, and very, very few corals not doing well. This is something that we are seeing across the board in all of our systems, and we are very pleased with this.
Growing corals has been a constant learning curve, with surprises, challenges, and opportunities popping up all the time. With constant refinement of our husbandry procedures, this end of our business continues to improve every week, as we learn more and more about what our corals really need. The end result- high quality corals for our customers- has been well worth all of the time, energy, expense, and effort invested.
And it’s a lot of FUN, too!
I hope that this brief look at “R2†has provided you with some food for thought, and perhaps a bit of knowledge that can help you keep the corals that you purchase from us in top condition in your own aquarium!
Keep having fun with your reef…
And Stay Wet!
Scott Fellman
Unique Corals
and send in another icp test.
You have to let me know when you are giving a talk in Nashville, I am there for business all the time. I would live to sit in on one of your talks. The Nashville club gave me some good advice on LFS last month for window shopping
