Acropora 'Target Feeding' Response with Particulate Coral Food
- Thread starter chcgregg
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Yes. 14k Phoenix on m80 and some 20k Radiums also on m80. Have a few T5s on some frag tanks and fuges. I have a pile of used LEDs that did not make it out of the frag room.
For me, light is #1 by a mile and I would suggest that people spend every penny that they drop on Reef Roids, Acropower, etc. on more/better light. ...it just seems to do more... more/better light and more growth and color where as more "coral food" did nothing in my tanks over the years.
I remember an article in Tropical Fish Hobbyist in the early 1990s about how you need to feed yeast. Then DT phyto, oyster eggs, marine snow, dead zooplankton, etc. Those are all now jokes/punchlines. Acropower, Red Sea, Reef Roids will all be punchlines some day too. It seems like over the twenty-five years that I have been doing this, the hot "food" of the day is tomorrows joke.
For me, light is #1 by a mile and I would suggest that people spend every penny that they drop on Reef Roids, Acropower, etc. on more/better light. ...it just seems to do more... more/better light and more growth and color where as more "coral food" did nothing in my tanks over the years.
I remember an article in Tropical Fish Hobbyist in the early 1990s about how you need to feed yeast. Then DT phyto, oyster eggs, marine snow, dead zooplankton, etc. Those are all now jokes/punchlines. Acropower, Red Sea, Reef Roids will all be punchlines some day too. It seems like over the twenty-five years that I have been doing this, the hot "food" of the day is tomorrows joke.
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chcgregg
Community Member
Coral suspension feeding on fine particulate matter:
www.sciencedirect.com
Feeding behaviors of three tropical scleractinian corals in captivity:
Influence of different food sources on the initial development of sexual recruits of reefbuilding corals in aquaculture:
www.researchgate.net
Give those a read, interesting results in all of them.
Coral suspension feeding on fine particulate matter
High concentrations of fine suspended particulate matter (SPM) on nearshore coral reefs are generally assumed to be a stress factor for corals. Howeve…
Feeding behaviors of three tropical scleractinian corals in captivity:
Influence of different food sources on the initial development of sexual recruits of reefbuilding corals in aquaculture:
(PDF) Influence of different food sources on the initial development of sexual recruits of reefbuilding corals in aquaculture
PDF | In coral aquaculture, sexual reproduction increasingly plays an important role for serving trade and reef restoration purposes. However, until... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
www.researchgate.net
Give those a read, interesting results in all of them.
ScottR
Surfing....
In the first link, the study is based on estimates, the word “may” being used a lot with no conclusion being made. The second link showed that the use of artemia salina showed the most growth and/or survival rate. But one thing I would question - as the ones being fed nori - is if phosphates and nitrates were being added as a result of brine shrimp being added. If the Nori tank had low or zero levels because food wasn’t really being added to the tank, is this the reason why? In a typical tank, we feed our fish and our fish feed our corals. I typically only feed my NPS corals. I don’t feed LPS because I don’t really care about growth in them. They’re big enough. For SPS, I wish they were bigger but I just let them be. I know we want to feed corals to make them grow as it’s hard to believe light alone can feed them, but I’ve never fed or even tried to feed SPS. My various montis grow like crazy. Seriatopora too. Acros is a different story.
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chcgregg
Community Member
Interesting point you raise! It is worth thinking about.
TexasReefer82
Active Member
What is this Predation Anxiety that you mentioned? I'm wondering if this is a similar mechanism to when a pygmy angelfish is kept with acropora and they cease extending daytime polyps... Even with little to no nipping.
... Just thinking out loud.
This is exactly the case. Corals can detect chemical cues, and in response to 'nipping', they will retract polyps, often far away from any actual predation.
I think some good evidence of what types of foods help acropora are the blue coral method and carbon source tanks that feed extremely heavy. In both of these types of systems you can see the tanks running very well off of lots of food. The blue coral method might not be feeding the acropora first hand but the amount of food going into the system is being used and the acropora clearly benefit from it and maybe the small amount of sugar that was used in the food. Some of those staghorn colonies were just mind blowing. I wonder how many are still trying to feed papone to their systems. I don’t think we will find any foods that acropora clearly benefit from catching anytime soon other than bacteria.
TexasReefer82
Active Member
It's been a long time since I've heard the Pappone method mentioned! I wonder what was the inspiration/thinking behind that approach? Assuming that the photos are honest, those are impressive results.
I'm not convinced either that adult Acropora actually eat, macroscopically, for any amount of their nutrition. The videos that purport to show them eating actually appear not to, in my opinion. I have the impression that acropora eating is a vestigial apparatus/behavior (like goosebumps on humans).
When I look at an acropora colony I see a huge amount of surface area. I see a fractal pattern with various levels of branching, the scutes around each polyp and finally the polyps themselves. Also, the entire skeleton of acropora stays covered in live tissue, unlike LPS corals. ...Huge surface area. "Eating polyps" like scolymia and lobo's don't have this.
Huge surface area suggests to me that these corals are built to ABSORB food. We already dose simple compounds like AA's, Nitrate, phosphate, and products like Red Sea Reef Energy (Carbohydrates, lipids, vitamins, etc). I suspect they're also able to absorb more complex compounds. I've read before that corals will take up Nitrate and Phosphate but prefer organically bound P and N. The organic molecule doing the binding could be a huge number of possibilities both large and small. But it's not eaten, it's absorbed.
Pappone is blended for a total of 15 minutes (meaning it's warm) with sugar (bacterial food). I suspect that there's a certain amount of bacterial metabolism going on there. Maybe it's the by-products of the bacterial metabolism that the corals absorb along with solublized components of the shrimp, oysters, etc.
I'm not convinced either that adult Acropora actually eat, macroscopically, for any amount of their nutrition. The videos that purport to show them eating actually appear not to, in my opinion. I have the impression that acropora eating is a vestigial apparatus/behavior (like goosebumps on humans).
When I look at an acropora colony I see a huge amount of surface area. I see a fractal pattern with various levels of branching, the scutes around each polyp and finally the polyps themselves. Also, the entire skeleton of acropora stays covered in live tissue, unlike LPS corals. ...Huge surface area. "Eating polyps" like scolymia and lobo's don't have this.
Huge surface area suggests to me that these corals are built to ABSORB food. We already dose simple compounds like AA's, Nitrate, phosphate, and products like Red Sea Reef Energy (Carbohydrates, lipids, vitamins, etc). I suspect they're also able to absorb more complex compounds. I've read before that corals will take up Nitrate and Phosphate but prefer organically bound P and N. The organic molecule doing the binding could be a huge number of possibilities both large and small. But it's not eaten, it's absorbed.
Pappone is blended for a total of 15 minutes (meaning it's warm) with sugar (bacterial food). I suspect that there's a certain amount of bacterial metabolism going on there. Maybe it's the by-products of the bacterial metabolism that the corals absorb along with solublized components of the shrimp, oysters, etc.
TexasReefer82
Active Member
Sounds like I need to scoop out my dwarf angel if I ever want any daytime polyp extention. I wonder if "predation anxiety" acts like a chronic stressor to acropora that would harm their health over the long run?
NanoDJS
Valuable Member
Awesome video , I target feed every coral we own . I am also the guy who brought cyclopseaze into alot of my lfs and hobby stores to show them waaaaay back in the day somewhere around 20 yrs ago ( weeps a tear for cyclopseaze ) . We all saw the active feeding response of our SPS and it does make a massive differance in color and health. Lately we do it with reef roids. But we still feed the slurry with everything down to rotifer size in there ,,also finding the new apex pods to be stellar for sps live feeding. Also if you have "active stripping" in place like GFO ,phosban , skimmer ect , you will have less zoaplankton in the W C and they wont PE as much . Berlin system is HEAVY in HEAVY out, thats how they get siiiiick PE there is always a massive nute level in the WC ( not the latent reading ) we take in the testing. I hope this makes sense. Anybody who has ever shot reef roids over a open mille colony knows exactly what im talking about its so cool . The places these come from have zoaplankton sqaulls on a nightly basis where the whole wc is food for a few mins.
Well said, I would also encourage anyone not familiar with papone and the blu coral method to look it up. Amazing colonies that you just don’t much see these days.
Coral beauty has been in our 75g prior to any acroporas and it never effected polyp extension. I've never witnessed it nipping at the corals though. Our yellow tang and foxface nipped at them daily but still never had a reaction that wasn't localized to the specific spot on the coral.
pledosophy
Active Member
Do you have a specific food recommendation for different species of acro's? Food wise is an acro an acro, or do they benefit differently?
pledosophy
Active Member
It's been a bit over a year. I am wondering if you continued with this research and what your further findings were.
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chcgregg
Community Member
And a year after your post, haha! I actually closed the system down shortly after the video as life got in the way. But I have restarted a small 220 litre system with Acropora.
Need to get them healthy and growing (it’s a very young system so keeping everything stable initially is very important), after that I’ll revisit it! I don’t believe that artificial foods are actually ingested by Acropora, however the Australian Institute for Marine Science did a study and found that Raw unfiltered sea water provided the best results for growth versus Filtered seawater, rotifers, and their own particular coral food.
sculpin01
Well-Known Member
I think bakers yeast and Artemia nauplii are the only two prepared food to have been shown to affect coral growth. Since I learned about the backyard culture method for Tigriopus, I'm curious as to whether they would be an effective coral food, particularly for young corals.
Thales
Valuable Member
"Acropora millepora from the spawning on 11/21, settled, symbionts uptaken, eating Golden Pearls 5-50 microns in the Secret Home Lab. Sped up 600%. Watermark is approx 1mm for scale"
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