Aussie torch care tips?

[HydroJ]

I think what I have is an Aussie gold torch. I've had it for over a year now, and it barely grows a mouth.

I have read that people are having difficulty keeping them, which made me think they might need something we did not provide.

One day, I was feeding my other coral with reef roid, and some of it landed on this torch. I usually do not feed torch because they just don't take in the food, but this one does. I saw it open its mouth and actively pull the reef roid into it. Now I'm thinking maybe Aussie torchs needs to be fed or given higher nutrient than indo torches to keep them happy.

Thoughts?

 

[EnterName]

This might be a bit oversimplified as it doesn't apply to all corals in the same way and there are limitations to how this data was gathered, but: Roughly 20% to 35% of certain corals' daily energy demand comes from heterotrophic feeding. (Grottoli et al., 2006)

The mentioned study concentrated on some SPS corals, that we know tend to be a bit more light-hungry than others, so it is at least possible that the values are even higher for LPS and soft corals.

To me, it appears logical that we need to feed at least a decent portion of our corals frequently for optimal health and growth. It is certainly possible to have enough fish waste and food leftovers for corals to catch during feeding time, but that's hard to measure, so the safest way is to just feed them a bit. I'm sure many corals can go very long without additional feeding under the right conditions (I didn't feed my corals for years at a time as well), but if you don't see any growth or can't keep certain corals: try to feed them frequently in small portions for a few months and see what happens.

In the ocean, corals have a constant supply of plankton, something our tanks are notoriously bad at keeping alive, as protein skimmers are just too efficient at removing it, and all sorts of organisms in our tanks will eat the little plankton they can get as soon as possible, without giving any plankton a chance to reproduce. This makes certain organisms hard to keep long-term and requires us to manually feed them, but at least we don't have to deal with more pests this way. I'm happy that our tanks are limited to benthic dinoflagellates and mat-forming cyanos & diatoms instead of suddenly having a red tide (dinoflagellate Karenia brevis) or similar in my living room.