I thought this paper was pretty incredible. Going with the flow: How corals in high‐flow environments can beat the heat. We all know that SPS coral need a lot of flow - but have you ever thought of why? It's sort of just taken as a given that you need 50x, 70x, 100x or more water turnover in our SPS tanks - but no one ever really explains why.
It turns out, from the paper, corals growing in high flow locations have a genetic response to the water movement. They seem to grow faster, they spend more energy on life, photosynthesis increases, they capture more food, and they make better use of that food that they do capture. It's pretty incredible!
The paper is comparing two locations on a reef in Guam, a high flow (8-16 cm/s) and a low flow (4 cm/s) part of a single reef. They're looking at RNA and the genes that get expressed differently between the two locations because over recent bleaching events more than 80% of coral died in the low flow area, where less than 20% of coral died in the high flow area. It's a really incredible paper - I encourage you to check it out.
Also, to convert between cm/2 and something like gallons per hour I think that we can just sort of jump to cubic centimeters/second and then use equations for water flow through a pipe - maybe? Should at least get in the ballpark, right? Doing that my tank is just a little over the low flow part of the reef - I never would have guessed as it's set up for my Achilles tang and I've always thought of it as a high flow tank.
It turns out, from the paper, corals growing in high flow locations have a genetic response to the water movement. They seem to grow faster, they spend more energy on life, photosynthesis increases, they capture more food, and they make better use of that food that they do capture. It's pretty incredible!
The paper is comparing two locations on a reef in Guam, a high flow (8-16 cm/s) and a low flow (4 cm/s) part of a single reef. They're looking at RNA and the genes that get expressed differently between the two locations because over recent bleaching events more than 80% of coral died in the low flow area, where less than 20% of coral died in the high flow area. It's a really incredible paper - I encourage you to check it out.
Also, to convert between cm/2 and something like gallons per hour I think that we can just sort of jump to cubic centimeters/second and then use equations for water flow through a pipe - maybe? Should at least get in the ballpark, right? Doing that my tank is just a little over the low flow part of the reef - I never would have guessed as it's set up for my Achilles tang and I've always thought of it as a high flow tank.