Duncan coral color loss…adjusting to new lights or bleaching?

george9

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Hi all,
I upgraded the stock Biocube lights to Steve’s LEDs about 5 weeks ago and have been slowly increasing the light intensity 1% every 4-5 days. I reached 45% blues and 35% whites when I noticed an issue today - my duncan’s are not nearly as colorful as they used to be. One of them arrived very neon green, and the other was a tan color. They don’t look fully bleached to me, but not nearly the same color as they were. I was watching for polyps closing or becoming smaller to assess whether or not the corals were stressed from the lighting adjustments but this color shift has been so gradual that I am just now noticing it since the duncans never closed while the lights were on.

Can a be stressed and bleaching without ever closing to hide from the light? They remain open 100% of the photoperiod and only briefly close for a couple hours at night. I feed reef roids twice a week and all of my corals have been showing great growth - even one of these duncans has 3 new tiny heads growing that I can see so I’m not fully convinced it’s stressed.

What do you guys think? The first two pictures are from when the corals were added to the tank right when the lights were changed in my regular blue-heavy daylights. You can see one Duncan is more tan/brown and the other is way more neon green/blue.
the second two are from today - one in the normal blue-heavy daylights the final one is in pure white light with the blues off.

Params:
Nitrate - 5
phos - .06
calcium - 420
Mag - 1350
alk - 9.8

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