my lighting plan for coral growth

[footballdude2k3]

ok, so today will be the first day that i begin reducing my light cycle in an attempt to better mimic conditions in the wild. it is my opinion that corals reproduce during certain times of the year, i intend to prove this by documenting growth during the next year.

when i first started my 20 i did an 8 hour light cycle, then over the next 2 months i increased the lighting to 10 hours, during that time my zoas at least doubled in the number of polyps. my take on this is that zoas mate in the spring, during the last 3 months i have stayed at 10 hours and my acans have had some nice growth, but not as dramatic as my zoas.

i will document everything with pictures and post everything in this thread, i will also put this on reefcentral and reef2reef to get as many opinions as possible. with my timer that i have i am only able to go in 15 minute increments, so over the next 3 months i will be going back down to 8 hours of lighting, i intend this to be fall. then i will leave the lights at 8 hours for 3 months being winter and then go back to spring increasing it to 10 hours.

tonight i will be taking pictures of my zoas, acans, and favias since these make up the bulk of my corals, when i get my new corals from AAF i will also begin to document the growth of these. i will keep a number of the heads that i can count on an excel spreadsheet that i update weekly, since weekends are easiest with school starting i will be picking either saturday or sunday to have everything done. new pictures will be taken weekly along with the count and i will post everything in this thread so people can learn from my experiment or at least laugh if something goes wrong haha.

i want to do this because it seems that everybody has different growth for different corals and i believe that this has a lot to do with lighting since i have not talked to anybody that has done anything like this in the past.

opinions, advice, and any thoughts are very welcome.

 

[thewackyreefer]

Sounds like a pretty good experiment, curious to see your results.

 

[fab1971]

Sounds good. Also include the growth of algae and chalices (if you have any).

 

[footballdude2k3]

getting my first chalice next week with my new shipment, i will include that for sure

 

[gar732]

Nice! Sounds interesting. I'll be tagging along for sure.

 

[roshi719]

A good theory, but...

as far as asexual reproduction goes (which is the majority of coral growth that we see in our aquariums) more light leads to more energy for the animal, but not necessarily to more growth. Photosynthesis (what the light is driving) only results in carbohydrate based food in the form of sugar. While carbs are very good at providing energy for metabolic process, it does nothave the building blocks required for growth (ie. amino acids). It is possible that if the system is relatively higher in nutrients the extra energy boost from the longer photoperiod could cause a boost in growth, however the reverse situation should cause a slowing in growth.

It is true that certain environmental cues trigger reproduction in corals such as change in photoperiod, lunar cycle, or change in temp, but this usually refers to sexual reproduction which is almost entirely excluded to the wild for right now.