I generally feed the corals at least once a day, but sometimes twice a day. If my nutrients are sinking low I’ll feed the corals twice a day. I kind of play that by ear. If I miss a feeding here or there, it’s no big deal and nothing to worry about. Sometimes I skip a day or two without feeding the corals. life gets busy, I forget, I get lazy. Etc. No real hard and fast rules here. Clearly you don’t want to feed to the point you are polluting the system, rotting food in the system isn’t good.
As for the anthias, having a large group has probably minimized the agression at least on an individual basis. I started with 15 females and now have 13 females a dominant male, who has a harem and a sub dominant male with his own harem. The males battle on occasion, they interlock jaws and wrestle, they also push around and display for the females. But, it seems to mostly be all show with no actual harm/intended harm to the females. The anthias are also all to busy trying to figure out their place within their own ranks they completely ignore all the other fish in the tank. It’s been fun watching them, and I’m glad I got them, they are great fish.
I started this tank in the beginning running zeovit, and I think that held me back for awhile. I wanted to try it and decided about 8 -10 months in it wasn’t giving me the results I knew I could get on my own. I probably put sticks in to this tank too early before things were 100% stable and it was also a mistake. It was very stressful at times thinking everyday I may wake up and everything would be bleached or worse... gone. If I had to do it over I would start with Prodibio Bio Digest and build up a bioload with fish, and process it the nutrients with NOPOx, once the tank settled and became stable nutrient wise I would add my SPS frags. The real trick to all of this is being patient to bring the probiotic population up and keep them happy, without overdoing the NOPOx, it’s a balancing act that takes some time to learn, it also changes with adding corals/fish.
The thing that has really helped me the most with this tank is I have largely kept my hands out of the tank, I stopped adding corals a couple years ago, the tank is 27” deep so I mostly use long grabber tools to do anything inside the tank. I mostly just let the corals and everything do what it wants, I try not to intervene and move things around if I can avoid it. (That being said, you have to get to a point where you can go hands off, no tank is hands off in the beginning).
When you look at this tank, there are lots of things that you don’t see. You don’t see the bleaching event that some of the corals went through when I changed my lights to the ATI powermodule and my nutrients were too low. You also don’t see the months of brown slimey gunk that was all over the sandbed and rocks from dosing zeostart and zeo bak without a full bioload, you also don’t see the hours and hours of pulling and plucking bryopsis brought in with some snails that I orginally ordered as a clean up crew. In other words this tank went through a lot of ugly stages for a long time.
Go slow, be patient, be dilligent, and formulate a routine that the tank responds positively to is the most important advice I can give. It’s all a process of looking and learning to see what your tank is telling you.
