Strawberry Shortcake, All red

[Donovan Joannes]

One thing good about halide is no tweaking needed. Set, fire and forget. Is there any chances to put it higher from water surface?.

 

[Jeremy Luke]

One thing good about halide is no tweaking needed. Set, fire and forget. Is there any chances to put it higher from water surface?.

For certain the Giesemann is suspended from the ceiling. What height would you suggest? It is currently 10.5" above the surface.

 

[Donovan Joannes]

12" - 14" might be a good height to try. Maybe you gonna get light spillage to the floor.

 

[Jeremy Luke]

I'll give it a shot.

 

[22bfan]

I have some experience with this same type of coral.
Under low or non existent Nitrate and Phosphate the strawberry shortcake will bleach easily above 400-450 par with halides.
Up the nutrients and it seems to be able to handle much more light without bleaching.

I had a thumb sized frag of SS under a Hydra52 in a shallow stock tub and had little to no growth and brown out over the course of a year. My nutrients were fairly high and my light program was biased toward blues and fairly low par.
I swapped to a singe 400 watt Radium 20k in a lumenbrite large reflector and electronic ballast providing about 600 par to my frag rack = explosive encrusting and bush like growth. However, despite rapid growth, the new growth seems to be fairly pail at first. The coral continues to grow but the growth sections don't develop good color on the skeleton or in the polyps until about 2 weeks to a month of development.

With the increased par i thought i was burning the coral at first. But upon closer inspection this was actually new skeletal growth with infantile polyp cups, not the bleaching and recession as i originally thought.

Wish i had pictures to timeline the progress, but that was a while back.

 

[Graffiti Spot]

The coral looks dark red like it's in an unstable tank with a lot of nutrients. How long have you had it? Too much light will make a coral light colored so I doubt that was the cause. Might just need time, not changes.

 

[Jeremy Luke]

The coral looks dark red like it's in an unstable tank with a lot of nutrients. How long have you had it? Too much light will make a coral light colored so I doubt that was the cause. Might just need time, not changes.

The tank has been up for only 4 months. The nutrients have been kept quite low. As posted above, nitrates are undetectable and PO4 is at .03 PPM last I checked which was two days ago.

 

[Jeremy Luke]

I've got several frags that have been flourishing

 

[Jeremy Luke]

Hard to tell with my crappy phone picture... This guy has a black base and that color is an amazing yellow. My pearlberry looks great... Pink lemonade... And so on and so on.

 

[Ibn]

SSC can change pretty dramatically through recovery. I have a wild ssc and for reference here's what it looked like through the stages.

This is two little nubs that my buddy gave me from his wild colony, which he eventually lost. They're about a month into the tank at the time of this pic. The tank was ~2 months old at this point.

This is approximately 1 month after that pic. Very meh looking.

This is 4 months after that. Had some nice purples on the tip and some yellows on it surprisingly.

2 months later and it got shaded and turned a very meh brown.

1 month after that, I redid all the rockwork and pulled it off. You can see how unhappy it was.

This is what it looks like as of a week ago. It's currently sitting in 470 on the PAR meter.

 

[Jeremy Luke]

I'm pretty sure I gave mine too much light and now it needs time to get back to normal coloration

 

[22bfan]

Ibn- what changes were made to cause that drastic of a color change?
-flow
-light duration/spectrum
-tank placement
-additives/suppliments
-nutrient levels

 

[Ibn]

Hard to pin down since there was quite a number of changes.

Flow. It went from a protected location in where it used to be (BRS reef saver rock) to the base of the Y in the tonga rock.
Light. Light intensity has been increased since it's about 3" higher in the tank than it was before. Other than intensity, spectrum hasn't changed. I just run the Fiji light cycle on the Vegas color.
Additives/supplements. Just normal BRS 3 part via doser. I've started on A/B again, but the colors were showing up before I started.
Nutrient levels. The tank bottoms out on nitrates and I was dosing KNO3 to get it to sit at 5 ppm. I stopped and just upped the number of fish in the tank which increased how much I fed them. I haven't measured nitrates in awhile though.

Oh, I should also mention that the period when it had the purples and yellows was right when I got back from the holidays. Tank was on autopilot for 2 weeks during the holidays and my doser ended up raising my alk up to 12.8 (from ~8ish). I lost a few frags from that, but the ssc didn't have any issues.

 

[Ibn]

Fresh picture from earlier today, so almost 1.5 months after that last pic in the previous post.

More encrustation and nubs shooting out. Different colors on the growing tips. White until the zooanthellae begins to populate.