Recent content by aninjaatemyshoe

IME, they are fairly easy to care for. They are much like Tubastrea sp., but even less fussy. Daily feeding is probably fine. I might switch it up here and there with different small foods. They don't seem to require much flow. They will also do better in low light.

Five months isn't bad, though Dendronephthya have been known to go longer and still die unexpectedly. As far as I know, the jury is still out on what food they eat in the wild and what food they will truly thrive on in captivity. Possibilities run the gamut from tiny zooplankton...

I know this is an old thread, but has anyone experimented with this further? Spracklcat, have you gone further with the alginate spheres?

Common in the hobby, definitely not. I've never seen nor heard of someone definitively having it. IMO, most mentions of it are misidentified corals - probably Stereonephthya, possibly some other nephtheid - from the Indo-Pacific. I wouldn't pound your head on the wall trying to figure out which...

I wouldn't fault them too much on the Neospongodes issue. As far as I know, this is still a genus. Proper coral identification, particularly with certain corals, is something that even experts in the field struggle with. Live aquaria used to list their Stereonephthya corals as Neospongodes...

The coloration of the coral is typically a dead giveaway. If the polyps are translucent and a bright red-to-yellow color, like most of what we call Dendrophyllia, then it is highly unlikely to be photosynthetic. All of the species in the Dendrophylliidae family that are photosynthetic - ie...

Randy, with 3x44gallon brute cans full of live rock in your system, do you worry about the buildup of organic waste and the resulting potential for buildup of large pockets of hydrogen sulfide? I'm guessing that there is not a ton of flow to keep waste from building up over time.

Having used both heavy vodka dosing and solid "biopellet" strategies for controlling nutrients in dedicated azoox tanks, I have not witnessed a drastic difference between the two in terms of coral or sponge growth. Vodka dosing IME has had more negative effects in terms of biofilm formation on...

That's really interesting Uhuru. Are you basically saying that high instantaneous concentrations of food delivered intermittently in the water column is better than the same average concentration of food (ie. same total food) delivered at a constant rate? Why do you suppose this is? Does it have...

I'm just curious because I wonder what they are going to do with that information.

The reason I think feeding live food is not so popular has a lot to do with the substantial extra effort involved in feeding live food. With the amount of food you have to feed NPS tank, it is no small effort growing and maintaining cultures of phyto, rotifers, copipods, etc. and feeding those...

Why do you need to know the exact species? In reality, visual identification of corals in this family is highly speculative at best. Many sources have indicated that true identification must be done by microscopic examination of the corallites.

The first one looks like T. micrantha. Hard to tell from the first image, but the colony appears to be branched. The only other Tubastrea I know of that can have greenish-black polyps is T. diaphana, which is not branched.

Sun corals are definitely the way to start if you plan to continue with more/harder nonphotosynthetic corals. They are more difficult than dendros, but in that sense they serve as a good bellwether of the feeding and maintenance that will be required for harder corals. With frequent feeding...

If anything, this thread has done a terrific job outlining how much of a bad idea it is. Sure, there is a lot of cool factor in blasting pests with lasers, but how practical is this really? By the time you get through all the safety precautions and doing whatever to protect all livestock with...