brighter light equals brighter ricordeas?

[lildraken]

My new rics are eating and growing, but their color has degraded from a bright vivid green to a brownish green. Also a couple of months ago I changed the lighting from 1 blue actinic and 1 daylight to 2 of those 50/50 bulbs. the coralline algae is starting to turn from pinks and purples to more green corallines. I read somewhere that blue actinics just make the corals look better and does not really aid in photosynthesis of the zooxanthellae If you have sufficient day light. ( I realize this is contraversial) anywho.... I was thinking of reducing 50/50 to 1 part daylight and 3 parts blue actinic to perhaps boost the color? or maybe vice-versa? what do you all think, would more actinic brighten the color of the rics? i'm sure it will brighten up the coralline algae since they don't like bright light.

 

[ek9vboi]

I currently run dual actinics and a 50/50 bulb. The color of the tank itself looks great, more blue then pee pee yellow IMO, thats just how I like it.

As far as coloring goes, because actinics is a different spectrum from a 50/50 and a 10,000k bulb... it is more dimmer. Not as bright as I want to say so coralline algae tend to grow better under the low light conditions. As for my corals, they all look better but I have changed a few things around as well.

 

[jessp]

imo rics will brighten up w/ brighter lighting.

 

[lildraken]

If brighter lights make brighter corals, then wouldn't the coralline algae die off? How do you get bright corals AND beautiful purple and pink live rocks? Do metal halides kill off coralline algae? I'm confused on what I should do. I would gladly upgrade to metal halides from my 192 watt PC's, but I don't want too much lighting to kill off the rics or the coralline algaes.

 

[Ken668]

Any sudden change in lighting is not good. I had a beautiful rock of 45+ purple rics that I picked up from a LFS. They had crap NO lighting. So when I put my rics in a low light area, they were still shocked by the higher intensity they had gotten used to sitting in the LFS. The majority of them started to bleach out. I reduced their light even further and it looks like they are making a come back.

For your question, coraline tends to not do as well under intense MH. I've seen countless tanks with MH that have plenty of coraline on the UNDER sides of their LR. So the shaded low light areas are where they do best.