Growth rates?

[Oiler3535]

So my tank is just 5 months old, but all parameters are good and zoas and other softies all healthy (blasto and ricordea getting larger but not splitting). Got a dozen headed small birds nest colony and a 2 inch by 1 inch(ish) wedge of Monti for $10 each so couldn't resist. Just curious, if assume parameters good, how quickly should they grow? Looking online and responses to this question generally range from "˜it depends' to "˜really fast in good conditions'. As a math guy, both of those responses make me want to do untoward things to the responder. Any guesstimates I can follow? An inch a month? Inch every 3 months? Guessing will accelerate once starts in earnest. Birds nest in a good spot to expand, but Monti growth might make me have to reaquascape .

 

[Oiler3535]

Lol. My new Flame angel is loving the tank and rock work. And my other fish don’t care a whit about it.

 

[jda]

There is no way to put math to this... and if you joined this hobby looking for answers, then you chose the wrong hobby... but:

Birdsnest and monits have exceptionally fast growth rates with good conditions. Young tanks are hard and this will impede the growth a bit for a while, but from about the one-year mark to the three-year mark for your tank, they should grow the size of a basketball and need a many pounds of calcium carbonate for skeletal growth. You can always frag them back.

SPS growth is exponential, not linear. An acropora will take as long to get from a frag to a golf ball as it will to get from a golf ball to a softball.

In my established tanks, one-inch acropora frags (I have a no MBP&S policy) spaced about 8-10 inches apart can overtake the tank, grow out of the top and be touching each other in three years. This does not include the first year that you are going through. Now, I have best of breed lights with lots of MH, spot-on balanced parameters with Calcium Reactor and stable everything... YMMV with lesser lights, different types of dosing and less stable parameters.

 

[Oiler3535]

Slow beginning then exponential is helpful thanks.

 

[jda]

Yes. However, I did leave out that with some of the newer lights, SPS will stagnate as they grow - note that I say newer, not better. LED are awful with shadowing and while stuff does well when it is small, it can start to die from the bottom-up as they get larger since the light is so directional. The back of the branches also will fade in color. This does not really happen with T5 and MH - the high-end LED Acropora users will often use many, many panels to account for this and some even have 3 Radion XR30s to cover each 24x24 area. As corals start to grow and this start to happen, folks generally start to add T5s... then more T5s until they figure out that their LEDs are supplementing their T5s.

Again, YMWV. This is all part of the "it depends" that you are smart enough to have picked up, yet so many just dismiss this as unhelpful - the nuance and detail in "it depends" is where all of the successes are made.

 

[Tnconcept]

I cant't remember the thread name or user but he had some Radium lights and 3 months of growth was out of this world... His purple or green slimmer was the fastest growing.

 

[Oiler3535]

2 months after getting them, my birds nest has easily doubled in size. Dozen heads has become 2 dozen, and each head has grown at least half an inch. The Monti formed a large ridge around its original frag size, and has grown about a centimetre all around. Seems pretty good to me so far.