tatuaje08
New member
You're fighting an uphill battle. I feed mine squid or krill, not silversides. Do you have a photo of your setup? How far are the lights from the bottom of the tank?
is this normal for BTA?
- Thread starter metzz71
- Start date
You're fighting an uphill battle. I feed mine squid or krill, not silversides. Do you have a photo of your setup? How far are the lights from the bottom of the tank?
Lights are sitting on top of the tank, you can scroll up this thread for an attached picture.
I have also added the 30w LED for help.
Looks light an awful lot of light to me. Did you acclimate the BTA to your lighting? I use multiple layers of screen and then remove 1 every week or so. I always see folks stating BTA's need alot of light yet I have found they like medium light the best and certainly less than SPS. Your guy is obviously already bleached but try adding a few layers of screen and see if he comes out with reduced light. Actinic is completely fine as well. Alternatively see if you can move him down to the bottom of the tank....this is always the best place to start as if they want more light they will move up but if they want less light they just tend to shrink and hide rather than move down. I am guessing if he had any zooanxanthellae he would have expelled it due to too much light. Notice how your Hatian is all the way down the bottom to the left and away from most of the center light but doing well? This is a big clue as to what is going on.
Mike31154
New member
When I started my system over 6 years ago all I had was a 36" T5HO fixture. I added my GBTA after a few months of start up, probably should have waited a tad longer but I was a newb & didn't know any better. Nevertheless, the BTA did reasonably well under those lights. It was not as bleached as yours when I purchased it & it really didn't lose any colour under the T5HOs. At one point, for some unkown reason, it decided to move to the back almost under a rock where I could barely see it. Let that go for about a month until I could see it was bleaching & shrinking back there. Bit the bullet & re-arranged the rockwork to get it back under proper light & it recovered nicely. Also pretty much stayed put after that.
6 years later I've gone through some lighting upgrades which included adding 2x250 watt MH & bumping the T5HO factor up by adding two 48 inch tubes with individual reflectors. Since April 2012 I've been running a DIY LED fixture using 27 ten watt multi chip LEDs. The lighting increase was more to enable addition of light hungry coral rather than for the BTA. It has split numerous times & the clones I still have in the tank are now very large, to the point where they're taking over & stinging coral. At some point you might consider adding more light, but I don't think that's your main issue at the moment. You simply purchased a very bleached specimen & will need patience & a bit of good fortune to get it coloured up.
BTAs can be pretty tough customers, surving powerhead incidents etc., but sometimes a funky paramater can mess them up in a hurry. Seems like you're on the right track with small feedings. I no longer feed mine much these days & when I do, it's every couple of weeks with silversides. It would be good if you could confirm that it's expelling waste from time to time as well. It could be that it is spitting out what you're feeding when you're not watching & not properly digesting. Best you can do is keep feeding, try not to overfeed, wait & observe.
Here are some crappy photos of my specimen(s) to give an idea of the amount of colour that would be considered normal. Both of the following were taken some years ago.
Here's something more recent, this guy is almost the size of a dinner plate when fully inflated under mid-day lighting.
6 years later I've gone through some lighting upgrades which included adding 2x250 watt MH & bumping the T5HO factor up by adding two 48 inch tubes with individual reflectors. Since April 2012 I've been running a DIY LED fixture using 27 ten watt multi chip LEDs. The lighting increase was more to enable addition of light hungry coral rather than for the BTA. It has split numerous times & the clones I still have in the tank are now very large, to the point where they're taking over & stinging coral. At some point you might consider adding more light, but I don't think that's your main issue at the moment. You simply purchased a very bleached specimen & will need patience & a bit of good fortune to get it coloured up.
BTAs can be pretty tough customers, surving powerhead incidents etc., but sometimes a funky paramater can mess them up in a hurry. Seems like you're on the right track with small feedings. I no longer feed mine much these days & when I do, it's every couple of weeks with silversides. It would be good if you could confirm that it's expelling waste from time to time as well. It could be that it is spitting out what you're feeding when you're not watching & not properly digesting. Best you can do is keep feeding, try not to overfeed, wait & observe.
Here are some crappy photos of my specimen(s) to give an idea of the amount of colour that would be considered normal. Both of the following were taken some years ago.
Here's something more recent, this guy is almost the size of a dinner plate when fully inflated under mid-day lighting.
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