Little coral growth

[dtapke]

So my numbers all seem in check, or even high. I use Red Sea coral pro salt. 35ppt. Just checked my parameters. Alk 9.5, Mg 1520, Ca 460, nitrates 2, PO4 .03, nitrite 0, Ammonia 0, ph 8.2.

23g nanocube, kessil 160we at about 40% intensity and 50% color.

I had a candy cane that split from 2 to 4 heads but doesn't seem to be building skeleton to complete the split. Same with a torch I've got, the soft tissue is massive but doesn't seem to be building skeleton. Everything eats often, every other day I'd say and typically gets fed twice in one sitting.

Why am I not getting hard skeleton building??

For reference the candy cane split soft tissue into four heads 6 weeks or so ago and is just kind of still hanging at about the same stage for the last 4.


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[dtapke]

Red Sea test kits except phospate is salifert. 12 hours of lights on. No phasing of the lights except a little bit manually if I remember.


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[WVfishguy]

How much time are you allowing for this growth? Corals take a while to grow - I know I'm quite impatient, I believe microwave ovens are too slow.

 

[Reefer40b]

"Alk 9.5, Mg 1520, Ca 460, nitrates 2, PO4 .03, nitrite 0, Ammonia 0, ph 8.2"

As long as you keep these stable the growth will follow. LPS can be fed some to speed up growth but eventually you will be at a point of wanting them to slow down... so you don't have to prune or get rid of it. If you want something fast growing for a coral try monti caps or stylos

 

[dtapke]

I have a green monti and two stylo. One ora bird of paradise and a plain thin pink. The bird of paradise has made maybe 1/16" of growth in a 6-8 weeks. The monti maybe the same.

I used to frag softies and fungia, candy canes. It seemed like the two hard I fragged built skeleton quicker. My fungia would go from a dime to a quarter in 4 weeks and a quarter to a half dollar in another week or two.

It just seems like there's a large amount of soft tissue growth, but little hard skeleton.


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[Uncle99]

1/16" inch growth in 6-8 weeks....seems quite normal to me.
Photosynthetic corals do not need to be fed, however, if you do that frequently, in the case of LPS, the coral will use the energy for tissue growth, skeletal growth remains the same.

In some cases, mostly SPS, I have found that growth appeared faster after the coral settled in with no changes for about 6-9 months, but even then, they don't grow like grass.

I get the feeling your growth expectations are a bit to high.