Maintaining purple on sps

[dviper150]

I am having trouble keeping the purple colors on my sps. They seem to fade away or become brown and this just for that color. I have full spectrum LEDs over the tank that have 65k whites, 10k, 450nm blues, 420 violets, UV, red, and greens. What am I missing to keep this color as bright as I get them? Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[ebacon]

Might be a diet issue, or maybe too muchlight?

 

[Reef Bass]

With the coral browning out, not bleaching, I'd go the other way with light. Some of the nicest deepest grapiest purple I've seen was on a GARF Bonsai in about 800 par.

That said, there are a number of chromophore proteins which reflect purple and getting the ones in your coral to orient into position is the challenge. I attended an excellent lecture by Dana Riddle on the effects of light on coral coloration and he started by explaining the mechanism by which corals display color. The color comes from either chromophores or fluorophores in the coral tissue. Chromophores and fluorophores are basically barrel shaped lattices with a special protein in the center which is responsible for the color we see. The orientation of the protein inside the lattice determines the reflected color. Currently several thousand different proteins have been identified which produce different colors. Looking at how the orientation of the protein inside the lattice barrel changes in response to environmental changes would provide insight on how to best and most rapidly "color up" corals. Fascinating stuff.

 

[stevedola]

I have my Garf Bonsai under my ATI about 10" from light. Deep purple tips with a lighter purple base. I was actually thinking of moving it up to get that saturated purple color but it still looks nice. purple (IME) requires intense light to bring out its true beauty...I saw it under 400w MH and it was brilliant.