New to NPS

[travis32]

I've considered NPS corals for years, but have always been told they're too much of a pain to feed, and require a lot of care. Neither of which, I took lightly. So, I never tried them at all. They're so beautiful and radiant in color though, so, I really wanted to try sometime...

I haven't boughten anything, don't even know what types I'd try. But, just some NPS newb questions.

I saw the sticky for advice on continuous feeding. How many times a day do they need to be fed? Do they need to be fed everyday?

I feed fairly heavy for my fish, and I have the feed timer setup to ten minutes on my apex, it shuts off all pumps and sets my MP40s down to 20% speed while food is suspended in the water colum for fish.. Would NPS corals need to be targeted or could get they get what settles to them..

Many times, I see my acans and zoas closing up having caught nice morsels of food from the water column. Can they live off that or do they require a lot more food so much that they'd need to be target fed?

I've built my tank around heavy feeding filtration, so hopefully, I don't have any algae issues long term with heavy feeding. (Feeding the equivalent of 3-4 cubes of frozen food, or several pieces of Rod's frozen food a day).

Somedays I am not home to feed, at most 1-2 times a week, but, would that be detrimental?

How does the apex automatic feeder change things for NPS corals (if at all?)

I could shut off all pumps and have the automatic feeder feed a large amount each time 3-4 times a day, so NPS corals are constantly being fed.

Just wondering if a really inexpensive easy way to keep NPS, or if they truly must be target fed 2-3 times a day to grow and be healthy long term?

 

[Allmost]

you should start with easier NPS at first.

start with sun corals. feed them daily, target feed, and see if you can manage nutrients after 3-4 months, specially po4. then try another Azoox creature.

the continuos feeding method, is for really hard to keep azoox corals, which you should not try for now. build it slowly. when you find the coral you like to keep, then experiment with it. feed it daily, see how it reacts and if it grows or not, depending on observations, increase or decrease feeding of the piece ...

 

[Reef Frog]

Travis it sounds like you have the knowledge & equipment to make it work. Feeding the LPNPS polyps like sun, rizo & dendro is fairly easy & straight forward. It's all about using a turkey baster to target feed a cube of mysis 1-3 times per week. These corals are suited to the average stony coral aquarium with no problems if you are willing to target feed. EZ.

But if you are after sea fans, gorgonians and whips for example heavy feeding of live, freeze dried and/or preserved planktonic sized foods all the time is necessary. The problem is to avoid fouling the tank & keeping nutrients at acceptable levels. It sounds like you understand and have access to advanced filtration equipment and a controller so you have a great chance of making it work, but it would still be easy enough to over do it in.a brightly lit mixed reef stony coral tank, if that's what you are running now.

That's why a dedicated NPS tank with rock solid filtration with subdued lighting used only while you are observing things is ideal as algae management is much much easier. Many filter feeding NPS like the Red Sea Fan & Yellow Florida Gorgonian are extremely sussptable to cyano & algae growing directly on the tissue, which will kill it if not removed immediately.

I tried a NPS filter feeder approach in a mixed reef tank with some NPS filter feeders but had to abandon the effort. Feed too little & things starve, feed right or too much but don't strip the water (and detrious) of old plankton periodically under strong reef lighting and you can kick off an algae apocalypse....that's why a dedicated NPS tank is ideal. Also, some flow patterns that are best for NPS filter feeders may not suit some LPs neighbors if housed in a general purpose reef tank.