Pale Hammer

[wcharon]

Hi and Happy Holidays...

I need some advise on my Hammers. I have 2 types of hammers, one with green tips and the other with brown tips. The green tips looks great but i see that the brown tips looks pale.

I have 6x80 T5 lighting (4B+, C+ and Purple +) and they are 8" above the water surface. They are on 8 hours. My water parameters are CA 450, ALK 8.5 MG 1360 and i change 15 gallons of water every 2 weeks with RC.

I have other corals like Montipora, Torch, Mushrooms, Bubble and they seem OK.

Here is a pic for reference and thanks in advance for sharing your expertise...

 

[aromano]

Hard to tell whats going on. It looks normal to me. You could try moving it a couple of inches lower and see if you get a color more to your liking.

 

[wcharon]

If you compare the tentacles of the green with the brown one you will see what i am saying...

Unfortunaly, i cannot lower them more as the are on the sand. In the meantime i have raised the Sunpower 1" more and reduced the lights also 1 hour and i have stoped the use of GFO and Carbon to see what happens...

As you can see i made several changes at the same time and if everything goes better with them i will have to be eliminating possibilities between the changes.

Thanks...

 

[cab395]

My hammer and FS got pale like that and I lowered the duration of my lighting significantly (like 6 hours total light per day). It has been a month and all my coral colors are terrific now. I have begun adding 1 hour per week to the photoperiod to get up to around 8 hours total daylight. I also have T5HO and less bulbs than you in a fixture with a crappy reflector, and it still started to bleach out my LPS.

 

[wcharon]

Great... Thanks for the suggestion... I will let you know my results after the changes realized.

 

[tektite]

Some hammers look like that naturally. Has it changed for you? Become more pale?

 

[wcharon]

Some hammers look like that naturally. Has it changed for you? Become more pale?

Yeppppp. It has changed in me and to be honest, i didn't notice it and my brother said that they use to have more color then i went to my old pics to compare and he was right...

Here is the evidence...