biggles
Premium Member
Wow mate, those acros are beautiful and your photo skills just blow me away. :thumbsup: I can really see the deeper saturation of the pink pigments in the pic below - the milli you're baby sitting for me........... 
The blue tipped tort in the first pic is very similar in tip color to one of my acros that's in low/med light, i like that blue the most of all the blue pigments. It makes the corallites really pop and catch your eye. I'm glad you said that green deepwater has blue tips otherwise i was going to say something quite rude about that acro lol.
The metallic green with the blue tips is nice and i like that shot showing the no mans land between the rival acros. That last one you like the most sounds really cool, it's impossible sometimes to capture the subtle colors and shimmer that some acros display under strong point source lighting but i know exactly what you mean in your description :thumbsup:
About the brown outs. It's not the water or you wouldn't be seeing the beautiful colors on the acros you posted pics of. I'm assuming you have a few turds so chances are it's just a PAR and or spectrum issue. If you just had one brown one i'd say give it away who cares but i think you said you had a few so here's a few ideas. The T5's aren't supplemental they are required to make the ATI hybrid the kick arse unit it is. I would not have good colors on everything in my tank if i was only running the 400W Radium because i tried years ago. Colors always improved when i ran overdriven T8 actinics with an icecap ballast and now i can use T5's i'm rapt. The brown acros might be in spots receiving too much LED and not enough B+ etc to get the spectrum close to spot on. My SSC has 3 distinct color morphs all in the one tank due to diff intensity and also diff spectrum from the placement. They can also be in too low light - any time i see an acro brown with just a few tips struggling to be blue it's always the intensity and higher light does the trick.
I'd frag a tip off every turd and glue it down in higher light and where it receives a good mix of both LED and your T5's. Frags will generally start encrusting a lot quicker than a whole piece will show signs of coming back to life and the best part is that in the majority of cases the encrusting growth edge displays pigments before the tips wake up so you can see what's to come sooner. I'm sure you've seen acros with the same tip colors also on the new encrusting edges of the same piece.
If you're game you can do the express route by nuking the acro with light for a couple of days to stress it into shedding a lot of zoa in order to slow the light absorption and then drop it to medium light and let it do its thing. Don't do that to a fresh cut frag btw or you'll likely kill it.
You have lots of options before you even think about dumping those brown outs mate so take the opportunity to try a few different things - they're turds after all so what's to lose. At worst they'll turn green........... i've never seen a turd fail to show some color return within a month of finding the spot it likes so spread them around and see what they do. :thumbsup:
The extra rock in the sump is a great idea for your bio filtration especially now you're feeding more.
Sorry for the long post again and remember these are just my opinions from my experiences, i'm no expert on SPS i'm just giving you some ideas to mull over rather than sitting there letting those turds give you the acro finger.......:reading:
It goes without saying that we all expect to see lots of before and after pics of the acros coloring up over the next few months mate
The blue tipped tort in the first pic is very similar in tip color to one of my acros that's in low/med light, i like that blue the most of all the blue pigments. It makes the corallites really pop and catch your eye. I'm glad you said that green deepwater has blue tips otherwise i was going to say something quite rude about that acro lol.
The metallic green with the blue tips is nice and i like that shot showing the no mans land between the rival acros. That last one you like the most sounds really cool, it's impossible sometimes to capture the subtle colors and shimmer that some acros display under strong point source lighting but i know exactly what you mean in your description :thumbsup:
About the brown outs. It's not the water or you wouldn't be seeing the beautiful colors on the acros you posted pics of. I'm assuming you have a few turds so chances are it's just a PAR and or spectrum issue. If you just had one brown one i'd say give it away who cares but i think you said you had a few so here's a few ideas. The T5's aren't supplemental they are required to make the ATI hybrid the kick arse unit it is. I would not have good colors on everything in my tank if i was only running the 400W Radium because i tried years ago. Colors always improved when i ran overdriven T8 actinics with an icecap ballast and now i can use T5's i'm rapt. The brown acros might be in spots receiving too much LED and not enough B+ etc to get the spectrum close to spot on. My SSC has 3 distinct color morphs all in the one tank due to diff intensity and also diff spectrum from the placement. They can also be in too low light - any time i see an acro brown with just a few tips struggling to be blue it's always the intensity and higher light does the trick.
I'd frag a tip off every turd and glue it down in higher light and where it receives a good mix of both LED and your T5's. Frags will generally start encrusting a lot quicker than a whole piece will show signs of coming back to life and the best part is that in the majority of cases the encrusting growth edge displays pigments before the tips wake up so you can see what's to come sooner. I'm sure you've seen acros with the same tip colors also on the new encrusting edges of the same piece.
If you're game you can do the express route by nuking the acro with light for a couple of days to stress it into shedding a lot of zoa in order to slow the light absorption and then drop it to medium light and let it do its thing. Don't do that to a fresh cut frag btw or you'll likely kill it.
You have lots of options before you even think about dumping those brown outs mate so take the opportunity to try a few different things - they're turds after all so what's to lose. At worst they'll turn green........... i've never seen a turd fail to show some color return within a month of finding the spot it likes so spread them around and see what they do. :thumbsup:
The extra rock in the sump is a great idea for your bio filtration especially now you're feeding more.
Sorry for the long post again and remember these are just my opinions from my experiences, i'm no expert on SPS i'm just giving you some ideas to mull over rather than sitting there letting those turds give you the acro finger.......:reading:
It goes without saying that we all expect to see lots of before and after pics of the acros coloring up over the next few months mate
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