That's really ingenious! So you saying that you can encourage the change of colors on purpose to improve appearance? Fantastic!
It sounds like you place dull Acan #1 next to colorful Acan #2. #1 is stressed intentionally & put in with a colorful #2 in tip top shape. Do I have all that right?
A few questions for you & I hope you don't mind answering a few:
•How long does usually take to get the color?
•Will one colorful acan transfer color to multiple dull acans at once?
•Does the colorful tissue have to be next to and touching the dull tissue?
•Or, does the symbiotic algae transfer through the water?
•Do you do this procedure in the display tank or a spare tank?
•Is there a particular variety or color of DULL Acan Lord that works best?
•How do you stress the dull acan & for how long without killing it?
•How long does the color change last? Is it ever long lasting?
Could you describe your tank parameters & equipment? Do you take the protien skimmer or filter pads & carbon off line? High or low nutrients? And any info on the trace elements would be great. I hope to try this as an experiment too.
Thanks for an interesting post and hope you can tell us more.
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I take out most of the colour/symbiotic algae in my tubs via very weak lighting and extremely high phos levels.
That’s where I A sexually breed feather duster worms again, I get inspired every now and then if I get bored with the hobby and the feeding frequency needed for that is enormous and the result from that is non testable phos levels, they are extremely high in there while I do this.
You can’t have nitrate or anything like that as it adversely stresses or kills the polyps I just work the symbiotic algae.
I place an originally green one that’s near white sort of next to a red one in my display, near to or actually touching.
I add iodine in small amounts, human grade vitamin iron and with my system it produces a lot of nitrogen, all these, especially the nitrogen in abundance make for some interesting multiple colours taking off in my acans algae.
Some of my acans are four times the size of when I stressed and then added them into my display tank.
If I stress them badly and break off the side of a polyp that also inspires dramatic colour changes in that polyp as it repairs and usually it spreads out over the entire acan polyp community of that frag.
I had over thirty frags a month back all fading and working up some weird very faint green based colours, they are all based from one colour and I gave them all away to a mate, he killed them all!
He went away for a weeks holiday and his kids were looking after the tanks and they thought they would put in the pool phos remover for the whole week so they didn’t have to do it twice each day, that’s death to near everything, oh well.
My system provides a lot of organic phos making it all moderately eutrophic with inorganic phos reading at less then .03 and its impossible to test nitrates in my water, there aren’t any with such large anoxic zones.
I don’t use a skimmer and rarely do water changes and the system is backed up greatly by a very large algae area based on the most affective racemosa at importing that I have found,I trim and throw out each 5 to 6 days, oh and I use standard blue 3 watt leds and cool whites as well.
I dose the rest the same as most reefers, Kh at 7 to 8 , Ph at 8.1 always and keep my water chilled at 23c and 24c all year round.
My latz need these temps and all tropical life do fine "just" ,at these temps.
