Sun Coral Help

kookerson

New member
After reading Melev's article on how he keeps his sun coral, I felt inspired to keep my own. I personally feel that I have the determination to keep one properly and all my params are good........... trite/trate/ammonia at 0, alk 2.5, and calcium a little high at 500 (Im working on lowering it). Now, during the day my sun coral is pretty much closed up the majority of the day......but at night and early in the morning, it always looks like this....... http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f10/gwhype132/SunCoral.jpg . How does it look to you guys? Is it normal for it to be closed up that much?
 
Are you feeding it regularly? For how long have you had it? You can really train these things to open at a certain time (feeding time...that pavlovian response). You can also train them to open during the day, but that takes some dedication.
 
Ive had it for about 5 days....I picked it up this last monday. Ive been trying to target feed it every day with a medicine dropper, but it doesnt seem like it is taking the food. A couple times this week, I put in about 4 capfulls of DTs phytoplankton and they came out wide open pretty quick.......but I dont think DTs is enough.......
 
Try getting it to open, then feeding target feeding it. The polyps are sticky, almost like an anemone. So once its open most of the food you target feed it should stick.

Another option is cutting off the top of a pop bottle and placing it over the sun coral while you feed. The food will stay suspended in one location, giving the sun coral time to open and feed.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10437601#post10437601 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by michika
Try getting it to open, then feeding target feeding it. The polyps are sticky, almost like an anemone. So once its open most of the food you target feed it should stick.

Another option is cutting off the top of a pop bottle and placing it over the sun coral while you feed. The food will stay suspended in one location, giving the sun coral time to open and feed.

I think Im going to try this tonight.....the only other concern I have is that when I do target feed them, most of the time the food will stick just like you said......but I dont ever think Ive actually seen them physically eat......on melev's website, he has picks of the coral actually taking the food in, but Ive never seen that.......
 
Its hard to see sometimes. They eat almost like an anemone where the polyps curl inwards around the food and into the coral itself. Once you remove the pop bottle top, or the food source is gone, the polyps should just close again, but this time with food.
 
You could also turn off one of your pumps and then feeding your sun coral. Give it meaty foods like mysis or brine shrimp.

Like another person above said, you can train them to come out during the day BUT their not opened that big. I have some that are trained to open during the day and eat with my dendros but they don't open up as big as lets say at night.|

If you want a coral that looks like a sun coral but opens all day, try to get a dendrophylia.
 
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