sun coral question.

[djberg]

so yesterday i went on a little adventure and one of the thing i ended up with was a sun coral. at one time it had 30+ heads, ut b the time i got to it it has 3 and a half heads. so for $10 i figured i'd try to see if i could bring it back, though the 3 full heads are full, i'm still worried about them surviving.

as of right now i have the in a cave in my 75 gal lit by 2 175watt halides 14k and 2 t12 vho actinics. so is there anything else I can do other than feed it a bunch? and also would i be better off trying to frag it and hide it even deeper n the tank? aka edge of a rock in the sand bed?

thanks in advance.

 

[Mathew26]

If the part of the coral that has lost the heads is actually dead (nothing but skeleton and no flesh at all) i would say try removing what you can of the dead area and just spot feed on a regular bases and give it time and good water quality.

 

[noy]

No real need to hide it - they are not affected adversely by light. Put it somewhere where there is flow and you can target feed easily.

I would hold off fragging it for a bit - sometimes there is flesh and you just don't notice. I had a fistula that looked all but dead except for a couple of polyps but after feeding I saw tiny polyps pop up - they can be surprisingly resilient.

 

[djberg]

Cool deal, yeah I hid him for a while then stuck it in the light and no difference at all. Does all nps work this way? There are a few others that I really like and wanna try my hand at. And also picked up another sun coral from my lfs, skipped over it, thinking it was some sort of candy cane the way they had it labled.

 

[MarineSniper]

Make sure you feed each head...liberally. If you're able to feed outside of the tank, you can feed them 3x a night, which will bring them back very fast. I've revived many this way but you must ensure each polyp closed on a piece or 2 of mysid; soaked in Selcon, most preferably. When healthy, they are able to share nutrients, to some extent, but if they have receded that much, there is likely little to no connecting tissue and each head is "on its own", food-wise. If you're able to commit to this regimen, you'll see fast improvement and generous numbers of new polyps. When I fed all my nps like that; in tank, I had literally hundreds of individual heads and small colonies growing everywhere from the colonies spitting off new heads