Sun Coral ?

[graveyardworm]

Awesome pics Dendro, whats your secret to getting them to reproduce. I've go several colonies which I feed nightly and to date havent had a spawn event, at least not one with any successful planulae settlement.

 

[dendro982]

whats your secret to getting them to reproduce. I've go several colonies which I feed nightly and to date havent had a spawn event, at least not one with any successful planulae settlement.

Hmmm, insufficient filtration and skimming? Unintentionally, of course.

You can see, how dirty the rock is, the same was at the first spawning - the chili coral was the only organic object, covered by similar layer of debris, in the ~1g tank without LR at all.

Particulates are floating in the tank, and settling on the any surfaces, I have only the side sump, same water level, as in main tank, may be with the sump below the tank filtration and skimming will be better - working on it.

Bear with me, several photos to illustrate the point:

First spawn event occurred most likely here (or in 6g NC before that, who knows):

The smallest sun babies:

Substrate, they settled on (debris on the chili):

Much later, after removing 3/4 of babies:

Close-up:

Tell-tale Q-tip sponges in the tank, where they are now:

Few more shots of the several following spawnings, main 90g tank, dirty rock:

This is just my guess about dirty rock, kind of the reef tank manure
If I could, I would prefer a clean tank, working on it.

 

[Qckwzrd]

I had insufficient filtration and skimming a few months ago and my nitrates went sky high and alot of my suncorals died do you check your nitrates and phosphate levels? how often did you do water changes? could it have anything to do with the chili coral?

 

[dendro982]

20% water changes weekly, daily the bottom vacuuming, still have the small particles, that should be removed by skimmer. Nitrates 40-80 ppm, phosphates - up to 0.5 ppm (once was 1 ppm, everybody is alive), have phosphate removing media permanently in the sump, now they are ~0.25ppm or so.

The tank, where the chili coral with sun babies is, have no skimmer and is heavily fed, nitrates come to 80 ppm, PO4 - to 1 ppm, 50% water changes weekly. All open to feed, no deaths.
What your nitrates were, and could be there another reason for a sun deaths? One of babies lost a lot of soft tissue after contact with a hammer coral.

Chili: who knows, nothing happened to another chili corals, that where together with the sun corals in the big tank with live rock, they also had layer of dirt-looking film on their surface. The sun babies didn't appeared on them, only on the LR.
May be the first time they had no choice - no LR was present in the 1g system.

Again, my guess only