Temperamental Duncan

[jlmawp]

I have a duncan sitting on the bottom of my tank, where it has always been for about 4 years now. After changing out my light about 6 months ago, it never fully extends its polyps during the day, but does so at night when there is little to no light at all. It never did this with the previous light...it always closed up at night.

Additionally, all of the other corals (zoas, stylo, xenia, gargonian, etc) seem to be perfectly fine with the light levels in the tank.

I have messed with the light levels here and there, and have been altering the intensity of the whites/blues and leaving them for a week or two to see if the duncan responds positively to any of the variations, but so far no luck. The new light has blues, which my previous one didn't, which is the only real difference I can think of here. It used to be happy during the day with all-whites. However, I've tried that on the new lights, and still no luck. Different light intensities too. All of the other corals do fine with any light combos, but this duncan is being really picky for some reason.

Any ideas of what could be wrong here? It looks so happy and healthy at night!

 

[DemonicalSRT]

well unfortunately unless you are using a par meter to measure your new lights there's no telling how intense the lighting is on the duncan. Also corals get more use out of the Blue spectrum. The other thing to is that if your other corals are higher up then the duncan they are more use to higher light intensity then your duncan, that is at the very bottom of your tank. So my suggestion is try and get a par meter, see if someone local has one you can borrow or rent and dial in your lights. Or if you can't get a hold of a par meter set your lights at like 20-30 percent intensity and if corals look like they are stretching to get more light increase the intensity little by little. Constantly changing the intensity is not helping anything and it can take coral sometimes months to acclimate to new lighting.

 

[RioReefr]

I have a few Duncan corals, I had found they did best at the top of the aquarium where they got the most liight and medium flow. They never did well at the bottom of the tank.

Also, make sure they are not touching anything -- no other corals.

Also, I got great response from feeding the Duncans. I used the method of mixing Reef Roids in a thick paste and dropping it into each bud. Ever since doing this, the Duncans have gotten huge.