too much light for deepwater fish?

[lostanime]

We are setting up a new tank in the next couple months to move our SPS to, and have been casually on the look-out for a good centerpiece fish. Due to the shallow depths (it is a 48"x48"x12" shallow cube of 3/4 acrylic) we've been discussing a pair or harem of dwarf angels as a possible option.

A pair of multicolor angels showed up on liveaquaria's diver's den yesterday afternoon, and will be on our doorstop tomorrow. We will be quarantining them in a 70 gallon cube (30"x30"x18", lit with single 150w HQI) for a few weeks before tossing them into one of the 100 gallon rubbermaid stock tanks for our main system, at least until the new system is stable, settled, and full of little crawling critters

This brings me to my concern - centropyge multicolor seem to be exclusively deepwater. What is the harm of having them under 1000+w of light? I understand fully lighting a 4x4 shallow tank will involve much more light than they naturally reside in, but I have no idea if this would be a source of stress or other possible problems. I have little experience with deep water fish. Any experience greatly appreciated!

 

[MikeandNicole]

We had ours in a 45g under 5x24w T5s and he never had a problem at all with the light. Was out swimming constantly and picking constantly at our SPS (hence the had).

 

[lostanime]

So far they seem to be handling 150w well, frequently swimming around. Pics:

Hopefully they'll handle the switch to a bright tank as smoothly

 

[michael_cb_125]

These little guys handle bright lighting quite well. The main thing to remember is that when kept under very bright lighting the brilliant white sides may turn dark yellow.

~Michael

 

[lostanime]

Very cool. I'm leaning towards trying a couple 250w instead of 400w bulbs over their final tank and only step up to 400w bulbs if the corals begin browning out, because I definitely don't want to give these fish a major suntan.

Diving somewhat "off-topic" (but trying to stick with the same goal of making sure I'm not steering this for failure)... would it be flirting with danger to aim for a harem of multicolor angels instead of a pair? If not, any recommendations for a source? I'm assuming based on my very limited experience and reading about keeping sets of centropyge, that I need to find them under 1.25"?

I also have a few other types of fish I would like to move into the final tank as well (halfdozen lyretail anthias, tomini tang, desjardini tang) These fish have never concerned me in the past with dwarf angels, but I've never considered keeping very young (<2") dwarf angels and certainly would love to hear any experience and insight of others since these are not readily available fish in my area, and I don't want to go down this path if it goes against the grain of conventional wisdom.