whoops - accidentally ordered Chili Coral, first azoox...

[salajander]

I placed a new order from liveaquaria, and managed to order a Chili Coral (Nephthyigorgia sp.) without realizing it was azoox.

So now I'm of course a bit concerned about taking care of it. All my other corals are photosynthetic softies, so I've done very little feeding.

All I have on-hand is some Coral Frenzy - I expect that won't be enough, right?

Any tips for an accidental beginner to the non-photosynthetic world?

 

[mark54321]

Chili coral is very beautiful but needs special attention and a lot of food to survive. As you noticed already it is NPS coral. I have one right now in my NPS tank, and also had few before in my other tanks, first put it in a cave, overhand or somewhere with very little light. They will not open when too much light, also they are prone to grow algae on their bodies. Make sure it receives good flow, it likes laminar flow better then turbulent one. Now the fun part, you need to feed it a lot. I feed mine mixture of different powdered coral foods like Coral Frenzy, Reef Chili, Reef-Roids, etc. Also frozen rotifers, baby brine shrimp, cyclopads, copepods and oyster feast. I try to feed it 3 times a day and during weekend , when I am home it gets food 5-6 times daily. It does fine right now, but sometimes it closes for few days without apparent reason , but always back to its normal after.
Here is a picture of it when fully open

[/url]NPS corals9 by Mark Mikina, on Flickr[/IMG]

 

[chefbill]

I feed mine once a week maybe 3 times per 2 weeks and it grows. Big mature systems help.

Sent from my LGL52VL using Tapatalk

 

[salajander]

It's a 55 gallon tank, been running around 2 1/2 years now. Hopefully there'll be enough extra bits floating around in the water column to help it along between my feedings.

 

[galvintjime]

I tried to feed mine once a day and had great success with them, though they did fine even if I forgot to feed them for up to 2 weeks. (I know I'm using past-tense here, but I have 5 of them that are still doing quite well and I've never lost one. I've just changed my feeding regiment in my new tank to be much more frequent and thought that it would undermine my point.) I like to feed mine an equal mixture of Phytofeast and Oysterfeast and they've been on that diet for nearly a year and a half and still happy. Also, try not to target feed them, rather release the food into a powerhead that pushes water near/past them. If you are too aggressive with your target feeding the flow from a baster can cause the polyps to close prematurely, though whether this actually stops them from eating then is something that I don't know.

As other people have mentioned, if algae grows on them then they can be in trouble, though don't be alarmed if they close up: One of mine stayed closed for two months and was totally fine afterwards. (I'm not sure if this is normal by any means, but all of mine have survived long periods of being close with no flesh degradation.) If they do get algae, try to manually remove it when there's only a little bit as once it starts to cover them, it gets difficult to remove and can damage the coral a bit during the removal process.