- As reef tank keepers, we love to see our coral healthy.
Lots of glorious polyp extension,
bright colors, quickly growing corals,
that is how most of us define success.
If your frags just stay tiny little frags
and they don't grow into colonies,
you're probably gonna end up on a forum asking for help.
Scientists face much the same issue.
They want to grow coral frags into colonies quickly,
so that they can be transplanted back into reefs
that have gone through bleaching and problems like that.
So, there's at least a little research going on
into what we can feed corals to achieve good results.
Hi guys, and girls, I'm ReefMan
and this time, we'll be talking all about food
for Acropora millepora and Pocillopora acuta.
Back in 2018, there was a paper published on this topic,
this paper, in fact, and it is titled,
"Comparing the Capacity of Five Different Dietary Treatments
to Optimize Growth and Nutritional Composition
in two Sclaractinian Corals."
It was published in PLoS One,
and it's open access, so check it out.
It is linked down below in the description.
Also, I did a similar video a while ago,
check it out up there.
If you're interested, check it out.
It talks more about specifically,
how to enrich food for Acropora corals.
So the question here is, if we want to grow a Stony coral
in an aquarium, what's the best way to feed them?
Now, some of you might be thinking,
hey, those corals, they just grow by light and you're right.
Stony corals get about 90% of their needed daily
energy requirements just from the chemicals
that are fed to them by the zooxanthellae algae
in their tissue, but 90% is not 100%
and there are some critical elements missing
in that food source, elements like nitrogen and phosphorous.
Those elements are critical to life.
Nitrogen, for example, is used in almost
all of your body's enzymes and chemicals, things like that.
Phosphorus is a critical building block
for a chemical called ATP.
That's the energy source for your cells.
In some tanks, just leftover food and fish poop
might cover most of this that your corals would need
and corals can absorb chemicals like that from the water,
amino acids, like those in AcroPower,
that are absorbed directly through the tissue.
They do get a lot of energy from their photosynthetic algae,
but they actually eat stuff in the wild,
tiny baby animals, fish, shrimp,
all sorts of microscopic stuff ends up
in the primitive digestive track of SPS coral polyps.
They're what's called polytrophic.
They do eat to get nutrition, just like us,
but they can also get it from several other sources.
So, to keep them as healthy as possible,
it's best to feed them, but then what should we feed them?
This paper is looking at five different sources
of food that you might try.
Artemia nauplii, which are just brine shrimp,
they hatch them every day,
a custom food that the team made,
but they don't disclose exactly what's in it,
a control, obviously you need a control
and in our case, it's just ultra filtered, clean seawater,
and then they also use unfiltered raw seawater
and then also, Reef Roids, a food that probably
a lot of you use and I use as well.
They split frags of Acropora millepora and Pocillopora acuta
into several different tanks and then over 90 days,
they fed each tank one of these things
or nothing, if it was in the control.
The team tracked weight, zooxanthellae density,
lipids and fatty acid content, amino acid content,
and more things like that.
Using those values, they could tell if a coral
was just growing really fast, but not particularly healthy.
So, what did they find out?
Well, coral ate all the food that they provided.
They actually were able to observe polyps pulling particles
into themselves to ensure that they were eating
and the corals all grew over the 90 days period as well,
very few of them died.
Though one treatment in particular
stood out for each species.
In the Acropora millepora tank,
the standout treatment was the raw unfiltered seawater.
Frags in that group gained significantly more weight
than the other treatments they grew faster.
For the Pocllipora acuta,
the best option was newly hatched brine shrimp.
The worst performing treatment in the Acropora millepora
tanks was actually their own custom food.
For the Pocllipora acuta, it was Reef Roids.
Zooxanthellae density was a similar story,
it's a measure of how much of that photosynthetic algae
is in the tissue, raw water one for the Acropora
and it also was best for the Pocillipora.
So, what does this actually mean for our tanks?
Well clearly, different species of coral
have different dietary needs.
No one food is likely to meet the needs of everything
in your fish tank or in your reef tank.
So, I think it's best to use a mix of coral foods.
Patching brine shrimp yourself at home is trivial.
Just get a cup of tank water, throw an air stone in it,
and they're gonna hatch overnight.
I then add some other coral foods,
I add Reef Roids, New Life Spectrum coral food,
and then I just mix it all and dump it into the tank.
Interestingly, the paper does point out
that Poclliopora corals are known to feed
on newly hatched brine shrimp.
So, if you have a lot of Poclliopora in your tank,
I think that would be a fantastic food source to use.
They also point out that both Acropora and Poclliopora
are known to feed on phytoplankton in the wild
and that's just the stuff in the water
that makes it kind of greenish,
single cell algae, stuff like that.
Adding things like that to our tank is pretty easy
and even setting up a home culture of phytoplankton
is pretty easy if you'd like to do so.
Doing that will also get you started down the path
of having live food available for newborn fish fry
if you ever wanna try breeding clownfish
or things like that.
I'm probably going to place an order with Algae Barn
or Reed Mariculture or a similar place like that
for some phytoplankton and maybe some live foods
and I'm curious what effect feeding those
will have on my corals.
There were also vendors like Reed Mariculture
that sell tiny copepods, rotifers, things like that
normally towards fish breeders,
but those are also interesting things that we could try
for our corals as well.
There are for sure other vendors,
don't limit yourself to those two
and not all species of coral are going to eat
every species of phyto.
So, I think it'll take either someone with a lab
or maybe some careful observation by hobbyists
to document what species of coral eat
what kind of phytoplankton.
At any rate, done carefully, I can't see a downside
other than, you know, you're going to spend a few bucks
getting the phyto set up, but it shouldn't be expensive.
Until we can find an artificial food
that does as well as that raw seawater,
we might just have to use phyto mixes
to make our own natural seawater.
The paper is linked down below in the description
and this one is really worth checking out.
It's long, it's about 20 pages,
but if you enjoyed the video, give it a thumbs up,
hit the subscribe button for more like this,
if you're not already a subscriber on my channel.
Have a great day.
Let me know what you feed your corals.
We can all learn from each other.
We all do things a little bit differently.
That's one thing that I really like about the hobby.
So, I'll see you next time.
Till then, stay safe, be kind to each other, bye.