Gorgonians and seafans non-photosynthetic

[NYRANGER]

Will scrubbers provide food for non photosynthetic gorgonians and sea fans? I would like to add these invertebrates to my fowler tank.
Thanks all :P

[SantaMonica]

That's a whole different area of study. Coral-feeding is the subject of lifetime detailed research studies by biologists, and non-photo (NPS or AZOO) corals are a big part of it. There are thousands of different NPS corals, in thousands of different food-supply situations in the ocean. So the question is sort of like someone asking you "how do you operate a fish tank".

The short answer is that a scrubber will start you in the proper direction. Everything a scrubber does is a benefit to keeping NPS corals. But whether or not you can actually keep them will depend upon everthing together:


o How strong your scrubber is.

o What you feed (basically divided into animal or plant matter).

o How much you feed (which will be limited by how strong your scrubber is).

o What particle size you feed (smaller is better).

o How often you feed (continuous is best, especially at night).

o Whether you feed live or dead food (live is vastly better, but almost impossible to do).

o The type of NPS corals you have.

o The flow that each coral is receiving (one-directional constant flow is best, 10 to 20 cm/s).

o How much light you have (more light will require a stronger scrubber to keep nuisance algae away).



Two things which throw people off who try NPS for the first time are: The gorg's they tried are not true-NPS (i.e., they use light), and so the people think they did it right. And the second thing is that NPS corals can put polyps out, and even grow new material that you can see, while they are actually starving. In non-NPS corals, this activity is usually a good indication that the coral is surviving well. But in many NPS, it lasts for about 3 months, and then the energy reserves are used up and the coral disintigrates. This confuses the person into thinking that "it was doing well for a long time, and then I did something wrong; but it was growing well". Not at all.

NPS almost certainly need a dedicated tank that is set up to do one thing well: Feed gigantic amounts of small food particles continuously, and do it with a constant high uni-directional flow. The amount of food this requires would destroy most reef tanks; only a skimmed-tank can handle so much food, because the food is pulled right out of the water. But this starves the NPS, of course.

The main things a scrubber does to help you with NPS is to keep all the food in the water, and, remove lots of N and P. This is step one, and if you don't get step one, there won't be any other steps. But there has to be a lot more still. Yes, a scrubber puts DOC and copepods into the water, and these help feed non-NPS corals a great deal. But NPS do not depend as much on copepods or DOC; they generally depend more on phytoplankton. Yes there are NPS that do well with just "meat food", but more NPS probably need "plant food" (phyto). So the selection of which NPS corals to get plays a big part is what you will need to feed. Finding a coral that eats lots of copepods would be ideal in the case of a scrubber, but at this point I don't know of any (but I have not looked).

The best plan is to start a small NPS-only tank, with a very strong scrubber, a circular flow pattern, and a continous feeder. I would make the scrubber 4 to 10 times stronger than for reef tanks. And I'd start with blended oysters as the food, since it is proven, and cheap if you blend it yourself...

viewtopic.php?f=27&t=1153
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=1152
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=110 (don't need the bags, however; just seal the bottom of the chiller).

You can obviously add live or dead phytoplankton to the mix, which makes it much better food, but since you have to buy phyto in a bottle, its' much more expensive.