Hey guys.. I have about 40lbs live rock in my sump and i have a. Uch of sponges.. I know they are supper beneficial fir the aquarium.. i was not able to grow them at this rate in any of my skimmed tank.
So I k.ow one of the requirements is food in the water... What are some other requirements to keep tgese happy and possibly even aid their filtering capacity?.. do they need high fliw? Low flow?
Any help greatly appreciated.
High nutrients, moderate flow, and no light is what I found to be best for sponges.
Many encrusting sponges require light, although probably not too bright.
Anytime I had a nice looking sponge growing on the bottom of a rock/in the shade and flipped it over, even in a far corner of a tank that gets the least light, it died in a week/turned brown/algae growing all over it but I guess it was just way to much intensity/change that caused that. According to google:
"Sponges do not have chlorophyl, therefore they are not able to engage in photosynthesis. They have a symbiotic relationship with algae, using the algae for food, and the algae has a home".
So it seems sponges are like corals to some extent with algae. Coral doesn't require light either, it is the algae in the coral that needs it.
When you flip the rock/sponge, you change it's flow patterns. It originally had grown to intercept the most flowing food particles possible, and now the flow has changed. So it starves.
This is in addition to any lighting changes.
There's a guy named Steve Tyree who did a lot of work with sponges, tunicates and other filter feeders. He even uses them as a filtration method for his coral farm. I think most of us subscribers on this site know algae is a better filter and nutrient export. He never seemed to put a huge fish bioload on the system. However, it worked well enough that he could run it skimmerless and continues to do so on a commercial level. He has some beautiful corals with vibrant colors. Low to no lighting is a requirement for a lot of these organisms. Many of them thrive off very little flow bc they actively create their own flow.
Steve uses cryptic (dark, non-photosynthetic) organisms for a lot of filtering. These organisms (sponges, non-photo clams, etc) can indeed convert small particles of food into larger ones, which can then recirculate back to feed the corals. But the removal of large amounts of nitrate and phosphate (especially phosphate) requires photosynthesis, which requires algae.
Ironically, he and everybody else with display tanks uses algae for filtering even if you don't have a scrubber. Periphyton, which is the stuff that changes the color of live rock from white to dark, is mostly a photosynthetic collection of algae (including coralline), sponges, etc. It's a thin layer, but it covers everything. You can think of it as a thin scrubber spread across your entire display.
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