Calfo's 2 hour speach at the Tornonto whatever it was...

[fritz]

I listened to the podcast today of Calfo's speach at the Tornonto Aquarium...... whatever it was.

He brought up a few interesting points and I was wondering what MR'ers takes were in relation to your experience in this hobby.

1. Flow->Skimming->Lighting is important in that order when keeping SPS. He adds that if flow and feeding are done right we don't need nearly as much light as we provide out reefs.

2. He points out that just about nothing is fully autotrophic, even if we brought the equatorial sun above our reef we could only provide 70% (or so) of what our coral needs. In addition to the oversaturation of the coral, leading to slow bleaching, discoloring and eventual death (possibly a year away) we'd starve it. (Got me wondering what MR'ers feed their corals)

 

[Tonyscoots84]

Feed your TanK, Makes for a coral and fishies 2 ....

 

[steveo32]

so what your saying or he saying rather is that the sps don;t need as much light, but actually more food ?

 

[fritz]

For the most part yes. More so he was saying that flow is the most important and most overlooked. Then how important it is to feed, otherwise you starve your corals slowly to death (he said usually they look their best at that point!) It was interesting. The podcast was on talkingreef.

 

[steveo32]

Well that is interesting but now the really question for me atleast is would this ideology would it be possible to have a heathy sps in a tank w/ high flow and feeding under pc lighting

 

[Tonyscoots84]

feeding is only a partial of what the sps need... steveo only certain sps may do good.... i had a red monti under pc and it did good not great growth but pretty good colors.. i have the same coral under my halides and its like day and night both growth and colors... (there awesome now)

so pretty much to recap flow, feeding, skimming, lighting, levels all play a key part of a successful sps reef tank..

the sps still need a good light and with proper feeding ur doing good...

 

[marrone]

It's the endless circle of theories. Some one has now done some thing different and gotten good results so now they're crowing about it as it's the way to go. Just go back through the years and you'll find everything under the sun from heavy light to no feeding to lite light to heavy feeding.

 

[fritz]

If you want to talk colors that's a very different story, according to Calfo's speach. It's really hard to boil 2 hours down to a paragraph but if you use 20k or 14k bulbs they have little PAR value, so yes you need to use more wattage to get the same PAR as 6,500k. If you want flourecent pigments in your corals they only produce those as a response to too much light. So again if you're using 14k or 20k then you have to use MUCH more wattage to invoke the "too bright" response in your corals. Or feed them which will cause them to need less light and thereby produce the light reflecting pigments that we love so much.

Also one of his biggest points was that high flow = meaningless. He pointed to people who use timers or streams. Even though streams are great, they're still laminar flow unless you point them all at each other. You don't want a whirlpool, but for each polyp to bounce around in a different direction every few seconds. He recomended closed loop manifolds, but I'm way off topic here...

PC have no abililty to "punch" through the water so I wouldn't recomend PC for SPS. He was mostly reminding everyone that SPS are not plants. They need to eat also. T5 and MH are still the grail of SPS keeping. He was saying if you provide more food you can provide less light. (Again your colors will very. They will adjust their pigment to provide the amount of light they require)

 

[alrha]

Just go back through the years and you'll find everything under the sun from heavy light to no feeding to lite light to heavy feeding.

"everything under the sun" - very cute...

 

[alrha]

The podcast was on talkingreef.

Actually it is on ReefVideos.com

 

[fritz]

Ah yes, thanks for the correction. I get it off of iTunes so I got confused. Wow Deanos you're slipping!
Thanks again for the correction plus linkage ;-) It's worth listening to IMO. I burn them to CD and listen to them in the car, cause I'm cool like that. Plus nothing turns the heads of young ladies like a 2 hour calfo seminar. Yeah that's right ladies, that's coming from my car.

 

[alrha]

lol, i do the same on iTunes, and it's hard to remember which podcast it was from.