Question about corals

[AriMiko43]

When adding corals to a new tank do you have to add slowly? What I am trying to ask is do corals put a bio load on the system as with adding fish? Or can you get a bunch of them and put them in the tank?

 

[ryangrieder]

ive added numerious corals in one shot and never had issues.

 

[SevTT]

When adding corals to a new tank do you have to add slowly? What I am trying to ask is do corals put a bio load on the system as with adding fish? Or can you get a bunch of them and put them in the tank?

It depends on the corals. In most cases, you can pretty much add a bunch in one whack -- after all, most corals are nothing more than a thin scum of flesh over rock, so they don't have much biomass that actually 'counts' towards metabolic bioload, and since most of them are zooxanthellate, they often actually have a net uptake of wastes -- that is, they clean the water.

There are of course some exceptions -- with things that're particularly large and fleshy, or that eat a whole lot, you may want to give some time for your biofilter to adjust, depending on how big your tank is. But you can generally add a whole whack at once.

Of course, with a new tank, that's not that wise. It's best to add a few species at a time and see how they deal with your tank conditions, and to get experience with them. You don't want to go out and spend a bunch of money on your first bunch of corals, put them in your tank, and have them all die because your parameters spiked or crashed, or there's some copper in there or some other contaminate, or holy **** I didn't know sweeper tentacles could be that long, or whatever.