Impact of Flow on NPS corals

This picture says it all. I haven't fed the corals (directly) yet. I gave the fish some Rod's Food which also has coral food in it. Look at the difference between the tubastrea in good flow Vs. the tubastrea in poor flow.



Additionally, look at the carnation. One of them is doing awesome and one that is only inches away is all closed up. These are clones.....same parent colony. The only difference is flow.

I was considering adding a wavemaker. This picture basically settles it for me.

BTW....the Dendro in front is interesting. It had fallen behind rocks at the store. Obviously, it wasn't fed as a result. It had 2 heads. One was dead. The other was 95% dead. I decided to try and rescue it and brought it home. I thought I had failed because I couldn't get it to open up.....EVER! I was wrong. They apparently have some sort of survival mechanism. It "decided" it was likely going to die so it spent 100% of it's energy making babies....more than 10 of them. Once they started growing, the "mother" started eating finally (after a month).

 

Flow and food, that's all they want!

(You need a Black Sun coral in there.)

 

and good water quality, especially with the dendronepthyea (carnation)

 

Seems like algae scrubbers are the perfect answer for a NPS tank. Keeps food but exports lots of N and P. I am going to pull my 40b off my main tank and I may try to keep some NPS in there and experiment. Only filtration I plan to run is a SM-100 algae scrubber. Should be completely overkill for that 40b though.

"Can" NPS be kept in high light situations? Is flow requirement more like sps or lps?

 

They definitely want flow more like SPS corals. As Gresham stated, many of them are unforgiving in high nutrient environments. This tank requires the same waterchange schedule as my SPS tank too.

 

survival mechanism is very interesting. really kind of amazing.