anyone spot feed their sps?

[Frick-n-Frags]

Does anyone do this regularly and any results?

I was screwing around and decided to kill the flow on the sps and see what they eat after feeding the softies. I had previously only dosed the whole tank with the powerheads on (return off)

I mixed powdered stuff and some diced up frozen stuff to get a sort of orange water going and repeatedly syringed it on top of all the sps. I let them sit still for a half an hour. then I ran the PH for another hour or two to circulate all the leftovers before cutting back in the return. My thought was to try and concentrate more food less often with the hopes of minimizing nutrient input into the system.

Anyway, I learned a few things

1) Pocillaporas are scary. they ate everything, even hanging on to big pieces of squid or whatever

2) plate montis must eat really small stuff, they "slime migrated" the bigger pieces of food off their edges.

3) milleporas(<- or millepora looking Acro) are almost as disgusting of an eater as the pocillapora

4) I did not know stylophora grew so fast when fed once a week.
I did not know Stylophora grew fast under any circumstance
they put out their polyps huge after eating too, never saw that before. dang thing had a mini afro going

5) my awesome echinophyllia from Porky slimes up the food, then one of the mouths absorbs the whole thing

6) birdsnests can get their polyps almost as big as Pocillapora and they eat pretty big chunks too.

In summary, only the Montis were difficult to tell if they ate, but I had some of the 2 smallest sizes of GP's in there so I'm hoping they got some really small stuff down.

I'm going to see how this goes for a few weeks, feeding them like they were softies. The corals look absolutely radiantly healthy this last week after now the second round of feeding(knock on a giant sequoia)

[reefshadow]

I feed the whole tank pretty heavily but have never turned off circulation and tried target feeding the SPS. I may try this.

[Frick-n-Frags]

I like doing stuff like this. It helps me learn my corals' MO's better.

I never had an Echino before. So I was watching it like a hawk for sweepers/mf's to make sure it played nice with the other frags.
It is a very peaceful coral. So now I have a better feel for what it does.

I am still really impressed with how piggish Poci's are. No wonder they grow great in captivity. They could live great from fishfood scraps (the pink one has slightly smaller polyps, but it chowed too)

at first I was worried the corals would get PO'd and shut down with no flow. but as soon as the food hit, they went nuts. I wanted to give them time to choke down any big stuff they couldn't hang onto in the breeze.

OK, so I can't pet the corals, but I can make them do other tricks

has anyone else done this??????? and what did you see?

[frederickk]

What are you feeding them exacly?

[Frick-n-Frags]

powdered meat foods, anything I could find: GPs, freeze dried tubifex, omega-1 flake food. that stuff turns to dust nicely.

then I mixed in what was left of the softies food which is diced up frozen cubes of whatever krill or squid - bigger stuff for the gorgs and palys

maybe next next time I slice myself on something, I'll squeeze some nice 7micron iron supplement in there too

but I don't think it specifically matters byond "meat" to get their protein sensors activated.


keep in mind, I have had these sps frags for a little under a month and have now done this twice. I wanted to do it a second time to be more sure of what I saw the first time before saying anything.

I have no idea about the long haul. Anyway, that's why I'm asking if anyone has done this for a while.



I always think about how to do things without trashing my water because it takes months and months to recover from a screwup.


ps: i had to throw out the first batch because I made it in freshwater, which works great for suspending the food in the column longer which i normally do. The stuff floated straight up when trying to spot feed SO, make batch #2 in tankwater so it sinks.

[reefshadow]

I never had an Echino before. So I was watching it like a hawk for sweepers/mf's to make sure it played nice with the other frags.
It is a very peaceful coral.

Heheh, watch out though in the future! I have a pink echino frag (only about 4x2 inches) that sends out 2-3 inch sweeprs at night! I can imagine when it gets bigger it will need lots of room. I also have a purplish echino though that I've never seen sweepers on, so it does seem they can vary. I think they're great corals.

I don't think it specifically matters byond "meat" to get their protein sensors activated.

I don't either. I feed my own frozen blend with shell-on shrimp, squid, clam, oyster, scallops, nori, garlic and selcon. I thaw it, blend to a slurry, pour into quart ziplocks and freeze it flat. Then I take it outside and smash it with a hammer into chunks. I just throw in a couple of chunks daily to feed both fish and corals and twice a week I throw one in at night for the LPS and the SPS with lots of night PE. I may try some of what you're feeding, and try turning off circulation for a few minutes.
All my corals seem happy but I wonder if the growth rate would increase with specifically target feeding them, plus it would be nice to minimize nutrient input as much as possible like you stated.

[reefshadow]

maybe next next time I slice myself on something, I'll squeeze some nice 7micron iron supplement in there too

Haha, just saw this.

I've wondered the same thing and thought I was a freak

[davidryder]

I leave my closed loop on and turn the overflow off for about an hour - seems to do well.

[Tennsquire]

I mix up a small batch of brine shrimp eggs (no shell), golden pearls, amino acid supplement, and a cube of frozen fish food and let it soak for a while. I target feed sps w/ the pumps off, and have noticed the same types of things you mentioned (the montis sliming up to capture food in particular). I don't leave the pumps off for as long as you mentioned, as I'm worried about that stuff staying in the water column too long, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt too much. But yeah, I target feed them with a dropper sometimes.

[Frick-n-Frags]

awesome T.

I like the way you think reefshadow. thanks for the echino warning. I will continue to watch it like a hawk. It has grown about 1/2" on the leading edge and has 3 new mouths all along there. It was also cut from a huge plate and it is just about done covering the huge slab of exposed skeleton on the backside from the frag cut.

david, what I wanted to try was to let the food sit on the corals in super concentrated amounts, so it was zero flow to accomplish this

[fighton03]

Frick,
How many frags did you feed and how much orange water did you end up dousing with?

How big is your tank?

[Frick-n-Frags]

I have a piece of plastic tube rigged onto the standard salifert 5ml syringe(that one collects lots of after a while ) The tube holds almost exactly 5ml of "orange goop water" with a few chunks here and there. a syringe probably got maybe 3 corals. It was like slow motion spraypainting, so probably 6-8 syringes per round and I got them all with 2 rounds. Anyway, I didn't put much of a dent in the normal cup of stuff I would normally just throw in the tank and let circulate off-line for a couple of hours.

I have ~ 20 frags in one of my 2 55L tanks(all on ~100-110 gal system including sump.


you know, to make the orange water , I really only use a small small amount of GP's. and I used a small solid pinch of flakes to powder too and maybe a grand total of 1/4 cube of frozen gunk, so really this isn't a major amount of food, which I only used about half of that on the feeding.

and I only feed the corals once a week and bowser (the king of the royal pain in the, err I mean grammas) gets a few flakes that he pretty much eats all of most days, so my food input is pretty low.

I would love to find the sweetspot where everything is fed except the algae. (wouldn't everyone)


here is a pic of this crazy stylophora frag. the polyp extension has been righteous.
I'm sorry I didn't take a pic when I first got it. It was just 3 nubby branches. This thing has added a lot of mass in almost a month exactly now. (flash shot because only the actinic side-lights are on) i'll try to remember to take a pic the next time I feed them like this.