NERD ALERT!
I finally read all of the coral magazine articles on coral spawning and have gone down the rabbit hole. A fun one mind you.
Things I have changed.
1. Downgraded my gen 4 Radions to work with my wxm instrad of mobius (I hated mobius)
2. Attached Radions to wxm and programmed to follow the season table (2 hours later than “normal“ so I can view later into the evening)
3. Added a Neptune LSM and three lunar LED’s and also have them coming on 2 hours later than “Normal”
4. Changed my gyres to run the 24hr lunar tidal mode also following the noon phases
5. Changed my feed cycle for my nighttime feeding completely. In the past, I just dumped in Acropower/ Red Sea AB+, fish food, and then oyster feast mixed with reef roids and all pumps running. Now, all pumps are off for 7 minutes, and the return and skimmer are off for 45 minutes. This will allow the tank to “soak” in food.
Things to do
1. Decide if I want to trust the apex outlet to turn on my heaters and follow the season table with that. It would probably help my power bill for the tank to get cooler during the winter and warmer during the summer. I need to find a way to have the ranco controller shut down the heaters if it gets too hot.
A. How much of a temp swing I should allow within the apex season table?
2. Move my MP40’s to the bottom of the tank and only use them as support flow so as to not disturb the gyres lunar swell mode. There is probably too much flow right now that’s directed at certian corals, so I need to make more indirect flow.
3. Change the season table in the apex to a location in the tropics that I want to mimic.
4. Wait
I have decided that I won’t black out the tank and see if I can still get some corals to spawn. My goal isn’t to rear any corals yet. I just want to see if I can get it to happen.
Things I need to figure out.
1. When will my corals potentially spawn. The articles gave me something to go off of, but I have different acros.
2. Does flow even matter or help? I am thinking of having the flow completely off (minus return) for a few hours after sunset.
So i changed the plan a bit. I decided to mimic Palau because it seems to be a pretty diverse reef, and is close enough to the equator that the days and nights don’t change in length too much over the course of a year. I pulled the data for the sun and moon rise and set times from this site
https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/palau
My season table was updated to match and then I changed all start times to be 3 hours later and end 3 hours later than Palau’s ”normal” times because their sunrise starts around 5:30-6am every day. Here is my season table with Palau‘s times and temp adjustments and my apex program I got for the xr30’s
When trying to find the water temps to mimic I came across this very interesting paper.
https://coralreefpalau.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/CRRFTechRep1.pdf
I was amazed by how warm the reefs are there...especially with this data being 2 decades old. I realize most of the data in the paper was surface temperature, so instead of high temps being around 85 degrees, I subtracted 5 degrees from every month. In the end, there is only about a 4 degree change throughout the year. So this was a long way for me to say I ain’t changing the temp of my tank. I get 1 degree swings all day anyway, and according to that paper it’s completely normal. The 4 degrees spread over the year seems like the corals wouldn’t even notice. So I think it’s pointless. I could be wrong, but we will see.
I also got sick of my low ph issue and slow growth in my tank. So I hooked my co2 scrubber back up. Look at that jump in ph and dip in dkh today! I’m super stoked to have the tank in what I call supercharged mode again. Time to turn up the carx again!
!