Coral Placement

[OCCFan023]

I have been reading up on corals and stuff, and I was wondering when you have a coral how do you put them into your tank? do you just place them on live rock and the will grow onto it, or do you need to do something specific. I have seen that some like expland and can be harmful and such to other corals. Also whats the difference between regular corals and leather corals are leather cortals just soft?

 

[wayne]

Depends on the coral and how your tank is set up w/ respect to lighting , flow et al, reactions to other things. Many corals have different needs that require a wee bit of tweaking to get positioning and enviroment right.
By regular corals you mean ones with a hard skeleton yes? Leathers are softer, they don't have a complete skeleton, rather they contain small needles of CaCO3 called spicules to give their body some strengh.

 

[1979camaro]

the three major coral distinctions you will see are generally "SPS" "LPS" and "soft"

though Small Polyped Stony and Large Polyped Stony are poor desingations because some of the SPS have bigger polyps than LPS and vice versa; this distinction is actually based more on light and feeding requirements than anything else. though truest classification is "stony" and "soft"

generally speaking stony corals of the so called SPS variety need high water movement, very intense lighting, and very clean water. Many of the LPS corals, however, thrive with less lighting and water movement and will do ok with a little bit of disolved organics in the water. softies (leathers, mushrooms, xenia, zoanthids, etc) will generally use the least amount of light, need the least water flow, and tend to be the most hardy. of course, there are exceptions to every rule.

generally, if you buy an SPS coral frag it will come attached to a piece of LR or putty plug. then you just stick that in your tank in the appropriate place. LPS corals tend to have large skeletal structures (look into Euphyllia, Trachyphyllia, Lobophyllia, etc) which you can set into your rockwork and will not come attached to anything. softies like mushrooms, zoanthids, GSP, and xenia (often called colonial because they grow on a big mat) will generally come attached to a piece of live rock rubble and will then spread to cover that rock plus the surrounding rock. leathers and corals like nepthea generally come attached to a piece of live rock rubble but will not spread onto other rock, they just get bigger. you can "frag" leathers and such and cut them into pieces and grow new ones. a lot of people do that.

hope that helps some

 

[OCCFan023]

thanks guys, that was helpfull and then some, thanks again!

 

[wayne]

There's a lot to take in with corals, and generally most rules start to break down pretty quickly. For example while a lot of softies will do OK under poor lighting, you only have to see the water depths Sarco can grow in to realise that 400 W MH would not be overkill, and certainly the growth rates and forms become much more natural. These things live under tropical sunshine in water so shallow they are exposed low tide.

If you are half serious about corals Eric Bornemans book is pretty invaluable as a single source of info. Else you spend all your time trying to get past generalities and down to some real fact.