I Want To Start Keeping Corals..!

[zeo]

Hi guys,

Its been about 7 months since I started keeping marines, and so far has been SW w/LR. I know want to move a little more towards a reef.

I went to my LFS and the cheapest coral they had (leather coral) was about £85.00 (is this the normal price? It was slightly large about dia of about 16cm).
But seemed too expensive for me.

What is the best way to get into keep corals?
I've heard of frags, but dont really know much what they exactly are?
Could I use them to start a coral colony in my tank? What are the norm prices?

My current setup is:
Vision 260 (260Lts)
Loads of LR
1 big happy sea urchin
1 red-diamond back starfish (i think thats what its called)
1 blue knuckle hermit
5 blue chromis
4 yellowtail chromis
1 cleaner wrasse

And 2 green bottom sea anemones (used to be one large one, dissapared for a couple of days.. then there were 2 small ones )

[EDIT] forget to meantion my pair of (true) perc clown fish

 

[xxBarneyxx]

What kind of lighting and flow do you have in your tank. This will determine what kind of corals you can keep.

£85 seems really expensive for a finger leather but is possible. Most of my soft corals have ranged in price from around £12-25 and the hard corals I have bought where more in the region of £25-40

Frags a basically "cuttings" from larger corals but can not normally be purchased from most LFS.

 

[Lynden]

In my opinion it is a good idea to get a few frags to start with, the reason being to find out whether one can keep them alive or not. They are typically quite easy anyways, but I would definitely not recommend buying wild colonies of SPS, as an example. Softies tend to do as well as either frags or colonies.

 

[zeo]

My lighting consists of 2x T8 - Arcadia Marine moonlight & marine whitelight tubes.

Flow rate is currently 25x (if my maths is correct), previous was alot higher, but removed 2 due to my sea hare having a habbit of getting stuck in the inlets.

Are these accectable? At present I am not using any skimmers.


Btw where can i get hold of some frags? I'm living in NE London.

thanks guys, you're advice has been great so far.
Keep it coming!

 

[chrissaysyes]

Im sure your lighting is enough to sustain a lot of corals however some wattage would help. Maybe start of with some Mushrooms? Zoanthid/Palythoa colonies? They dont require much and theyre great for getting the hang of keeping corals.

 

[zeo]

Can anyone explain to me what SPS, LPS are?
And what is the difference of between them and frags?

 

[steelhealr]

Zeo...corals tend to be expensive and many of them are sensitive to water conditions. All of us at one point have lost a coral that was near and dear to us...and not cheap. The softies are probably the best way to go and these are usually the most resilient.

SPS are small-polyped stony corals and LPS are large-polyped stony corals...self-explanatory. I highly recommend the following book for you to peruse:
Aquarium Corals

Frags simply refer to pieces, or 'fragments' of coral, i.e., someone divided or cut off a piece of their coral and grew or propagated another coral from the original piece.
SH

 

[1entra]

£85.00 is very expensive for a ordinary softy. Just this weekend gone my mate bought a finger leather almost a foot big when fully opened for £40!

If your struggling for frags around your end then why dont you have a look on the internet. Ebay is normally quite good. Also why dont you google online frags on google.co.uk. Fishmans Frags is meant to be good although I personally have not used it!

Heres a few others:
Corals4you
Tropical fish for you
Reef works

 

[1entra]

£85.00 is very expensive for a ordinary softy. Just this weekend gone my mate bought a finger leather almost a foot big when fully opened for £40!

If your struggling for frags around your end then why dont you have a look on the internet. Ebay is normally quite good. Also why dont you google online frags on google.co.uk. Fishmans Frags is meant to be good although I personally have not used it!

Heres a few others:
Corals4you
Tropical fish for you
Reef works

 

[nanocubeking]

Here is a better idea of sps and lps.
Here are the only two sps in my tank right now.

and this is a more common idea of an sps.Small polyps and a mostly stony sturcture

Then Lps.

and an LPs has larger soft polyps and a stony structure but the majority is soft. Most people think of lps like acans,brain corals,torch corals, frogspawn,hammer coral, and bubble corals.Like so.

 

[zeo]

Wow those are some beautiful looking corals. I really like the first LPS one.

Thanks for the advice. I may try ebay and a few of the other sites.

The only worry I am having that is my past exp with buying livestock over the net hasnt been so good.

I recently purchursed (well recent being about 3 months ago) 5 different types anemones (snake lock, rose etc) from ebay.
All seemed to be doing really well the first week, but after that I noticed a trend between them all making there way behind the LR and disapearing altogether. I'm assuming they all died, as I have moved my rockwork around a few times since then.

However the anemone that I purchused from my LFS aswell as livestock in general are all still doing really well (infact havent lost a single one w/exception of my seahare - died to a powerhead, and my pearl jawfish.. for me they never make it pass 24h ).

Are corals abit more hardly then anemones? Also this may be a silly question, but can corals move off to where the like? or can I actually position them to where I think they will do best and look good?

 

[nanocubeking]

Corals will grow to where you place them in the aquarium. I'm not sure if there is a kind of coral that can move the majority doesnt.

 

[SkiFletch]

Corals will grow to where you place them in the aquarium. I'm not sure if there is a kind of coral that can move the majority doesnt.

Some softies can "move" albeit very slowly. Most notably, Xenia and Mushrooms. They don't really move, but their method of reproduction can lead them to be far from the original colony

 

[Lynden]

My Xenia once "moved" by attaching to s new place and detaching from the old. This happened only once, the colony was then overtaken by what I assume to be a ciliate infection. How ironic... I want my Xenia to grow, and it dies... others want rid of their Xenia and it just grows faster...

 

[Musho3210]

my xenia found a way to grow vertically onto the rock structure above it, it "hopped" rocks. Uhh my shroom after its split is slowly moving a tiny bit away for more room to grow (although shrooms technically arent corals), and fungiids are moving corals, but slow. So yeah there are some moving corals but if they do, its either really slow, or stretching out and putting their babies somewhere else.