Experience with birdnest under PC

[dlux5life]

Hi Guys-

I know the common thought regarding SPS corals is that they do not faire well under Power Compact Lighting. Due to their high intensity lighting requirements, T-5 HO's or MH's are generally needed.

I am new to relatively new to coral care, but have had FOWLR tanks in the past.

I am just trying to get a common perception if I would be able to get away with keeping a pink bird's nest coral where the red arrow is if I re-locate my hammer coral frag. It is a fairly high flow area about 4" from the top of my tank. The lighting system that i have is a 48" 4x 65 watt PC system. The lamps are 2 22" 460/460 and 2 22" 700+ lamps.

I reguarly monitor my calcium levels in my tank and they are around 450 on average.

If anyone has any advice or input for me, it would be much appreciated.

(PS: the date on my camera is off. this picture is about a week old.)

 

[naturebatslast]

You could put the hammer on the substrate and mount the birdsnest frag where you want it. You may get some growth, it won't die. But, Seriatopora can be finicky in general.
In general you'll be able to keep Acro frags alive, but you won't get true color or real growth from PC lighting.

 

[MikeG]

pink birdsnest has can be very adaptive to different conditions. High up in the tank, you should be ok. I would watch your parameters for a while and make sure they are stable in particular

temperature- not having more than a couple degrees swing
salinity- somewhere around 1.025
alkalinity- much more important than calcium. Big swings in this can kill
calcium
magnesium

 

[fanaglethebagle]

I think you would be alright, you could probably have some monti caps too

 

[stingythingy45]

My experience with Birds nest.
Well,went from 260 watt PC to 2-250 watts of halide.
Got a nice birds nest and mounted it high.Looked at it wrong one day and it RTNed.
Now it's a funky looking paper weight.
But orange cap did pretty good in my tank under 260 watts PC.

 

[fanaglethebagle]

Sounds to me like it was too much of a jump in lighting and burned it.

 

[stingythingy45]

Sounds to me like it was too much of a jump in lighting and burned it.

Nah,

I had the lights before I added the coral.
I think I OD'ed some alk supplement one night(bad Salifert DKH kit).
That's the only coral that checked out.

 

[dlux5life]

I think that I will get a smaller frag of this see how it goes.

I'll try to track my progress with it as well.

Thanks for the input guys. It has been a great help!

 

[snowmaker]

FWIW, I've had a few different species of birdsnest corals and they have all done terrific (under T5's), until they get about 5" across, then start to get RTN from the base up. If I catch soon enough, do a Tropic Marin Pro Coral Cure treatment 2x in 1 week, they recover... No idea why this is happening. The ORA green BN is the only one that has not done this.