Tropical Fish Hobbyist - October 2010

stonies, but I wanted to run the lights for fewer hours a day. Soft corals tend to need less light than most small-polyp stony corals, so this would allow me to cut back on the big tank’s electrical consumption even further. There’s more to it than that, though, which I’ll get to momentarily.

I had maybe 50 stony specimens in the tank, but the only softies were a good number of mushrooms and zoanthids, and one big colt coral right in the middle. So, I went in and removed all of the stony colonies and used a good number of frags from these colonies to get the 55-gallon stocked up. The rest were mounted on frag plugs and left on the bottom of the big tank for a while, and then traded in at a local shop. I was able to get a significant amount of credit from the shop for these, which I then used to get some new softies. Basically, they let me trade in everything, as many shops will do.

I’ve also purchased a few things here and there over the last couple of months, and now I’m pretty much done adding things to the tank, at least for a while. Now I’m ready to watch everything I’ve got grow out and get the tank looking full again. It’ll take some time, but that’s nothing new.

I added many more zoanthids (Zoanthus
spp.), as well as some Actinodiscus and
Rhodactis mushrooms. I also added three
types of Xenia pulse corals, two types of
Anthelia waving hand polyps, some big
fluorescent Clavularia clove polyps, some
Clavularia daisy polyps, three types of
Pachyclavularia star polyps, two types of
Protopalythoa button polyps, two types
of Palythoa mat polyps, several small tree
corals (Capnella sp., Litophyton sp., and
Nepthea sp.), four small Sinularia finger
leathers, and two types of Sarcophyton
toadstools—one being the bright yellow
variety, which is much harder to find these
days. The centerpiece Alcyonium colt coral
stayed put, too. Some of these are still very
small and the tank doesn’t look even close
to full yet, but again, that will change.

Cutting Back on Energy

Even with a few stonies left over, in switching over to softies I’ve been able to cut back on bulbs. The tank is 6 feet long and my T- 5 lighting fixture is a big one. It holds fourteen 3-foot bulbs, with seven bulbs over the left half and seven bulbs over the right. This fixture also has three power switches on it, allowing me to turn on six bulbs, four more bulbs, and then four more bulbs.

When I had the stonies in the tank I was running all 14 bulbs for several hours a day, but now I’ve cut back to 12. I just took out the two bulbs that were at the front of the fixture, and now each power switch turns on four bulbs. That’s not all I’ve changed with respect to lighting, though.

To further cut back on energy usage, I’ve also cut back significantly on the number of hours that these sets of bulbs run. Before, I was running six bulbs for 12 hours a day, with four more running for 9 hours, and the remaining four running for 6 hours. For six hours a day all 14 bulbs were on at the same time.