Who keeps Sps? Not just Acro's either

I'm far from an SPS guy, but I still have about 10-12 of them in my tank. My water parameters are far from pristine, but they are all doing great and growing well with great lighting and flow.

To me those are just fundamentals and the building blocks of a reef tank. But then again I can't see any form of reasoning for not keeping Sps I mean they're the single most important coral of a real reef. Imo


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I tend to kill them after a while. I'm dumb. I can only keep Zoas and lps.

I keep and have kept SPS for quite a while. I feel a lot of the "random die off" can be prevented simply by appropriate feeding. almost every coral out there feed organismally, so forcing them to rely on photosynthesis alone almost guarantees they are going to die eventually. The tendency for sps tanks to be too sterile is what I would suspect in a lot of cases, people often forget that reefs are what they are because of the abundance of food available, starting at nitrogen and working its way up the chain through phyto and zoo plankton's and up and up. so if we don't support that network of nutrition our corals wind up starving. Obviously we don't want enough nitrogenous wastes to create algae problems but we need to be putting in enough food to support what we have, and remove the excess by-products. To sum it up in one sentence I feel people over emphasize on keeping it clean rather than making nutrition available and removing the waste.

Well I've had softball sized birdsnest in both tanks die over night. Then the downward spiral. Everything looks like crap. Did water changes and carbon. Something has to change. ICan't figure it out except I'm tapped for money. Lights and skimmer would probably be a good starting point. I just can't invest in the lights I want.

ahh jason your not quite grasping what I mean, those nutrient levels are fine but just because those are there doesn't mean the planktonic foods are, when we powerskim our tanks all that little stuff gets sucked up. sps don't feed on nitrates, they are carnivores they need actual chunks in the right size range, most corals are carnivores thats the challenge for keeping sps long term is keeping enough of the right sized zoo available without pushing our levels into crazy spikes of death. The capture rate I believe calfo? or fenner? or one of those guys, god it's been forever since I read that article, did some sort of research on capture rate for planktonic foods and it was abysmally low like 5 or so percent of what was dosed into the tank, (i'm not even sure how they measured that) but if thats correct even if we are hitting the tank 2 times a day with a zoo based food it may still be insufficient for the long term health of the coral because we are pulling it faster than they can capture it so it doesn't breakdown. and of course that's just my theory (and of course I did say a lot of unknown dieoff), but your talking to a guy that feeds his tank skimmate so take it with a grain of salt. but honestly I feel 99% of tanks are underfed, or rather not fed enough of the variety as needed.