Suncoral questions

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pat8you

Aquarium Advice Addict
Joined
Apr 30, 2007
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Woodbridge, Va
So i got a piece of sun coral from my LFS a week or two ago. They had fragged it from a larger colony and it had been sitting in the LFS for some time and i just assume they weren't hand feeding it. So when i picked it up it wasn't in great shape. In an effort to get it healthy again i have been feeding it daily. So my question is can you over feed these things? I have heard you can over feed a sick anemone because it takes a bunch of energy to digest the food. Is there anything similar to that with sun corals?
 
Pat8you,
I'm afraid I'm in the "LFS situation here." I got my sun corals as part of the rock with my Kenya trees on.
How do you feed your sun corals? I got phytoplankton and chopped up shrimp, I also have syringe can I just "spray" plankton over the polyps or is there more to it?
 
Well i have a real small tank (12gal) so i have to take my sun coral out to feed it so i don't send my nitrates through the roof. I just put some tank water in a tupperware bowl and then it real easy to squirt mysis on it with a turkey baster. Some times i also add some phyto and baby brine. If you wanna leave it in the tank a lot of people cut the top off a 2 leater pop bottle and use that like a feeding dome of sorts. That way your other critters like shrimp and fish don't steal all the food away.

My polyops wouldn't open for quite some time when i first got it so if you have that going on just keep tring to squirt the shrimp right on the mouths. After a couple days of doing that they start to open and then its real easy to feed them because the tenticles are kinda sticky.
 
OK, if their tentacles are sticky, I'll try placing pieces of shrimp in them with twizzers. Now the only thing left is to find plastic twizzers...
 
you don't need twizzers. A trukey baster or eye dropper or something like that will be fine. just kinda blow a bunch of food over the coral and a bunch of it will stick
 
My concern would not be can you over feed it but will you foul up the tank. I saw where you pull your out to feed being that you have a nano tank. I only feed mine twice a week while it`s in the main. I feed it mysis. I hope all goes well
 
I feed my sun corals mysis shrimp with tweezers.

If a sun coral polyp is fed mysis after mysis there will come a point where either the food capture response will wane or it will tenuously hold the food but won't take it in (eventually it will drop it). It seems the polyp senses when it's had enough. The polyp, not the entire coral.

To overfeed the entire coral you'd have to feed each and every polyp until the above characteristics effect the entire sun coral (i.e., specifically feed each and every polyp 5 or more mysis shrimp); that's quite a lot of food depending on how many polyps the piece has.

I personally don't max out each sun coral polyp (rather than feed 1 polyp 5 mysis, I'll feed 5 polyps one mysis each).
 
Sorry, I'm a little late on this one but I'd like to throw in my 2cents.

I don't believe you can over feed them but you can feed so much that you 'pollute' your tank (as Melosu says).

It sounds like the polyps have receeded a bit and it will take some time for them to fill back out. When I feed my sun polyps I simply soak the mysis shrimp in garlic and vitamins. Rinse them off again and feed each polyp a few mysis shrimp each. (Also, I feed the tank about 10 minutes before so they are expanded when I go to feed them).

Since my other fish are pigs, I cover the sun coral with a plastic bell (fashioned from the top of a 2 liter pop bottle) so they can't rob the polyps of the mysis. I leave the plastic bell on for about 30 minutes....which gives them more than enough time to eat the mysis.
HTH :)
 
Thanks. I take my sun coral out of the tank when i feed it because i have such a small tank so that isn't an issue. The polyps had receded quite a bit and it had no tentacles at all when i bought it. Its making a nice recovery now. They polyps have small tentacles now and it is hard to get them to open and eat any more either. I am going to try and take a bunch of pics of my tank and post it in my tank journal so i'm sure the sun coral will be in there. I will have to try soaking in garlic though i've never done that for my corals.
 
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