How do you feed corals?

[Drysocket]

I hear people talk about feeding brine shrimp and shrimp pieces to corals, and I've been sitting here trying to figure out how you would do that.

[Signmom99]

Get yourself a turkey baster from the grocery store.  If not that use a medicine dropper than you can get in the baby department at Walmart or someplace cheap.  Those two items are a must have and can be bought in stores.  LFS will charge more for basically the same item.

[Jefe12234]

It depends on the coral you have. Most LPS corals have large polyps capable of capturing large food particles. You just gently blow the food (with turkey baster, dropper, etc) over the polyps of the coral when they are expanded. The polyps will grab the food and transfer it to the mouth(s) of the coral. It's really pretty cool to see and is of great benefit to some corals.

 

-Chris

[djlanius]

I find it helps to turn off the water circulation while I'm feeding. Some corals have "sticky" tentacles that grab onto the food really easily, but most of mine don't, the food chunk has to sit on it for a sec to get the tentacles in action enough to hold onto it. And sometimes I have to distract or push away the scavengers - I have some very aggressive serpent stars, and some of my hermits are pretty aggressive when there's fresh food to be had.

Different corals like different sizes of food. Some don't seem to eat at all, but even they apparently take in microscopic plankton or proteins & stuff from the water. You just have to experiment, it's hard to find info because for a long time people believed that corals got all their food from the photosynthetic algae in their cells. But there is some info out there. But trial & error works too. If it eats, it likes to eat! Just go easy on it because it's easy to overfeed & pollute the tank. But definitely worth trying, it's so cool to watch them eat...

And I agree that a turkey baster is totally necessary for lots of aquarium tasks. I've made plenty of turkeys & chickens without owning one (I'm 38) but it was one of my first purchases after getting started in this hobby!