Planning aquascaping for coral growth, what space reserve for SPS

[ubpr]

Planning 7 gal (12" external dimensions) cube setup, reserving space for:

• glass cleaning access, 1.5"
• future coral growth for acroporas and montiporas (digitata and setosa), 3"
• the space, left for a rock structure, is just 2.5" square (or extend it to the back, corals fill be in the front).

Am I leaving too much for sps growth? How much clearance for cleaning and growth should be left in this size of a tank, in your opinion?

 

Montipora dititata is already too big, but the rest of corals are still small. Acros are bonsai valida, packman carduus, A. millipora, tenius, and no name miniature bushy and growing up varieties. They are now in established standard 5.5 gal tank that starts looking disorderly. The rest of corals are: few encrusting species (mystic sunset and rainbow montiporas, red porites, three kinds of cyphastrea), a couple of chalices (red rim raging river and spiny streaked red). Zoas, gsp and xenia could be moved in another, established pico tank.

[mitten_reef]

22 minutes ago, ubpr said:

Planning 7 gal (12" external dimensions) cube setup, reserving space for:

• glass cleaning access, 1.5"
• future coral growth for acroporas and montiporas (digitata and setosa), 3"
• the space, left for a rock structure, is just 2.5" square (or extend it to the back, corals fill be in the front).

Am I leaving too much for sps growth? How much clearance for cleaning and growth should be left in this size of a tank, in your opinion?

 

Montipora dititata is already too big, but the rest of corals are still small. Acros are bonsai valida, packman carduus, A. millipora, tenius, and no name miniature bushy and growing up varieties. They are now in established standard 5.5 gal tank that starts looking disorderly. The rest of corals are: few encrusting species (mystic sunset and rainbow montiporas, red porites, three kinds of cyphastrea), a couple of chalices (red rim raging river and spiny streaked red). Zoas, gsp and xenia could be moved in another, established pico tank.

Pics of the existing corals?  Do you have the rockscape already mocked up for the new tank? 
can you get a small magnet cleaner, so you don’t need 1.5” all around?  I still prefer a scraping stick personally, tbh. 
3” space all around seems like a good idea if you’re growing them at a good pace 

[mcarroll]

I think you want a bigger tank if your main object is growing branching corals.

 

Corals can be perfectly happy in a little tank, but other growth forms, such as mounding or encrusting, are much more favorable to your tank's small footprint.

 

👍

[ubpr]

Thank you, this is something to think about.

 

Good point about using larger tank, have spare 10 gal with larger footprint, and the difference in volume is not much anyway.

 

1.5" for cleaning glass is for razor blade scraper, faster and easier to work. Even 1" may be enough.

 

No pictures, most of them are overgrown frags on frag racks. I just trying to grasp the general logic of planning ahead, to give corals some space to encrust and spread.

 

For now ended with making paper models to move them around when planning rockwork in hedgehog or shelves shape, to see how they fit together. If still too much, will have to resort to keeping smaller colonies.

[JoshO]

My honest opinion on this is you will never have enough room!

I left 10cm between the front glass and my rock Scape...my next tank will have at least 15cm! 

I also left about 1.5" between the back and Scape to be able to clean...I'm constantly hitting corals and they grow towards the back too!

In terms of height I'd try to stay at a maximum of 50% of your display, but 2/3 is fine if you want a bit more.

You'll be amazed how quickly stuff grows and takes up the space you saved for cleaning 😂

[mcarroll]

Ask some of the folks like @jservedio how they cope with growth.....his tank always has no room, so I know there's a strategy!  🙂

[jservedio]

1 hour ago, mcarroll said:

Ask some of the folks like @jservedio how they cope with growth.....his tank always has no room, so I know there's a strategy!  🙂

The best and most common strategy is to simply buy a bigger tank when you run out of room like approximately 99.995% of reefers and continue on this trajectory until you run out of space, run out of money, or you happen to notice your spouse perusing the old Google for divorce attorneys.

 

If you are just too stubborn to upgrade, the next best strategy is to restrain yourself as much as you can and leave as much room as possible. For a 12" cube, maybe 3-4 sticks and peaceful LPS or softies to fill in. Then, treat your sticks like little bonsai trees once they are more than 2-3" and heavily prune them a few times a year to keep them from getting out of control and shaping them as best as possible. @Nano sapiens is an absolute master at this. You can keep a little tank like this indefinitely as long as you regularly prune and pick your corals extremely carefully.

 

Lastly, if you are too stubborn to upgrade and have no self control when it comes to purchasing frags, you are going to be in for a wild and unconventional ride. You need to really embrace regular coral warfare as simply being a part of your tank and you are going to have to give up on cleaning 3 sides of the glass (just paint them now!). My best strategy for keeping the tank going long term (10 years) was to slow growth down as much as possible and to focus solely on color. I did this by keeping my alkalinity very low - I would never let it break 7dkh and my target range was 110-120 ppm (6.15 - 6.7dkh). With coral warfare going on constantly, your growth rate is not going to be consistent. Low alkalinity gives you a bit more wiggle room and once your alkalinity gets below 6 dkh, growth really starts to slow down. Instead of trying to keep from dosing both too much or too little, you never have to really worry about not dosing enough since it's sort of self limiting. I highly doubt I could have kept my alkalinity stable-ish if I had been shooting for 8 dkh.

 

While my alkalinity was low, I kept my phosphates and nitrates pretty up there (0.1 - 0.15ppm P, ??? N), my lighting very low for an SPS tank, and fed very heavily. My SPS was probably growing at 1/2 to 1/3 the rate that most people who run a standard SPS tank got - but my color was quite good. One side effect of the really high phosphate is that the SPS skeletons were extremely brittle. Because of this, I didn't have to use bone cutters to frag sticks, I could just use my fingernails to break off branches.

 

If you want good branch structure and not have all your sticks growing long, thin, gangly branches you need really good flow - which gets pretty challenging in a small nano that's packed, so plan on spending more than you planned on doubling up on your powerheads.

 

But, eventually they will all just grow into each other and be locked in a constant battle which really starts to slow growth down even more. When they start to battle all jammed together, they don't grow upwardly nearly as much and start creating new base out of existing branches - basically trying to get to the high ground with their bases. This is the end result of what happens when you glue down way too many SPS frags and manage to not lose any of them after a few years - it really isn't ideal and would look way better if I had only glued down half as many or had a few die on me early on:

 

 

But, with all the coral warfare, you get to see some pretty cool stuff - this is what I'd wake up to pretty much every other day:

 

 

 

 

 

I think he is on a hiatus, but @Cannedfish is probably the best here at cramming way, way too many corals of all sorts into a teeny tiny tank. He definitely has more coral density than I did in my 20g and he took cramming corals as far as it could possibly go. You could at least see a few square inches of rock here and there in my tank - I think his is pretty much one block of solid coral. He was literally gluing frags on top of existing colonies. I've yet to do that... Plus, his tank was always nicer than mine 🤣

 

[Nano sapiens]

^^ Now that's what I call a thorough write up.

 

To reemphasize, while it's the opposite of what mid to large tank reefers strive for, slowing down growth (while maintaining color and health) makes life for a small nano reefer much easier and more enjoyable.  Each year end I thank the reefing powers-that-be if my coral growth was relatively slow and none of them completely obliterated their neighbors.

[mcarroll]

3 hours ago, Nano sapiens said:

To reemphasize, while it's the opposite of what mid to large tank reefers strive for, slowing down growth (while maintaining color and health) makes life for a small nano reefer much easier and more enjoyable.

This is something I've brought up quite a bit to the "faster is better" crowd quite a bit....there's plenty of evidence that fast growth has it's downsides – it is not purely advantageous or automatically a sign of superior health.  For one thing fast growing corals heal more slowly from wounds than slow growing ones.  Fast growth can also be an indicator that their photosynthesis gear is operating at a high level, which can actually be quite stressful, and which is a more precarious mode for the coral-dino symbiosis.  

 

A coral growing fast is almost directly analogous to running your car engine in the RPM red-zone all the time – not immediately bad, but much more precarious than running it in the RPM safe zone.  Less margin for any error while running that way....more chances of overheating, etc.  Not to say that you have to avoid fast growth, but it's best to be aware of what you're doing. 👌 Just as an example/starting point for the conversation, I saved this article back in 2016: Fast Growth May Impair Regeneration Capacity in the Branching Coral Acropora muricata. 

 

BTW, going back to the fish that didn't make it and netting, etc., here's a good read on fish stress:

https://reefsuccess.com/2017/06/12/book-biology-of-stress-in-fish-fish-physiology-chapter-12-stress-management-and-welfare/

[ubpr]

Thank you, everyone, great help with all possible options and potential problems to be aware of. A lot of information to digest for making informed decision.

 

With my already too many frags and current moderate speed of growth, looks like a larger tank is due, and mounting frags on removable rubble rock, for easier moving if necessary (to the next larger tank or giving some of them away).