We received some blue berry gorgonia and thought we should run a bit of a test on these pieces and on the Fauna Marin line.
For those of you that are not familiar with the blue berry gorgonia here is a picture.
There is no question about it, these pieces are absolutely stunning!!
And for those of you that already know about the blue berry gorgonia, you are aware that they are VERY difficult to keep alive!
Typically IF these pieces come in undamaged they have very large, very blue polyps.
As this gorgonia has such large polyps many retailers bring in this coral and advertise it as a piece that could be kept by simply feeding in cylopeeze (this was common here anyways).
But it did not take people long to figure out that this is simply not the case....
Typically the blue berry gorgonia comes in and looks like the picture above for a few weeks and sadly, slowly wilts away to nothing...
Another point that is worth mentioning is that these corals will often sit in the collection beds over in Indonesia for anywhere from a few days to a few months. When I was in Indonesia last I couldn't count the number of blue berry gorgs that were in the various wholesalers tanks and had obviously been there for quite some time. Even if these piece do make it to your local retailer without receding, these are typically NOT the pieces that you want. They have gone without food for so long that you will be lucky if they ever start to feed again with any food IMO... Ideally you want a piece with the absolute shortest time possible from collection to when it gets into your tank at home.
I did explain this to our suppliers and while I can not guarantee that they will not ship the older pieces to someone else, I made it clear that we did not want to receive them!
Which bring me to our little test.
On May 22nd we received an order from one of our suppliers in Indonesia and we managed to acquire a VERY nice, very healthy collection of Blue berry gorgs. The pictures above are one that we snapped with our camera after they arrived.
We put a couple pieces into our coral beds and we put a couple pieces into our azoox tank. Our dedicated azoox tank is plumbed into our corals beds so food from the azoox tank is of course going into our coral beds, but the pieces here do not get the same food density that they do in our azoox tank. None the less, we put a couple pieces in here as a control.
Here is what we are feeding our azoox tank with:
And the tank is being fed hourly with the assistance of a Fauna Marin Dosing pump.
Can the blue berry gorgonia be kept alive in our azoox tank with a high food density, continual feeding of the Fauna Marin azoox line?
Can the blue berry gorgonia be kept alive in our coral beds with a relatively low food density?
As both tanks are on the same system, they both have the exact same water quality and parameters. Any changes that occur will therefore occur to both system so this should help to add a great deal of consistency to our experiment.
Both are being fed the same foods, BUT the azoox tank is at a high food density and our coral beds are at a low food density.