blueberry gorgonian tips??

[PFoster]

I kept mine for around a year and it was perfectly healthy and growing. I finally lost it in the move to TO.
Right up to the day of the move, mine always had 100% polyps extention and the nice thick, healthy orange flesh across all of the woody base.

That being said, these are impossible to keep unless they are on a dedicated azoox system.
We even did a test and brought in 6 new blueberrys that I purchased directly from the divers in Indo and shipped back to Can right away, so that they did not sit for long in holding tanks there (once nps gorgs stop eating they often will not start eating again).
We put 3 blueberry in our dedicated azoox tank and 3 into one of our corals beds.
The azoox system had a fridge below it and was fed hourly with a Fauna Marin dosing pump. This tank overflowed into my sps tank.

The other three were placed in the sps tank. So technically all the food that overflowed from the azoox tank went to the sps tank. But the sps tank had a low food density and the azoox system had a high food density.

Within 6 weeks the 3 blueberry in the sps tank were receedind, the three in the azoox system were doing just fine.

There are definately a few details that are absolutely essential for success with this sp. Believe me when I say that we did not have instant success with the blueberry gorgs....
1) water quality
in order to keep 99% of all azoox corals you need absolutely prestine water quality. I have heard people say "you need dirty water for those" but nothing could be further from the truth.
You need low doc's, high redox and zero tannins in the water.

2) feeding frequency
Different azoox have different feeding requirements in terms frequency. Some do ok with 3 times a day. The blueberry gorg is not one of these pieces. It should be fed hourly via a dosing pump. All other attempts are destined to fail eventually IMO.

3) Foods
I fed mine Reef Nutrition Oyster eggs, Fauna Marin clam, minF, seafan and MinD. I have details blogs on here and other forums for my setup and i dont mind sharing the info if people are interested.
Other combos may work for other people but this is all I fed and it worked amazing for me.

The trickiest thing here is the continual feeding and prestine water quality. Those two things are basically polar opposites...

IMO its MUCH easier to tie a smaller, dedicated azoox system into and sps system with an decent sized skimmer. If you have nicely colored sps they you are probably already aware of how to keep tannins down (carbon, ozone, zeolite media, wc's etc), po4 is probably already at zero, and you have no algae issues. As long as your skimmer is slightly oversized, an azoox system will also serve to feed your sps.
This is a major key to success.

I have kept a stand alone azoox system and even with my level of enthusiasm for the hobby, its just too much work for me to keep the water quality high enough....


I will shortly be setting up another azoox system, this time it will be a 144g half cylinder though