Beginner corals

Steve1971 · #1 10-24-2013, 02:25 AM

Looking at getting my first corals. Tanks been up for 3 months, all parameters are stable and where they should be. Have 2 clowns, a couple rabbit fish and a couple damsels. What would be a good starter coral. Would like to get a bubble tip anenome or a hammer coral but I think too soon still?! Any help would be appreciated...

Magickiwi · #2 10-24-2013, 02:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve1971

Looking at getting my first corals. Tanks been up for 3 months, all parameters are stable and where they should be. Have 2 clowns, a couple rabbit fish and a couple damsels. What would be a good starter coral. Would like to get a bubble tip anenome or a hammer coral but I think too soon still?! Any help would be appreciated...

See how you do with some softies first like zoanthids or palythoas. If you can't keep them alive you'd have no chance with a hammer coral!

Reefwars is one of MANY people selling soft corals as a side line and he sure as hell has a lot of different ones.

intarsiabox · #3 10-24-2013, 02:54 AM

My first coral ever was a hammer coral and I still have a number of heads from it today. They don't require anything special and I've had them under T5's, MH's and LED's at varying depths and stages of neglect and have never managed to kill any of it (with the exception of a section that broke off one night and fell onto an open brain coral who quickly killed the hammer). Very easy to keep and a good beginner coral IMO.

Reef Pilot · #4 10-24-2013, 02:56 AM

Mushrooms and palys, almost impossible to kill. And you can get some real nice ones, different colours, etc.

HaZRaTTy · #5 10-24-2013, 03:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve1971

Looking at getting my first corals. Tanks been up for 3 months, all parameters are stable and where they should be. Have 2 clowns, a couple rabbit fish and a couple damsels. What would be a good starter coral. Would like to get a bubble tip anenome or a hammer coral but I think too soon still?! Any help would be appreciated...

I have so many beginner corals in my tank, that i'm trying to get rid of and able to Frag as I am wanting to do a tank over haul and go a different direction.

If you are in Edmonton any time soon and want to bring home a load for your tank give me a PM.

3 Months should be fine for beginner corals, I would stay away from SPS.. but softies, and like posted earlier Zoas, and Paly's.

I may even have a Green Tip anemone for you!

asylumdown · #6 10-24-2013, 06:33 PM

My suggestion would be to think about where you want your tank to be in a year. What kind of tank do you want it to be? a Softies/zoa tank? an LPS tank? an SPS tank? A full blown mixed reef? Some corals are less compatible with others (some leathers can inhibit some SPS for example), a lot have different needs, and some that are good training corals in the beginning can become a serious pest in the future if you decide you don't want a tank full of blue and red mushrooms anymore. So just throwing in whatever now because you think you can keep it alive might not be the best choice - though it is a good way to learn.

Whether something is a 'beginner' coral or not depends very much on the equipment that you have. If you've got a crazy powerful LED/MH setup, an auto-doser, and tons of flow in your tank, there are plenty of 'beginner' SPS. If you've got dimmer lights, less flow, and are manually maintaining calcium and alk, then pretty much all SPS should be considered 'advanced', and you should stick with LPS for now.

Most of the hobby staples like frogspawns, hammers, etc. are pretty forgiving. In fact I dare you to try and kill one. I have a frogspawn that started life in a pico where it got 100% water changes when I remembered to do them, got no water changes for probably 2 months while the tank was at my dad's, was subjected to salinity swings that would kill a copepod, then got moved to my big tank, was cooked nearly half to death by over-powered lights, then got dropped during re-scaping in to a huge rock pile that was too much of a PITA to move so I gave up on it. 6 months later I caught a glimpse of it in a dark cave and finally fished it out. it only had 3 heads left and they had each withered to the size of a small grape and turned completely white. I put it in the light, and now it looks like this:

moral of the story, a lot of the LPS corals out there are pretty forgiving assuming you've got enough/not too much light for them.

My other advice is that if you want an anemone, get it sooner than later. It's going to wander around a lot in the early days, it's better to let it figure out where it wants to live, get settled, then build your coral collection around it rather than adding the nem late stage and having to emergency rescue half your corals from it's path.

duncangweller · #7 10-24-2013, 06:36 PM

That is REALLY good advice, and if I can say anything......just get corals that you really want. I found myself putting in all sorts of corals because other reefers said " these are easy to keep" I have mushrooms and the odd Zoa colony that doesn't interest me in the slightest now. They are harder to get rid of now than they would have been then.

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Steve1971 · #8 11-03-2013, 12:11 AM

Thanks for all the great advice!

Starry · #9 11-03-2013, 01:58 AM

Fantasic advice! Wish someone had told me when I first started. (blue cloves and green palys are kinda pretty and realy easy, but...)

Steve1971 · #10 12-03-2013, 10:32 PM

Got a few corals now! I got a frogspawn that is doing awesome as well as a a few zoa's of some sort and some starburst plops that look great! I got a gbta but he on the other hand is not doing as well. He's slowly creeps to the bottom of the tank and inverted Haekel on some coral where he's shriveled up. Verdicts still out if he's gonna make it...

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