Saw something cool last night.

[chaosfinity]

So i was sitting up late last night and i had the lights off in my office here and was looking into the tank to see what i could see with the moonlights on. My frogspawn coral was emitting a spawn cloud for about 1-2 minutes every 5 minutes 2 or three times as i saw. So this morning i did a water quality check to make sure the quality was still ok The skimmer went CRAZY I emptied it last night before the lights turned off and its almost full. That thing takes a week to fill up lol. Well just wanted to tell you about my neat story dont know if its that cool tho.

 

[RyanG]

That is definately cool.

 

[yote]

Totally cool.
It would be awesome if we could actually figure out a way tobreed corals in our tanks.

 

[chaosfinity]

I have been reading a book called Aquarium Corals by Eric Borneman and it says that most spawnings go unnoticed since they happen at night. It also lists a free article to make an inexpensive egg trapper by Styan in 1997 in his Marine Ecology Progress series. I searched for the name and found them listed on this site with full pdf readings here is a direct link to that article http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps/150/m150p293.pdf. I guess if you know it is going to happen and you can turn off your skimmer you need some kind of substrate heavily covered in usually coralline algae. I would love to see if i could catch these things. I may try and make this and see if I can get some pictures of the spawning if it happens some more. none of my corals seem unusually bloated as the frogspawn was for a few days recently so it may be awhile.

Edit: no point forgot that there is actual sexes in coral lol i only have one so no chance of fertilization.

 

[fatman]

Professionals use special lighting cycles to mimic natures seasonal cycles and came up with the moon light concept just to try to induce what happened without any special effort in your tank. It should not be that much longer before success is achieved in such propagation. After all they said marine fish could not be bread in captivity and the skeptic's were wrong. Few people could believe fragging would ever supply so much of the aquarists demand for coral, but they are getting closer and closer to doing no wild taking of corals. If it was not for poor third world people selling live rock so cheaply all that would be maricultured or tank produced from dry rock. I think aquarium reefing clearly has a long future ahead.