Issues affecting acro growth (1 Viewer)

[KarenB]

How to formulate this question.....let's see. Okay, say you have an acro that came out of the ocean, a humilus, for example. By virtue of its growth habits, it's a very thick-branched cluster acro that appreciates high light and high flow. Say if you wanted to break a piece off....well, its tough to do since it's a very dense acro. Then say you had that same colony in your tank, had high light and high flow, albeit not the same as the ocean, of course. Say your calcium was just slightly under 400 for a year. Would you expect that same acro will assume the calcium it needs and just grow much slower than it would in the wild, or at an expense to its strength it grows the same but becomes more brittle?

 

[djreef]

I'd say that it definitely grows slower in house, given that natural params are different than captive. You have to consider the lack of natural food sources in our systems that continouously bathe corals in the wild. I consider continuous availability to live food & natural sunlight to be the X-factor. Natural predation I believe to be cancelled out by mechanical failure/human error.

DJ
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[Guest]

Karen,
This is a really uneducated theory, but could the lack of calcium and it's resulting brittleness in coral be similar to osteoporosis in humans?

Don't laugh too loud. I don't know diddley about coral. But I need to learn.

 

[mushrooms]

is that why mi acro look like this, 2nd pic is nine weeks ago,1st pic is now

 

[KarenB]

Maybe my hypothetical assumes too many different factors. Here's a simple question, then:

Would the corals in our tanks, given the best possible care we can give them, still grow less dense than they would in the wild? And over time, say several hundred years of propagation, how do you think those corals would "evolve" differently than they would in the wild?

 

[Guest]

As for as evolve, they will become lazy and less protective.

Nathan

 

[djreef]

Less dense in captivity? I would say yes given the forces subjected to them in nature. Ocean currents vs aquarium = no contest. The corals would have to be thicker just to keep from being pulverized into sand. I think they would 'evolve' different characteristics (structurally), but fundamentally (at the cellular level) remain the same; given that these animals have changed very little over the course of millions of years. It would be cool to get Eric's take on this, since it's one of his fields of expertise.

DJ
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