Keeping coral is one of the best things about keeping a marine tank. You don’t have a drab brown and green background set on an highly aesthetic brown gravel. Instead of this you have nature’s amazing array of colours that are absolutely stunning. The coral pulses back and forth with the  movement of the water in pinks, purples, greens, yellows, reds, blues, and any other colour you care to name.

The wonderful thing is with high intensity lighting you can have this in your living room or bedroom. It’s far better than a dodgy sit-com on TV. So what do you need to keep coral? Firstly a very well set up marine tank that has superb water quality. Corals will tolerate slightly sub-par water but not for long they will just end up looking half dead or they will die. This quality also needs to be stable or again they will die.  So make sure you perform regular water changes and monitor the water quality carefully.

You need to provide massive amounts of light through metal halide lighting in a daylight colour temperature (what colour the light is) and actinic light to provide the blue wavelengths from fluorescent tubes or power compacts. These are quite expensive but they are a once off investment. The globes are pretty pricey but they last for about twelve months or so.

Without these lights you will not be able to satisfy the corals need for lights. Despite having more of their bodies dedicated to catching prey than any other predator corals actually gain most of their energy from photosynthesis as they have a symbiotic algae living in their bodies which converts light into energy.

You need to be able to supply calcium, carbonates, magnesium, strontium, iodine and other trace minerals. The calcium you need in large quantities as that is what the corals use to maintain their limestone exoskeleton. Without calcium the corals can’t grow this is especially true of the hard coral species.

You will want to make sure that you have the right flow rate and the right amount of light each coral likes. Some corals will prefer to be in still areas of the tank as oppose to right in front of a powerhead others will prefer to sit at the bottom where there is more blue light.
Corals also have this tendency to compete against each other and sending out stinger polyps to try and sting each other so sometimes you might need to watch out that a more assertive coral isn’t attacking another or trying to cramp out the light.

Corals are brilliant and are the main reason I began a marine tank, nowhere else will you find the same amazing variety of colours in the natural world.

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