How to Take Care of Corals in a Home Aquarium

One of the most important aspects of a reef aquarium is to keep the corals alive. Corals are live marine creatures that require proper care and unique maintenance in order to survive. Maintaining a coral in your home aquarium can be overwhelming when you don’t know the basic needs of the coral. If you want to add these creatures to your aquarium, you will need to know about their nutritional needs, light requirements, temperature requirements, etc. Clickcorals offers several corals for sale, which are a worthy investment to make.

Taking Care of Corals in your Home Aquarium:

In order to keep your coral alive and thriving, the following are some essential things to follow you should know.

Feeding:

Like other living organisms, corals also require a balanced and healthy diet. It is essential to know not only the food type they eat but also their feeding habit. These mixotrophic creatures can be able to produce their food and indirectly consume other living organisms in their environment. With the use of sunlight, corals can create and feed off the thing called zooxanthellae, which provides the majority of their daily energy requirement. They also require additional proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids in order to grow faster. They can gain these nutrients by absorbing foods like phytoplankton, zooplankton, bacterioplankton, etc. Before you start feeding your corals, it is important to research the specific species you own because not all corals prefer the same type of food.

Water Quality:

For maintaining the corals, the water quality in your aquarium is also important as the food. Having the perfect concentrations of the minerals and elements in your tank water is essential for all the corals to generate the necessary chemical reactions to process foods in order to survive. For example, ammonia is a harmful substance for your corals. Regular testing of water will help you to know when to adjust the water to get ammonia or other parameters back to their respective levels.

Water Movement:

Most of the corals develop well in turbulent water conditions. It is best to research the requirements of the water movement for your coral because it varies according to the several species. In order to create a turbulent water effect in your aquarium, you can start adjusting the water flow rate to 20 or 30 times per hour. Also, you can purchase the devices that attach to the end of the powerheads in order to create a circular or wave-type motion.

Lighting:

If you want to maintain your coral correctly, it is important to know about the correct amount of lighting necessary to keep your corals healthy. Soft corals need less light than their hard counterparts. If the particular species lacks the amount of light, it results in coral bleaching.

Conclusion:

Corals grow best in the larger reef tanks than the smaller ones. When you are a beginner reef caretaker, soft corals are easier to take care of than harder ones. You should be more careful when mixing different corals in your aquarium.