Feeding Sun Coral, Part 2

Making coral open to feed

There are different options, depending on how reluctant the particular sun coral is to open for the first feeding.

1. Night or day feedings. I'm doing all of this when the lights are on (in a low light tank). If intensity of the light in your tank is high, maybe the night feedings, after the lights are off will help.

2. The simplest is adding a pinch of Cyclop Eeze in the tank water. Withing 15 min polyps are usually open to feed. Others recommend adding the spoon of the frozen squid juice, but this didn't work for me. Reaction on cyclop sized particles was better.

3. If this is not working, and shading coral (by newspaper, for example) doesn't help, try to keep covering coral by the food for a prolonged time, 15 to 45 min. Not all the time but may be every 5 min. At the first sight of appearing tentacles try to stick a piece of food to them, the tentacles are not too sticky, try to keep the food next to the tentacles for a couple of seconds. If this works, the future feedings will be easier. Maximum troubles gave me the black sun coral, T. diaphana, that was expected to be as easy as orange T. coccinea or faulkneri.

4. If this didn't work, then try hut feeding: covering the coral by a top half of a plastic bottle. The food is injected by turkey baster or pipette in the opening, and moving the settled food also is done by baster or pipette. More advanced version is described here, the Lunar Lander.

5. If this fails too, what always worked for me was container feeding: removing sun coral from the tank into a separate container with tank water, shade container, add the food there. Again, for keeping food floating and available for contact with coral, use baster or pipette, or even a weak pump or power filter without media. Keep the coral in container for up to 50 min - 1 hr. Then return coral to the tank. Exposing coral to the air never caused problems for me, but your experience may differ.

During the cold season the temperature in container will drop rapidly, try to keep it within reasonable limits. Placing the feeding container into the bigger container, with the warm tap water betwen them, helps. Or set container with heater and the source of water movement, only check in advance how this heater holds temperature in a small container, dealing lower could be necessary. Usual 50W heater (All Glass, Eheim Jager) worked for 1 gal well.

One or two feedings in container could be enough, then tubastrea starts to open in the tank after sensing food in the water.

6. After that, prolonged and repeated covering coral with food in the tank (see point 3 above) worked even for a corals in a very bad condition. More frequent feeding at least for a week helps too. Then the coral will behave more lively, and eat as any other tubastrea.

Training tubastrea

I had read, that many people trained their sun coral to open for a feeding in the certain time of the day. All mine were untrainable, but sensitive to the presence food in the water. As long as food (starting from the size of Cyclop Eeze) is present in the tank, they are open and feeding. Unless they were already well fed, then they close for a while.

If the food wasn't served in time, when coral was open, it closes frustrated, and it takes much longer time to make it open again right after closing. Give it an hour or so.