LPS Growth Rates

[Staaan]

I always look at peoples tanks and LPS such a brains, acans, and favias never seem to grow.

Only real growth that I have seen in LPS type species is duncans for some reason..

Only "growth" I ever see is the tissue puffing up or getting larger but never an expansion indicating growth of a new mouth/head...

Anyone care to share their experiences?

Type of LPS?
What you did to make them grow? (feeding, light, etc)


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[ZANYMASTER]

People tend to feed their Lps's often to get them to grow.A lot of people here lean towards Reef nutrition,marine snow,I use cyclop-eeze.Duncans are fast growers for sure.

 

[Master Shake]

i have all types of lps, my branching hammer i got one head of 2 years ago and just counted 21 the other day. my torch has split from one to 2 in the past year and a half. Chalices seem to grow the slowest but they require the most light out of most lps. brains and favias do grow relatively slowly but you usually dont see it because it is under all of that puffed up tissue. my duncans and acans grow like crazy. Just as long as you have decent lighting and keep all of your paramaters in check they should have no problem growing. I have a 4 bulb tek light on a 90 gallon and everything is doing great. i feed reef nutrition phyto, mysis, oyster feast and arcti pods. for fish its mysis, brine shrimp and dried seaweed...Thats every day. For suplements its seachem reef buffer for alkalinity, esv calcium, Brightwell Coralcolor, magnesium, iodide, and esv strontium chloride. For growth you need light, food and next to no nitrates and phosphates so have a good skimmer i have a asm g1

 

[seldin]

I have found that LPS can have growth spurts. For instance, I have a neon green candy cane, that seemed to explode. I saw with 2 heads, then after I came back from a 3 week departure, it grew to 7 ( no kidding). It could have helped that I trimmed some nearby coral that week...

I have another LPS that used to get inflated a lot, after spot feeding. I stopped spot feeding, and the growth slowed.

All in all, some corals, can take several months of "no growth" and then just explode. Just depends on tank conditions and how well fed the corals are.

Same for SPS...

 

[Jzhou]

Yea, the branching corals def grow very fast, The 1 head frag i got from mA has about 8 small buds on its side.