There are many coral food products available these days, and I believe corals benefit greatly from feeding in an closed environment like our reef tanks. Find a product that is compatible with your system filtration capacity and meets the livestock feeding requirements. Learn to observe! Understand how a healthy specimen is supposed to look and capture that in a photo as a reference. Yes, there are many factors that contribute to livestock health such as water parameters, tank mate aggression, and photosynthetic/non-photosynthetic nutrition. Thus if you believe you can stabilize the necessary environmental factors you can explore growth enhancements. Understanding livestock nutrition is a critical part of this hobby. Anything we can do to allow these organisms to thrive and not merely exist under our care should be a priority.

Prior Trials

I originally participated in a 6 week beta-test of Benepet’s latest probiotic food products BenePellet Reef and LPS.  I was amazed with the visible results seen in my large polyp stony coral (LPS) test tank.  For years I fed a DIY frozen food mixture in addition to pellets and flakes in my auto feeders. I am always open to try new foods to see if they meet any of the vendor’s claims.

A sample box of some other Benepet’s products, primarily the original Benereef powdered food, appeared on my doorstep. Based on the positive results with my large polyp stony (LPS) corals I am now curious how the powdered food will perform on my small polyp stony corals (SPS).

As with the original beta test, this will take time and is not a quantifiable test by any means. SPS corals like acropora do not show the inflation and color improvements as easily as the Trachyphyllia geoffroyi I was focusing on in the prior test.  I will have to pick a couple of specimens to document this trial.  Nutrient levels in the water will be monitored again. I will follow the feeding guide on the BenePets website.

Unboxing & Initial Feeding

Disclaimer

Please note this is not a scientific test by any means. It will be very difficult to really say if this will have direct impact.  In a hobby environment there is no ideal way to quantify direct impacts. There are too many variables such as water chemistry, lighting, flow, etc. that can also impact health and growth. You would have to assume every other variable is constant and you would have to have a repeatable measurable metric to compare with a control. In the past, others have used weight as the closest measurable metric. That is probably the simplest method, depending on how you define and control your experiment.

This will just be my observations during the usage period. As long as there are no negative impacts to the corals or the nutrient levels of the system I will determine this will be a viable product like the other products I have used so far. I will check back with my thoughts and observations after I fully used up all the contents in this sample kit in the next few months.