About Soft Corals in the Reef Aquarium

Soft corals are corals that have no hard skeleton and are considered by many hobbyists to be beginners corals. These corals are extremely hardy and most do not require expensive lighting to grow and thrive in your tank.

lighting for soft corals

Soft corals can use fluorescent tubes. The best practice is to fit as many tubes down the length of the aquarium as possible, ensuring they are fitted with reflectors. The tubes should consist of at least two actinic blue tubes, and the rest should be marine white, assuming a minimum of four tubes. The tubes can be of the T5 type. The order of fitting should be blue, white, white, blue. Where there is space, an equal number of blue and white should be fitted (ie. blue, white, blue, white, blue, white). The aquarist will probably be using an electric timer for the lights on the fish only system. An additional timer is required, so that the blue tubes come on ½ hour before the whites, and go offa half hour after the whites. This gives a ‘dusk/dawn’ effect. The white tubes should be on between 9 and 12 hours per day. The blue tubes stay on all the time from switch on to switch off, this is because they are not just there to create the ‘dusk/dawn’ effect, but they assist the corals as their light spectrum suits the zooanthellae algae in the coral tissues.

In the soft coral reef water movement should be chaotic and non-directional as far as possible. As a very general guideline, powerheads can be successful and should have the ability to move the display aquarium water about ten times per hour.

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