Non-photosynthetic Gorg Keeping

[cmsargent]

Hi all,

I’ve been asked a few times about my experience keeping non-photosynthetic gorgonians so I though I’d start a thread to talk about my experiences. I’d love to hear from others who’ve been able to keep these as well. I don’t have the gorgs now due to a mishap when moving but as soon as my tank stabilizes from the move I hope to have these gorgs again. Please post with your experiences.

Species Kept –
Swifta excerta (?) and Euplexaura sp.

Length of time kept –
about 6 months but I lost them when I moved a few months ago and the heater in the holding tank malfunctioned and cooked everything.

Growth -
Both of the gorgs were actively growing after a month or two in my tank. The swifta added a few small branches and extended the existing branches in the 6 months I had it. The Euplexaura was just two long branches when I got it and after about 4 months it had put on about 6 side branches of approximately and ½-1” each. By no means rapid growth, but they were growing.

Tank -
29G. Lighted by dual 65W PC. One dual daylight (65000/10K) and one actinic. Temp is kept between 74-76. Ph 8.2. Nitrates usually would be around 0-10 ppm. Water wasn’t crystal clear but had a slight yellow-green tint (probably from all the DTs I feed)

Water flow –
Tank circulation consists of a hang on back CPR fuge and a small rio Powerhead pointed across the front of the tank. The gogs were placed directly in the flow from the powerhead. The current was enough to cause the branches to sway but not be whipped around to heavily.

Filtration –
No skimmer, just about 25lbs live rock in the tank and another 2-3 lbs rubble in the fuge. The tank is heavily planted with a variety of macroalgae.

Tank maintance –
10-15% WC 2-3 weeks apart. During water changes I siphon out the detritus, blow off the rocks, and run a hang-on-filter filled with floss for a couple of hours. Occasionally (maybe once every 3 months), I use some kalk water for topoffs but generally didn’t worry much about calc and alk. I added a few drops of iron for the macros every couple of months.

Inhabitants –
2 H. erectus seahorses, 1 small goby, 2 peppermint shrimp, various hermits and snails, leathers, zoas, mushrooms, gorgonians, sun coral, dendro, GSP, and lots of macroalgae.

Feeding-
I feed the gorg twice a day with a mixture of different types of food. I always included about a teaspoon of DTs or sometimes a powdered phytoplankton and a teaspoon of reef chilli (at the end I started making my own from a combination of freeze-dried copepods, the 2 smallest golden pearls, and freeze-dried bbs all from brine shrimp direct). Then I would add a mix of 2-3 of types of frozen trying to get a couple of different sizes and varying them at each feeding. One feeding might be oyster eggs, cyclopeeze and bbs, the next rotifers and cyclopeeze, the next just a cube of the ‘Coral Feed’ (which is a mix of cyclopeze, rotifers, phytoplankton, a couple other small zooplanktons, and enrichments), etc. I also used some the bottled rotifers and copepods. I never really measured amounts but I would usually end up with the equivalent of about on cube of frozen, sometimes a bit more sometimes a bit less. I also had a copepod culture that I would feed on occasion along with the occasional newly hatched bbs. About once a week I added a few drops of the Seachem’s Reef Plus to the frozen mix. This tank was also feed 2 cubes of mysis daily for the seahorses.

My tank is not skimmed at all and since I was feeding DTs daily the pod population in the tank exploded. You could visually see almost every surface crawling with pods. I wanted to encourage this pod population as the larvae are an excellent food. I don’t skim as I don’t want to remove these larval pods. I would also use a turkey baster to stir up the detritus and would suck up detritus and blow it over the gorgs about once a week.

Other info -
The Swifta was purchased for a LFS in pretty bad shape. I talked to owner into giving me a steep discount and it was clearly dying. About half the gorg had tissue necrosis and the polyps weren’t opening. I cut off what was left of the coral removing all of the dead skeleton and gluing the remainder onto a rock. For the month it continued to slowly recede. I ended up cutting it back again, this time removing up to about 1/2” of healthy tissue and reattaching it to the rock. This time the necrosis stopped. I think it was a combination of the gorg recovering and feeding and eventually removing all the unhealthy tissue.

After a few weeks of feeding the Swifta polyps stayed open most of the time. They would occasionally close up mid-day but were always open for the morning and evening feedings and most of the night. I also had a Euplexaura gorg and its polyps were only open for a few hours a day, around feeding time and for maybe an hour or two afterwards but that seemed to be long enough for it to get adequate food.

[CapitalO]

Those gorgonians are awesome! The color intensity rivals that of the most intense corals; beautiful!!

Very nice. I'm contemplating putting together a non-photosynthetic tank (lit by mostly actinic + a little 10k). I want to go with a similar skimmerless set up with heavy phyto dosing.

There are some truly awesome non-photosynthetic corals/inverts most of which filter feed and keep your water clean. It's too bad more people don't do tanks like this.

[mikekman]

BEAUTIFUL gorgs, thats sucks you don't have them anymore. The swiftia and the euplexaura are hard to find aren't they? I don't see any place selling them.

Informative thread, if you have anymore info on gorgs, please post here.

[Shoreliner11]

I have also kept non-photosynthetics and photosynthetics and I fed live brine and phyto. The tank that was set up had a skimmer but I would feed and turn a valve that bypassed the water to the skimmer. I would feed for a couple hours (depended on the day) and switch the valve when I was done. Most photosynthetic gorgonians from my experience have very fast polyp closing reaction times, while most non-photosynthetics were much slower. This is what led me to such long feeding times, so the non-photos could get enough food. Anyhow, thats my 2 cents.