AI Blade Grow Lighting Question

[hbubley]

Currently these are my settings for my DT:

I ramp up to 50% cool white, and then alternate heavier blue (118%) to heavier royal blue (115%) as it gets later in the day. Is this okay? Should I have more white light?
I have LPS and softies in my tank. and clowns.
Not as concerned about algae growth as I have a bristletooth tang in my observation tank right now ready to eat some algae I'm sure.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Bumping this for you!!

 

[mjw011689]

Not sure on the specific percentages, but you do not NEED to run whites. The corals will live and grow under just blues perfectly fine, and in some cases better. Lps are generally lower light corals. Depending on type, a lot of them come from deeper water where it’s mostly the bluer spectrum that makes it down there.

 

[thatmanMIKEson]

Not sure on the specific percentages, but you do not NEED to run whites. The corals will live and grow under just blues perfectly fine, and in some cases better. Lps are generally lower light corals. Depending on type, a lot of them come from deeper water where it’s mostly the bluer spectrum that makes it down there.

Are you sure about this, what about the algae inside the coral cells does it require a certain spectrum to grow successfully?

This does sound like some information ive heard used and spread alot, I don't agree with it, I've dove on several deep water reefs and the light is definitely not blue like most of our lights, but they sure do make our tanks glow and look pretty.

 

[thatmanMIKEson]

Currently these are my settings for my DT:

View attachment 3091492
I ramp up to 50% cool white, and then alternate heavier blue (118%) to heavier royal blue (115%) as it gets later in the day. Is this okay? Should I have more white light?
I have LPS and softies in my tank. and clowns.
Not as concerned about algae growth as I have a bristletooth tang in my observation tank right now ready to eat some algae I'm sure.

I dont have the blades but I do have 4 ai primes, 3 of which are over my tank in conjunction with other lights but here is my schedule. I run 12 hours of total photoperiod.

 

[mjw011689]

Are you sure about this, what about the algae inside the coral cells does it require a certain spectrum to grow successfully?

This does sound like some information ive heard used and spread alot, I don't agree with it, I've dove on several deep water reefs and the light is definitely not blue like most of our lights, but they sure do make our tanks glow and look pretty.

What I meant by this was that the white spectrums are filtered out by the time the light gets down to some of the deeper stuff. It may not look blue to us, but the white spectrum is not getting all the way down there to where some of these corals live. Plenty of videos on the subject through brs investigates, but also the thousands of people (especially coral propagation companies) use pretty much all blue and they get perfectly good growth. I personally just got done running blue only for about 3 weeks to fight back some Dinos. My euphyllia corals actually took off in just that 3 week period of no whites. Multiple new heads on just about each one of them.

so yes, I’m sure they will be perfectly fine with no white lights on.

 

[thatmanMIKEson]

What I meant by this was that the white spectrums are filtered out by the time the light gets down to some of the deeper stuff. It may not look blue to us, but the white spectrum is not getting all the way down there to where some of these corals live. Plenty of videos on the subject through brs investigates, but also the thousands of people (especially coral propagation companies) use pretty much all blue and they get perfectly good growth. I personally just got done running blue only for about 3 weeks to fight back some Dinos. My euphyllia corals actually took off in just that 3 week period of no whites. Multiple new heads on just about each one of them.

so yes, I’m sure they will be perfectly fine with no white lights on.

That's definitely an opinion and there's no actual proof that the blue light only is responsible for the new growth. Even the professional coral propagators have no proof that blue light only is reason for their success, more than likely they do it to cut back on nuisance algae so they don't have to clean all their frags as much, because they are always putting new clean surfaces and plugs that grow algae quickly into their system, if it was proven no one would run anything but blue lights, theres plenty of success with white light tanks too. Obviously blue light only can grow coral and makes them more appealing to our eye(some would say), thats not the debate but to say white light is not needed for system and coral health is not 100% accurate, the needs of coral in our closed systems is more than likely much different than those corals at 10'-90' of water in the ocean. Comparing the ocean light or even the environment in 5' of ocean water is not the same as a 21" deep aquarium, our aquariums are no where near comparable to the ocean. An aquarium is a man made closed system that is manipulated by us, and more than likely the system as a whole can benefit from a full spectrum light and algae growth.

Of course these are my opinions also and doesn't mean I'm right, every system is different therefore the needs are different by default. Its all personal preference there's no harm against using white light. I like blue light too!

 

[mjw011689]

The question that was asked was specific to lps and softies, which is what my answer was geared towards. Neither of them NEED whites. Like I mentioned, there’s tons of places that grow under blue only (as you mentioned, most of that was for algae and color purposes, but has been proven to still grow them quite effectively). Many people DO only run blues. I personally don’t like the look of 100% blue as far as the way it makes the rest of the tank look, and obviously there are some corals/macros etc that require the white spectrum, but for the most part those don’t fall in the lps category. The question was whether he should run more white light, and in his specific situation adding white won’t really affect how the corals grow, but it will definitely increase algae, and obviously the corals will look different when reflecting different spectrum. But their health/growth would more than likely not really benefit from making it whiter.