Acans and LED's what gives.

[KhensuRa]

What is it about LED's that just messes with acans color? I mean I have a few acans that sure are nice but man they never end up looking like the acans I bought after a few weeks. Thing is all my other corals like great color wise and even better then when I bought them. Ask Gabe he is in love with my blue milli, it was almost brown when I got.

But these acans never really seem to color up right. What do you all think it is? Do you think it is my lights? Water? My eyes? Anyone else have this happen? oh and anyone want to come over and show me how to frag acans?

 

[Cake_Boss]

Are they turning orange? I was told it was the limited spectrum of just blue and white LEDs. Mine did ok in the shade.

 

[Cherub]

I noticed the same thing at first I thought they were just lightly bleached since the color is close by lighter usually but now I wonder if it's spectrum too. Maybe a bit of both but yeah my acans look much nicer when I get them

 

[KhensuRa]

No they never really turn orange, in fact most of my orange turns to red and the blues disappear as well.

 

[KhensuRa]

Doing some reading and there are so many theories on this. Many think it is a lack of UV, which help the corals, color up as they use the color change to help protect themselves as a tan in humans. Others say there is not enough spectrum in just blue and white leds, thus many are adding colors like red and green in there led builds, along with some UV. Might have to add some UV and red to my next build to see.

 

[Wicked Color]

Just throw em in the shade.

 

[Zoalander]

Yeah I have mine out of direct light

 

[The Coral Shop.com]

I've had this problem too, I was told by a few people to dose iodide and trace elements to help them tolerate the intensity of our lights. Allegedly the more stunning acans are collected in deeper waters where the blue light is what they're used to getting but not as intense as we beam down on them. I'm no expert but was told by a few people I regard as such who used the wellso as an example, the more bright/brilliant it's colors are the deeper it was found! Brighter colors catch more usable light...

 

[projectx]

I have the same thing, my purple snake skins look great but my Solar explosions look like hell, I moved the explosions to the shade and it helped some.

To frag the acans, dremel and a diamond cut off wheel go through the back first to make your line then turn over and repeat for the front

 

[spstimie]

I moved all of mine out of my 75 when it still had t5s because peppermint shrimp attacked them. They went into a bc14 with a SunBright Slimline fixture. The acan's pretty much all washed out, with all of the reds turning orange. Actually for a few months I was convinced all my red based acans had exchanged zooxanthellae, because they all started to look almost identical. I had mostly the Blue channel running with the white turned down to 30-40%. Once I turned the white to about 70% all the original colors recovered. I have moved a colony back to my 75, which now has 1 peppermint(not bothering corals, but watched very closely) and my cheap Chinese 12k LEDs on it. The colony exhibits similar color changes, depending on how long I run the white channels(since they are not dimmable). Just my experience though.