Acclimating Your New Corals

One of the great things about buying captive bred corals, is they require very little acclimation when you get them. You dont need to worry about matching pH, or alkalinity, or specific gravity, or anything else..

Remember, they have lived their entire lives in captivity. They are used to an artificial environment. And frankly they are much hardier than wildcaught corals. They are in very good health. And they haven't traveled long distances under strenous conditions, like wild corals. In almost all cases, when you order farm raised corals, they go from our tanks to you tank in less than 24 hours.

Wild corals may be in transit for a week or more, often under very severe conditions. And they may change hands, and tanks, 6 or more times before they get to your tank. Any living organism that changes environments in such a short period of time would be stressed out. Its no wonder so many of them die on their way to your tank.

Anyway how do you acclimate corals from our farm?

You only need to let the bag temperature equalize with your tank temperature. Nothing else.

And most likely, the temperature in the bag is very close to your tank temperature already. We use heat or ice packs, depending upon the weather and where we are shipping to.

Heres the only thing you need to do:

When you remove the bag of coral from the styrofoam box, float it in your tank. dont let it sit directly under your lights. To be safe, either float the bag in your sump, or turn off your lights.

Let it float for about 15 minutes. Then remove the bag, open it, and place your coral directly on the bottom of your tank.

When you first place the corals in your tank, put them down low. Its always safer to put corals in a lower light environment instead of a higher light environment than they are used to. If too much light in a short period of time, the corals can bleach.

So place them lower in the tank, and then over the next few days, gradually raise them up to where you are going to epoxy them in place.