How important is target feeding?

[oakengineer]

I've got a few corals in my 65 gal reef. Mostly polyps and lps like acans and frogspawn. I also bought a birds nest frag just to try it out an sps and see how it goes. I have always heard it is benedicial to target feed. Will they just not grow as fast if I don't, or am I doing my corals a grand disservice by not feeding them? Of course I feed my fish, and I have an established refugium, so some stuff might be coming from that.

[Ratpack]

IMO, target feeding is only really beneficial in non photosynthetic corals and then it is really only to make sure they get plenty of food. I have a tank full of corals and do not target feed anything. Just add the food to the current and they will catch it. All my corals are growing great.

[Dkuhlmann]

But some of them sure are fun to feed, like Duncans

[thegrun]

You will get faster growth if you do but none of the corals listed need it.

[oakengineer]

But some of them sure are fun to feed, like Duncans

I bet not as fun as hand feeding my shrimp, though.

[skimjim]

IMO target feeding can be achieved a lot easier by turning skimmer and all water movement OFF btwn 12mid to 6am......

dose ONLY one shotglass of seafood mush prcessed thru a blender. find a good seafood deli and liquify in a blender; squid, mussels, shrimp, clams, etc. it doesnt take much of a purchase to produce a ton of mush. take the mush and put in AIR TIGHT container and keep REFRIDGERATED. Pour out mush into a single shotglass. Dont do more than just one shotglass per night 3-times a week. anything more than that might cause a NO3 spike.

i take the shotglass full of mush and dribble the liquid over the entire surface of the waterline..... so the mush slowly sinks to all areas of the tank.

if you view your tank with a red-light at like 2am you'll see most if not all your coral with their sweeping tentacles out feeding on the liquified mush suspended in the water. with very very little to no water movement, the liquid mush will slowly fall thru the water.

come 6am when the skimmer kicks back in, the skimmer will remove any mush that the corals didnt eat. by 8am your water should look clean and not hazy. if it does look hazy, readjust your skimmer. goal here is to feed corals btwn 12mid to 6am...by 8am all your mush leftovers are to be in your skimmer collection cup.


i've been doing this for over a year and have seen a lot more growth and color.

[snorvich]

IMO, target feeding is only really beneficial in non photosynthetic corals and then it is really only to make sure they get plenty of food. I have a tank full of corals and do not target feed anything. Just add the food to the current and they will catch it. All my corals are growing great.

Likewise.

[LobsterOfJustice]

I find people new to the hobby tend to target feed at the expense of water quality. I do not recommend target feeding corals - corals would rather have the cleaner water than the extra food. That's why you paid all that money for whatever lighting you've got.

[Stevenahammer]

Target feeding = much faster growth

[stingeragent]

I find people new to the hobby tend to target feed at the expense of water quality. I do not recommend target feeding corals - corals would rather have the cleaner water than the extra food. That's why you paid all that money for whatever lighting you've got.

I personally don't target feed, but I don't have a reason why I don't, I just don't. I do however think your statement is incorrect (in my opinion). If corals didn't need to be fed, then they wouldn't have the capacity for doing so. Nature evolves animals to get what they need. If humans could live off sunlight alone, they wouldn't have evolved to be able to eat. I'm not saying go out and target feed all your corals now after that statement, as I'm sure a lot of them filter feed what the fish don't get.

[LobsterOfJustice]

I personally don't target feed, but I don't have a reason why I don't, I just don't. I do however think your statement is incorrect (in my opinion). If corals didn't need to be fed, then they wouldn't have the capacity for doing so. Nature evolves animals to get what they need. If humans could live off sunlight alone, they wouldn't have evolved to be able to eat. I'm not saying go out and target feed all your corals now after that statement, as I'm sure a lot of them filter feed what the fish don't get.


You're thinking about it backwards. Eating is the ancestral trait. They evolved the commensal relationship which enabled them to photo synthesize because their environment was food-poor. Several corals have almost entirely lost the ability to capture and digest prey (Xenia for example).