[Ninong]

Originally Posted by TimH07

The assumption before i did all this reading was that SPS thrive more on the blue spectrum, and ASSUMED that red spectrum was a waste. hence my logic was get more blues.

I hate to be the first one to break the bad news to you, but you have no idea how complex this topic really is. There are entire books written on the subject of photosynthesis in corals.

The various major photosynthetic pigments, which are actually located in the zooxanthellae, have different absorption peaks in different parts of the spectra. Then you have assessory pigments to take into consideration. Then you have the fact that corals have the ability to adapt to varying light conditions in nature by modifying their zooxanthellae, not only in population density but even in the physiology of the individual zooxanthella.

For example, Chlorophyll-a collects light in the violet, blue and red portions of the spectrum but there are two special forms of Chlorophyll-a (P-680 and P-700) that absorb light at 680 nm and 700 nm, respectively. P-700 is important in Photosystem I and P-680 is important in Photosystem II.

I don't have any of my reefkeeping books because I sold all of them a couple of year ago when I sort of "retired" from the hobby and took down my tank due to a move. However, Yuri Sorokin covers the physiology of photosynthesis in corals in excruciating detail in one of the chapters in Coral Reef Ecology. The book has been out of print for several years now and it's virtually impossible to find a copy. I paid $86 for the paperback version several years ago. I sold it for about half that. I'm not sure I would recommend this particular book to anyone but the most dedicated fanatic. It was originally written in Russian and then translated to German. The German edition was translated to English. The English version contains approximately 2,000 typos! Seriously, I'm not kidding. And the grammar is so confusing that some paragraphs have to be read more than once. I read the book three times, so I think I still remember a lot of it.

[Ninong]

Dr. Sanjay Joshi has a brief article on Photosynthesis and Photoadaptation that you may find interesting. He very briefly touches on some of the major points.

[Poseidon]

4 T5's would certainly support LPS... It would also support Montipora, and other SPS like Staghorns, and maybe even some Millepora

[TimH07]

Ok so... one thing that i'd like to see is some kind of PAR requirement for, well i know the list would be impossibly long to do ALL corals, your most common SPS corals.

im sure im just reaching on that one, but is there any list at all that says "millepora xxxx requires 1300 PAR on a 12 hour photo peroid" or something to that extent.

even just some basic guide?

[zhenya]

Originally Posted by TimH07

Ok so... one thing that i'd like to see is some kind of PAR requirement for, well i know the list would be impossibly long to do ALL corals, your most common SPS corals.

im sure im just reaching on that one, but is there any list at all that says "millepora xxxx requires 1300 PAR on a 12 hour photo peroid" or something to that extent.

even just some basic guide?

Tim,

For basic light requirements of some of the corals you can buy a small book written by Dana Riddle. He has done very extensive research on this topic and his book (granted an old one, 1995, and things change a lot since then) is called The Captive Reef. But I like this book not because of the bulbs descriptions but because it explains the PAR and surface irradiance and Lux and so on.
I'm almost sure store like Amazon.com would have it.

[TimH07]

Thank you Zhenya, im surprised one exists heh, i'll look for it, im sure its a good read!!