Do Corals Need Light
Anatomy Of A Coral Polyp.
Do corals need light. However they are quite adaptable corals in terms of lighting. They do not only need light to grow bigger and faster but also for breeding purposes. Therefore If you use the visual brightness from the human eye to judge the amount of light you are likely using way too much light.
As a general rule hard SPS and LPS corals require more light than soft corals. You cant keep corals without good lighting. Fluorescent pigments are where we start to find variations in corals color that do not follow the rules of the conventional light spectrum.
Achieving ideal PAR values based upon coral species requires more than a keen sensitivity to light. Therefore before you get your coral packs make sure you know where you will be getting direct light intensity. Corals rarely develop in.
Corals which require a lot of light will not be found in the deeper waters outside the reef. So long as you increased the intensity slowly corals will build stronger colour pigments to shield themselves from the light just like us getting a tan corals do it with colour. Photosynthesis in order to survive.
Light is necessary to all living organisms and more so to Zoas. Too much light is likely to bleach your corals. SPS corals have even lighting demands than LPS corals.
In fact meeting these values without specialized equipment is almost impossible due to our inability to see the full light spectrum. Coral can get too much light and hit photo-inhibition - the extra light is converted to heat which is dissipated by the water so a ton of flow helps with over illumination. Just as plants convert sunlight to produce chlorophyll marine animals survive similarly by converting light energy into food.