UV light question

fazgood · Sep 27, 2007

Does anyone have any information as to what effects a 390-395nM UV light would have on coral? Specifically SPS coral? My son and I are setting up a science project and can get LEDs in that range and wondered if this would be fatal to the coral or what effects that might have. Any help would be appreciated.

Faz

MikeS · Sep 27, 2007

UV radiation has been shown to act as a photoinhibitor in coral zoanthelle...here's an article on it...

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/issues/aug2004/feature.htm

MikeS

fazgood · Sep 27, 2007

Thanks

Thats what I was looking for. At least in the far UV range. I found a LED light that claims to be 395nm but they do not have the specs on the LEDs to determine if thre is a lot of overlap in the overall output. It is cheap enough so I went ahead and bought it and will see if the instrumentation at work is good enough to plot the color. I would like to use it to accent specific corals by placing a spot light on them but I don't want to risk injuring the algae or tissue. I will post back the results.

Faz

MikeS · Sep 27, 2007

Is your goal to make the corals flourece? If so, you don't need a UV light to do that...the high intensity blue LEDs will make corals flourece quite brilliantly, and most of these are in the 420-450 nm range I believe, and probably put out much less UV radiation than a 395 nm LED. Here is a picture I took about 6 years ago of my brain coral flourecence under a blue LED...it's a crappy picture, but you'll get the idea...

MikeS

fazgood · Sep 27, 2007

The need is two fold

I would like to use these to make certain corals glow. My son is working on setting up a science project for school to study the effects of light spectrum on the growth of coral. He is going to use 400nm, 420nm, 472nm, 507nm, 525nm, and 595nm as well as a control of full spectrum 10K. The interest evolved from finding the UV LEDs which led to locating some inexpensive (cheap) UV flashlights.

Since out tank is mostly softies it has not been much of an issue but the recent acquisition of some SPS has pointed out that they don't glow like they did in the tank from the guy that gave them to me. I donâ€™t plan on changing the existing lights but adding spot lights would be a workable solution. I ordered a UV and a â€œultra blueâ€ light to test with.

Thanks for the input.

Faz