Always wanted to keep LPS or SPS corals in your water tank?
If yes, it is better to understand both the corals, and to know about differences between LPS and SPS corals.
What is Corals?
Generally, corals are marine organisms that are normally found in colonies of individual polyps. They’re living animals and they can also grow, reproduce and build their own skeletons. You might be surprised by knowing that some corals can also build the coral reefs.
Being a beginner, to set an aquarium, you should first decide what type of setup you want?
Do you want salt water aquarium or fresh water?
In these type of cases, when you are not sure what type of saltwater aquarium you want, you should gain more knowledge from online or local suppliers.
While researching online, you may come across many pop-ups and websites with many offers such as saltwater fish for sale, buy LPS coral online, buy best live rocks online.
Nowadays, many people prefer to buy saltwater fishes and another set up online, as these became more easy and feasible.
What Is An LPS Coral?
In a simpler term, corals are marine invertebrates in the class of Anthozoa of phylum Cnidaria. They are typically live in compact settlements of many identical individual polyps.
In the coral family, there are mainly two types such as LPS and SPS corals. LPS is large polyp stony and SPS is small polyp stony.
What are the Difference Between LPS v/s SPS Corals?
Have a look at following pointers;
- The main differences are the size of corals, food requirements and light requirements.
- If polyps are large it is easier to feed the coral. LPS corals are much easier to fit the lighting requirements.
- It is easier to grow LPS coral in aquarium compares to SPS coral. As SPS coral requires a very particular space and high intensity lighting schedule.
- SPS corals are expensive and time consuming coral than LPS corals.
LPS Is The Best For Beginners
Being a beginners, you would face many challenges to find suitable corals for your water tank. In this case, starting with the LPS coral is perfect.
To know more the reason behind preferring LPS corals are:
- LPS corals require less light than many other species, therefore require less expensive lighting equipment for the aquarium setups.
- These corals are very easy to grow faster and they also require less maintenance such as water changes, chemical adjustment, and temperature regulation, etc.
- Maintaining LPS over the long term is much easier.
After finding LPS corals are best for your water tank, just have look on the types of LPS corals to choose from:
Open brain coral: it is one of the best beginner corals. It has bright color, and it needs sufficient lights.
Candy cane coral: It has an orange to red color with white striped coloration. Most of the beginners prefer to purchase as they are low-cost available.
Bubble coral: has a soft and gentle appearance. This coral adds a moment to the tank.
Plate coral: it is little aggressive in nature, they might attach to other corals. These corals are easy to keep for beginners, they might go well with a shallow water tank.
Conclusion
Therefore, if you’ve decided to keep LPS coral or other species of fishes such as aiptasia anemone removal eating fish, salt water fishes, just make sure that the tank has a well-established and has healthy echo-systems. For better experience, you should start first with saltwater fishes and slowly move toward the LPS corals.