I find it interesting that no one asked you what it is that you are trying to keep... If your intention is to keep octocorals and some species of fore-reef acros or montiporas or lps, then good intense
VHO lighting would be all that you need to keep thriving colonys of corals. If your intention is to keep mostly reef-top spp. of stonies and clams, then definitely, MH with VHO supplementation would be the choice. Consider which biotope you wish to mimic, select your specimens to fill the niches in the biotope, add complementary fishes and inverts and suitable substrates, and match the currents to the part of that biotope your emulation seeks to copy. MH can be too much for some spp. of acros and other stonies, definitely too much for many spp of corals and corallimorphs that come from either deeper water or murky lagoonal conditions. The result of such mismatching can be the development of photoprotective pigments much the same way that we do with melanin. The result? rapidly growing BROWN corals. Depending on the location that many corals are collected from, coloration may be intense under bright lighting, or almost non-existant. It all comes back to whether that particular coral strain/variant has been selected by genetics to develop in
high energy environments or not. Some specimens that brown up nicely under MH actually color up better (in non-brown shades) under VHO lighting. The only way to really tell is to see the conditions that the coral has grown under
while in captivity.
Heck, another case for captive-bred corals...
