Is it Dying?

[rk4435]

Sadly I have yet another piece of apparently dying coral. The photo may be hard to see but it has been a bit bleached for several weeks which I attributed to parameter problems. Now it seems to have some blackish tips and it is very stony rather than soft.

I'm not positive where the nightmare started. I believe it was about 8 weeks ago when I was verifying my parameters to add a clam to what I thought was a stable system. My Calcium was low so I buffered. At the time I was advised that the Calcium buffering may have driven my Alk low because it ultimately turned out that my Calcium kit was bad and my Alk was suddenly low for the first time in 15 months since set up. That's when I started losing coral. On top of that I wound up with high Phos, or not, depending on which test kit you believe.

Do I seem frustrated?
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[outdrsyguy1]

I understand your frustration, i've had some ghost issues myself as of late. It looks like a goner to me. from the angle of the picture it looks like it started with a run in to that monti.

keep at it though, i'm sure there's a survivor section on it that will pull through, you'll just have to regrow to that size.

 

[rk4435]

Dumb question, can Monti harm it? I pulled it off the rock and held it with tongs to get a picture. It did have monti growing up to it though where it was.

 

[camellia]

If it was mine I would move it to an area with a little less less light and flow than currently.
Try to keep sand off it (but don't shoot water forcefully at it).

It looks like it might eat. If you could turn the flow down low, set it on the bottom, feed it some Rods, Frenzy or brine... I would put a glass bowl over it to give it time to eat with out the food getting stolen.
It's not dead, but will need TLC to recover and make you proud!

What is it? A Lobo maybe? I'd pick up corals with your hand gently, those tongs could rip the tissue really easy. But yes I'm sure Monti can sting, it gets stung too.

 

[camellia]

When in doubt of a test or pram out of whack, doing a water change is always a good idea and will only help, unlike dosing. Yea yea you already know that now, I'm sure.
Sorry for your loss and frustrations!

 

[jennm]

Disc corals are pretty resilient. Move it to the sandbed where it belongs, and away from stinging neighbours and let it be.

All corals have some sort of defense mechanism. Sweeper tentacles, toxicity, whatever they need to do to protect their piece of real estate on the reef. So if you stack them too close together, they're going to go to war, plain and simple.

Quit tinkering with your chemistry - you can tinker things right to death. Do some water changes with good quality salt mix, make sure your temp and SG are OK then leave it alone for a couple or three weeks and let things settle before you try to dial anything in again.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but I've seen it happen so many times when people dose for this and throw off that, to the point where the tank's equilibrium is way out of whack.

Let it find its equilibrium again, then you can fine tune it if you feel you need to.

Jenn

 

[rk4435]

Thanks guys, it's now in my sump where it will get gentle light three to four hours per evening. I moved another piece there three or four weeks ago and it is recovering nicely.

I know what you mean about tinkering to death Jenn. Things were fine for a long time until the Calcium incident and it's been a mess ever since. It seems like it started losing color when the Alk went wacky and I thought it would recover when it stabilized, I was shocked to see it take a turn for the worse.

 

[saltbubbles]

I think it will recover in the sump just try to feed it. BTW, if you do water changes regularly and your calcium was still low, I would check magnesium first. Remember Alk, Mag and Cal work together.

 

[camellia]

Awww, good it's a plate it don't look so bad

 

[rk4435]

Actually my Mag was a bit below the normal level, but it has been that way since the Calcium problem.

 

[saltbubbles]

rk4435;991994 wrote: Actually my Mag was a bit below the normal level, but it has been that way since the Calcium problem.

Yup. I would suspect the problem started with Magnesium. It is my understanding that Magnesium allows us to keep high leves of calcium. Maybe someone that keeps mainly SPS can correct me.

 

[tanks4life]

I dose magnesium. Everything I have found says magnesium helps critters be able to break down calcium in order to use it to grow. Not technical terminology but i hope it makes sense. Anything with a shell, inverts like shrimp and hermits, sps and lps all use calcium to grow. Without proper levels of magnesium they are not able to properly use the calcium. I just brought a plate back from bleached white. They recover pretty well. And they really do best on the sand where they can move on their own. Don't worry too much about sand on them as they will inflate themselves to clean the sand off. Also from the looks of it you have some skeleton showing. It's a blessing in disguise. The mother coral will typically reproduce on the areas where she was damaged. Give her a few weeks maybe a month or two but I bet you get babies!!!!

 

[tanks4life]

I also feed mine every other day. Nothing special, I just blend up mysis shrimp, brine shrimp, and silversides. I cut a 2 liter bottle in half and stuck some flexible pcv in the half with the bottle top. I place it over the coral and use a syringe to inject the food into the feeder. I leave it for about 30 minutes to allow the coral to eat as much as it can. It seems to really help with growth as well as speedy recovery when they are wounded or upset.


Also since they are photosynthetic does your sump have adequate lighting for them? If not may cause the algae colonies in them to die off. I think. I could be wrong but that's my understanding. ...