acropora strange diseases

K

KIDULT

New member
hi everybody!

Is there anybody, who know what is going on with my acroporas?

Water:
Kh- 8-9
po4 - 0.04-0.20 (hanna)
no3 - 0-0.4 - hanna
salinity - 34 ppt (hanna)
temp. 25-27 C
lighting - 10x80W T5
Skimmer - KZ S
Salt - KZ (the same for last 6 months)

Diseases started about 3 months ago
One thing changed in my tank - i started with NP Reducing Biopellets from half of may 2010

Photos:








some acroporas are going down slowly. But not all in the same time, one after one

I'd be very glad for some help.
Kidult, Poland
 
tagging along, my are doing the same thing and I haven't changed a thing!
I lost a colony that had encrusted a 10" circle, with more babies than I could count.
 
Hmmm, at first I thought it was bleaching, and then I saw the green acro and see you have tissue loss.

If it is STN, that's odd since STN starts, usually, bottom-up.

Good luck finding out what is wrong. Do you frag the healthy parts?
 
change brand of salt asap and do some 20% water changes every other day. its alk related in my opinion experienced this myself using a lower brand of salt which had false readings of alk (there is a way to truly determine alk in a salt i can't remember right now but you have to subtract something out of it and then it reveals its true alk...) my old salt said it had an alk of almost 8 but once i figured it out it was really around 5.5dkh all my sps would go down hill slowly tips burnt and receding of the bases slowly but once i changed salt and did water changes they bounced back within a few weeks literally and death areas started regrowing very fast i posted about this issue like 4 years ago now.
 
oh by the way i use tropic marin pro now and ever since 4 years ago and have never experienced this problem since in any of my tanks and i had a 180g sps tank packed with sps
 
no problem for reals though i had the same problem sps would lose color and tips would melt/burn off.... finally found out through research and others on this board that it was the poor quality salt that used some sort of buffers which were not true alkalinity so it would give false readings on test kits but in reality the real usable alk to the sps was low and caused these issues.... this happened to me for the first 3-4 months slowly and once i got the new higher quality TM pro salt things started rebounding literally after 1 water change and after a few weeks everything was regrowing over the dead parts and took off!!
 
Agreed that this is an alk issue and I agree that cheap salt has low Alk but I disagree that is what is causing your issue because from the looks of your colonies I am sure you are dosing your alk prior to water changes? Did you over dose or something?
 
looks like it could be aefws.... I would test dip a piece and see. I see a lot of white marks on the body of the acro and that doesn't seem to be the case with alk problems. Whatever it is, good luck, you have some very nice corals.
 
Its an alk issue. When you carbon dose, you need to lower your alk or you will burn your tips. Happened to me. If you dose too fast on startup its even worse.
 
If your alk is 8-9 DKH then that is fine. Your Po4 is what would concern me!! .2 hanna?? R U serious?? That is EXTREMELY high P04. When I had a problem with Po4 mine was .12 and for the record my acro's looked like yours.. Do another po4 test with hanna meter and report back. I'd also check for AEFW's as well.

I try to keep my Po4 < .04
 
If he's dosing carbon to lower p and n and he's doing it fast, then an alk of 9 can and will cause the tips to burn. There have been plenty of people that it's happened to, including me. I dose heavily and after a year the highest I can bring alk up to and not cause bleaching is 8.6. When I started dosing I had to come down to 7.
 
check your bio pellet reactor. If you have any large group clumped together you could be releasing hydrogen sulfide into the tank...toxic to corals and fish. I ran bio pellets briefly and had the same issue of STN and lost some big colonies. Found a big grouping of pellets under the top cap of my reactor. I also was dosing a bad batch of microbacter 7. (if it is yellow and has clumps in it..it is bad!!) I found out the hard way. It is possible that the alk can be some of the issue, especially with the burnt tips, but your sps STN looks like a nutrient issue in my opinion. Are the corals losing color as well?? Usually with alk burn, the corals retain their color. Nutrient problem, they will lose color.
 
my corals lost color, nearly everyone is maximum browned.
i made 25% WC one week ago (instant ocean salt). corals are going down all the time.
look at new photos:









i pulled out biopellets one week ago.
 
Last edited:
I noticed a similar problem about 3 weeks after introducing Vertex pellets but only on the tips and only certain pieces. Others seemed fine. My DKH was a steady 7.8-8. This past week it dropped to 7.4 so I upped my reactor which seems to have made things worse. I'm going to let my DKH fall to 7 and see what happens. Oddly it seems only certain colonies are having problems. Montis are doing very well. Wild colonies also perfectly fine. Home grown are the problem children. They were doing very well prior to the pellets. I started with 25% of the recommended volume of pellets then upped it to 50% about 2 weeks ago. Otherwise nothing has changed other than a decrease in N03 and P04.
 
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