AHHH! help!

[Im SpSing]

I swear to god my tank is the tank for all parasites and what not. Has anyone ever heard of any predator of toadstool/leather corals that eats away at it from the base up?

I went out on a trip and came back and it looked like there was a dibbet in my leather in the stem. I thought it was my hermit crab but i took him out and every day it still got worse and worse. Now yesterday night the stem totally detatched from the upper plateau. The stem smelled awful and had like 6 pin sized holes in it that look something like burrows. So now i have just the top and that is still getting eaten.

It is still completely healthy and opens up fully.

I really need to find what's wrong or else i dont get any corals for christmas.

 

[Hormigaquatica]

There are a few things that can do that- Ive run into a couple worms that bury into leathers and can cause something like the divets youre describing, though Ive not seen them go to quite That extent.
First things first, check all your water params.
Then assuming all is OK, I would say take out the healthy capitulum of the leather and cut off the end that seperated from the rest of the stalk, about 1" up into the healthy tissue. Hopefully whatever is eating away at it will be discarded with the infected portion.

 

[Doug]

Hormigaquatica has some good advice. If you do cut it, make sure that you keep a lot of water flow on the area you cut. I have had something similar happen to one of my leathers. It was too far gone to save it but it started wasting away from the base like you describes. I ended up cutting the top into 8 frags.

 

[johnnybravo234]

Make sure you are running carbon too.. leathers release some noxious stuff when they are ****ed.

 

[Im SpSing]

well i just did an iodine dip because i read some stuff similar to mine and he performed an iodine dip and said his revived perfectly. So, the yellow parts ( the parts that were infected ) have now receded and are almost gone. I hope that this solved the problem. If not, i will try to cut away the infection.