Brown film over a dead head on my torch?

[jadette]

I picked up a 10-head torch over the weekend and it's slowly opening up. One head was 'dead' when I purchased it, but instead of removing it, I decided to keep it on and see if it'll regrow.

Well, this morning, I found a brown, slimey film cover the skeleton of the dead head [pic below].

Is this something I should be concerned about? Should I remove the head from the colony or let it be?

Thanks!
Shirley

 

[katpurdy]

cut it off...quickly...it's brown slime and can infect the whole coral...I have found torches to be very suseptible to brown slime and haven't been able to bring myself to buy another.

 

[cristhiam]

I agree, don't let any of the browstuff touch any of the other heads, it spreads fast. good luck.

 

[dc_909]

I would do a water change and in the bucket that the old water is in, put the torch in it, cut the head off and swish all the remaining brown slime off of it.

 

[edwardw771]

I just had the same exact thing happen last night. I only had two heads on my touch. One looked almost like it yours. And I did not do anything with it. just in case it would come back. Well this morning they were both gone. The whole thing is dead. Which is sad because I really liked that peice. I hate lossing anything.

 

[cristhiam]

How long have you guys had your torches?

 

[jadette]

Egads!

I placed the torch in a low flow area, thinking that it might encourage it to open up, but I'm reading now that the lack of flow just might be what's encouraging the brown jelly formation.

Thanks for the responses. Wish I wasn't 30 miles away from my tank at the moment.

 

[J. Montgomery]

I lost a frogspawn head and had a brown jelly form on the dead head. I just suctioned off the brown stuff with a pipette, and the other head has been unaffected. Though the previous posted solutions are probably better suggestions than what I did.

The exposed skeleton on the bottom head in your picture doesn't look too good either. I only have minimal experience with LPS, but I would think thats a bad sign that it'll die soon.

Your torch looks pretty cool overall, I hope it pulls through.

 

[jadette]

Went back to the LFS where I picked up the coral to get some lugol's solution to handle the brown slime...

Looked at their torch/frogspawn tank and noticed that about 1/4 of them had brown slime on them. I told one of the workers there that maybe she should do something about it before it spreads and she just shrugged her shoulders, rang up my purchase, and said "brown slime doesn't spread".

Sigh.