Brown Jelly Disease

[Randrew215]

Last night everything in my tank looked fine. Today I see that four of five heads of a torch coral have brown jelly on them. I have a 90 gallon mixed reef. I called ARC and they said that I could try to dip it, but I don't have anything on hand so I threw the coral out. It smelled rank. I have a lot of other euphyllia in the tank. How worried should I be about this spreading and is there anything else I can do to prevent it?

I don't know if it's related, but my tank has just finished recovering from an accident. I fragged a bunch of soft corals for a friend starting a new tank on New years. I went out of town for 5 days and my carbon (which I'd just replaced) wasn't running. Additionally, my tubing for my alk doser kinked and Alk dropped to 6 while I was gone. When I came home I looked at my tank, dropped my bags on the floor, and went straight to work. Everything was bleached out. I lost a clam and I haven't seen my purple lobster since, but everything else has recovered. Maybe this contributed to the brown jelly? Any thoughts or experiences?
-Andy

 

[Eastamherstbias]

Can you cut the heads that are ok?

 

[davidpesce]

With me alk has always been the issue when getting brown jelly. Either too low or increasing it too quickly. Alk might not be the cause but it's certainly an indicator.

 

[tmz]

Brown jelly isa protozoan infection. It starts in necrotic tissue usually from a wound or sting and spreads to healthy tissue. A corals that was dying would get it too and it can spread from coral to coral. It's best to dispose of infected specimes or frag off the infected sections. A lugols dip might help. Absent lugols, a freshwater dip might help some corals if they can tolerate the dip. With death in the tank, I'd be sure to run fresh carbon and skim heavily a aseries of 15% water changes would be useful too, imo.

 

[Randrew215]

Okay, thanks. Coral's out, preparing for a water change later today, will run new carbon and look for signs of spread.