Brown Jelly Disease

nuttyd

New member
About two months ago, I took over a friends corals who passed. Most were receding due to tank not being maintained well after. After adding to my tank, the majority of the corals bounced back quickly. Large duncan colony, bubble coral, cinnamon polyps, trumpets all returned to normally in a week or two. Frogspawn and hammers were slower. A lot of the heads are growing back, but some just died off. Never saw any signs or anything of disease, they just recessed back and never came back. This last weekend, i came home and saw what appeared to be a small patch of red slime on one of the heads that died a week or so back. Freaked out and took the coral out and immediately broke the piece off just in case it was brown jelly. Been a few days and havent seen any issues with other lps.

My question is this, if you have an established tank and you dont add any new corals for a while, is brown jelly present and looking for a coral to attack? Or is it brought in by a new coral that is sick and then spreads to others?
 
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Brown jelly is an infection that can be caused by something hitting it or a fish nipping on it where it causes a cut in the flesh then the infection sets in. I don't know if it's just in all systems or what the actual bacteria is but it's pretty hard to save one unless you can catch it right away and use iodine for a dip. I was not successful when my Duncan colony got it and I lost the whole colony even after fragging all of the heads off that had flesh on them and moved to another tank.

Here is a link that might clarify some of it for you.

http://www.athiel.com/lib/bacterial.html
 
I have read enough about it to understand what it is and how it works, but I really cant find a source that says whether its naturally in all tanks or not. The biggest reason for this curiosity for me is that in moving the corals two months ago, the bubble coral got extremely beat up. Almost 50% of the fins where sticking through the flesh. But it wasn't attached by brown jelly then. It just seems like there was a better opportunity for infection that didnt happen.
 
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