Bubble Coral Not Opening Much

[cm11599ps]

I got a Bubble Coral through live aquaria about a month ago. I put him on the substrate in my 55 under a 4 bulb T5. It's been about a month and I still only see about 5 bubbles appearing in random areas. The coral is about 2" across.

Temp 81-83
pH 7.95-8.2
Conductivity 36.6
Ammonia, Nitrite nitrate 0
Phosphate .1
Calcium 420
Alk 8
Mag 1300

Everything else in my tank seems to be great. Open Brain, Sun Coral, Green Hairy Mushrooms, Candy Canes, Orange Digitata, Grape Digitata, Toadstool, Green Paly's, Acans & Frogspawn.

Any ideas?

 

[lgull1]

make sure you do not have him in a high flow area. also make sure you don't have any critters picking on him in the sand where you have him. They don't like to be blown around much. I have had mine for over 10 years and they are a pretty hardy coral. :bounce3:

 

[cm11599ps]

It doesn't seem to be too high of a flow but I could try to move him.

 

[STS_Rock]

Nice Tank

 

[lgull1]

have you tried feeding him? see if the tentacles extend and the bubble coral tries to feed. if you have had him for a month and never tried to feed him that could also be a problem. I have always spot fed mine. If the bubbles are swaying in the current that is not a high flow area. If they are getting blown around like in a wind tunnel that would be too high a flow.

 

[shayna123]

My bubble likes to bounce

 

[Alex33324]

Bubble corals are one of the most delicates corals as far as shipping and handling. I am tired of see them dying in LFS and I bought 4 before finding one that survive, and that's only because I visit the LFS and saw that nobody bought it for 3 weeks that I jump in and bought it.

Once they survive the shipping they become a very hardy. I have mine for over 2 years and I love it, but only after I bought 4 that did not survive.

The problem is that they might look ok in the store, but they are not.

I can only suggest to leave it alone don't handle it too much, and wait to see if it makes it.

 

[jascymcl]

Feed it krill and he will survive.

 

[hupababy83]

I bought my Bubble coral at the LFS even though it had 3-4 bubbles and the rest was skeleton. I put "Little Joe" (yes I name my corals) in my nano, gave my usual "daily vitamin" dose to the tank, fed some mysis shrimp to the tank and now Little Joe has tripled in size! Well in bubbles. I don't know if its the supplements or the feeding the tank, but he sure loves whatever it is!

Sent from my HTC Liberty using Tapatalk

 

[victor escobar]

I also think they are very delicate and do not react very well to mishandling.

I fully agree that they do not ship well and even they do not adapt very well to new environments.

I have now two aftere buying many. The first one is now more than a year and is growing and growing. The other one had a bad episode when I bought it; it was good at the shop but started to recede one septa after the other until it lost half of the tissue on one side, so I put epoxy in the dead skeleton just to the tissue that was alive.

After two days the remaining living tissue started to recover and now is healing very well and polliping out gorgeously.