Bye Cali Tort you will be missed

[TotalVapor]

I changed my flow around so it would move my sand less last week. The other morning I discovered my Cali Tort of 5 + years had suffered RTN. Did a pretty large water change just to be safe and now I see bleaching on some of my other corals.

When things go bad they go bad and fast!

 

[kawicivic]

I wouldn't assume its flow only. There have been some temp spikes in many areas which can cause numerous issues. Run multiple tests and make sure you check all params as I would hate for you to assume its the flow when something else is out of whack. Losing 1 coral is bad enough but I would hate for you to lose more because you overlooked something else.

 

[iap]

That's sucks. My frag of it died last week

 

[klepto]

Ouchness. Sorry to hear that. I love this tort! Do you have any pics of how big it was?

 

[sowellj]

For what its worth, I had on RTN on me a while back. I guess if you are the optimistic sort, you could say that it morphed into an arctic blast acro.

 

[TotalVapor]

I wouldn't assume its flow only. There have been some temp spikes in many areas which can cause numerous issues. Run multiple tests and make sure you check all params as I would hate for you to assume its the flow when something else is out of whack. Losing 1 coral is bad enough but I would hate for you to lose more because you overlooked something else.

We checked the water param, the temp, the lights, the media reactors, the RO/DI units and everything was as stable as it has been for the last 3+ years.

The only other thing we could think of was when we moved the sand back to where it should be it released something that got trapped but we could not find it with normal testing. We have sent out our water to a shop that will test the things we cannot. Waiting to hear back from them. This raised my old suggestion to my wife to just suck out all the sand and go with a bare bottom tank. If I was not so scared of breaking the coral I would move everything to a new glass tank. We have been thinking of going much larger but hard to find a great deal on a huge glass tank.

Someone asked the size of our cali, we never fragged it since we owned it, it was the size a little bigger than a volleyball. The frag we started with was about 2"

We loved our cali but I doubt we will be replacing it. Our 400 gallon tank has over 100 different SPS that we collected over the years.

 

[64Ivy]

Any softies in the tank? A long shot perhaps but I have seen 'cases' of changed water flow patterns beginning alleopathy in corals that had previously adjusted.

 

[andyman]

its possible that by changing the flow you stirred the sandbed which could contain high contents of sulfur, especially in established tanks. That would be toxic to corals and you could kill things fast.

 

[stryker]

i had a similar problem with my XL becker tort colony and it affected all the blue torts in my system. Cali, becker, oregon torts all STN from the bottom. The recession was slow in my case and took its toll over 2-3 months. moving the corals to higher flow areas slowed the recession but it kept going until i had to frag it up and move it to my frag tank. some frags made it, others just kept receeding.

The interesting part was that no other types of sps were effected at all. its almost like a bacterial infection that only targetted tortosa? I never figured it out but I miss them. One colony of oregon tort survived. and has fully recovered.

Good luck with your battle, i would try more flow for sure since it is a large colony.