Can this hammer recover?

M

marcusbacus

New member
I bought this hammer a few days ago (about a week or so), and while setting it up along with some other corals, another coral fell on top of that place at the right with 2 small mouths that is now fully white... oh well :sad2: .

It had some small tentacles for a few days after the burn in that place, then they all fell off and it was like when the coral is entirely deflated, kind of grayish/dark minus the green bits. A couple days later, this region started to become whiter and whiter (and these white bits seem to be growing and getting rounder and "bumpier"), and it doesn't look exacly like a dead tissue to me. The other mouths (2) at the left aren't that great but they are alive. I haven't touched the coral since.

There is now a white "link" between the 2 parts (#1 arrow in the pic) that wasn't there 2 days ago. Number 2 is a little kid sprouting... it had a tiny shade of green but it's not very visible lately.

Question: is that white part some kind of recovery/protective tissue or is it dead? I had a hammer in the past that died and it looked very different when it died, it didn't get white like that, it just "dried" and the green parts disappeared. As this white part is growing and it's a bit different from dead coral skeletons that I have seen, it seems that it's not really a loss so far. Or is it? Here's the pic:

hammern.jpg
 
Unfortunately I think you're right. Today there are some white stripes appearing in the green area which means it's really dying, as this new pic shows. Should I cut it out to preserve the other bit that seems to be ok (although far from being healthy...)?

hammer2.jpg
 
I haven't seen this either. Although it doesn't look good, it doesn't look exactly bad either. I see no sign of decaying flesh (albeit injured). I think I'd leave it alone. At most, I'd dip in iodine and move it to a low light, low flow area.
 
I have the TLF Iodine, would it help?
If it wasn't for this bleaching in the green area, I wouldn't mind either and I was actually really planning to let it as is, as untouched as possible.
It's already in a low flow area, and at the substrate. I think moving it anywhere else can be a bad idea, even if for a "safer" place.
 
That should be fine. You could either do a dip or dose according to manufacturer instructions. Personally, I would do both. Beyond that, I think I'd leave it untouched since it's in a low flow/light area.

Sorry...this is a new one on me. Keep us posted...this is interesting. I'll keep thinking about it.
 
I'm dosing it occasionally, and I think that for a dip I'll have to remove it and it might stress the hammer a little... better see what happens in the next week or so first I think. It doesn't seem to have bugs or anything different.

Edit: Things aren't going that well... this morning, this was the aspect of the other mouth:

hammer3.jpg


It's exactly the same as the other one was before getting bleached as this. First it loses the tentacles, then that part looks dead but not white and then this white stuff covers it up. I might left the hammer there for a week or so just to see what happens. BTW all my parameters seem to be fine, except for the Ca that is a bit high (test goes only to 500 and it's higher than that, pink algae starting to cover the rocks) and the nitrates that are 25ppm (it's a fairly new tank, reassembled about a month ago after a crash due to a bad salt batch).
 
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With the hammer I first thought about that brown jelly stuff or something (after checking for bugs/planaria etc.), but there weren't signs of anything wrong, suddenly it was ok then the next day the polyps were decaying.

Since the restart most of the corals I've been adding aren't as good as I'm expecting, I must say. 2 small zoas for example never opened at all - one is here for almost 3 weeks, in the first day it was barely open but the other never opened at all.

Definitely most of the other corals aren't the best they can be, but in some cases I think it's just some sort of adaptation process, they're fairly new additions - and all from sources I've never acquired from before. I have this ricordea (glued to a rock) that now has this very long "body" like a tube (4-5 cm long), and its main part isn't opening too much except for food and it's changing its position occasionally... but there is a very small new ricordea growing right beside it... so I think it looks strange like that because it's splitting or something, I read that mushrooms look pretty strange when they're splitting. This other green caulastrea is kind of "deflated" but doesn't seem dead, although there is some green algae growing a bit too close. It was never too big from the beginning anyway. The other caulastrea is fine. If some of these are dying, they should have been dead, I think corals don't take longer to die even when sick like some fish do and some have been looking like they are now for a week or 2, only the hammer really got worse.

What is really interesting is that I had never much luck with xenias, and when I bought some corals other day (same batch as this hammer I think) the guy sent me a small colony for free (I wouldn't buy it as all the times I've tried in the past they died pretty fast), and the xenia is the best coral so far in my tank, it even released a few tiny polyps that are in another small piece of rock. Go figure...
 
pull it out of the tank and smell it, it it smells rotten its dunzow, saw my frogspawn wither away after a peppermint shrimp decided to have it for a snack and it never recovered looking better than that, their just real sensitive, soon ull see ribs with tissue melting off. sorry bud
 
The same happened to my branching hammer which arrived in a bad condition. I didnt throw off the skeleton and in a month the hammer regrew with atleast 30 small heads at once. Now its a huge colony. Keep the skeleton in your tank itself in case it does not make it.
 
If It's falling off the skeleton like that it will not make it. I just had one of my
decay just like that, It didn't make it. As for the wierd white growth, what does it feel like?
 
I haven't touched it, but it doesn't look like it's 100% calcified, at least the part that is at the top of it. It's rounded with small little bumps and it looks like sort of a "foam". It's not 100% white too, which makes me think it's not calcified (yet?). A new pic, taken some minutes ago:

hammer4.jpg


Notice that the "fresh dead" part at the left doesn't look too "dead", it's still green/pinkish and sort of fleshy, it's not getting any whiter (yet?...). It seems that it just sort of discarded the tentacles for a regrowth (well that's what I'm hoping for anyway...).
 
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Not much happening with the hammer except for some apparent shrinkage of that white stuff that appeared first. But... this small caulastrea seems to be suffering from the same problem today...

002ako.jpg


Happened overnight, yesterday it was still fine.

Ammonia was rising fast too... did some big water change to fix it (75%), it's between 0 and 0.25 in my test. Also got some new live rock to replace my still half-dead/half-alive ones, hopefully it can make things get a little healthier. It gives me another lesson about why I shouldn't buy live things from the internet. From now on, only at my fav LFS. It's a little bit more expensive, but way much safer.

The hammer pics of today (with a close-up of the oldest affected area)... did I just see little bugs? Or just copepods that came with the new live rock that found something to eat?

003ath.jpg

003btm.jpg
 
I'd get those out before they mess with your tank more - they aren't coming back. Can you post up all parameters (ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, pH, salinity, temp, alk/ca/mag) as well as tank specs (size, sump, lighting time and type, running AC/GFO, etc)? Something about all this isn't sitting well with me...especially since it is spreading. Let's rule out a tank problem, but this is just seeming too much like a virus.
 
As it's a pico (13L, Dymax IQ5) I am aware that small things can cause a disaster quite soon... I try to keep things in order monitoring it as much as I can. Water changes are done every 2-3 days the most, 2 litres the most at once unless there's something wrong. Evaporated water is replaced everyday. Default lights, 10 hrs/day. No fauna other than the corals and around 10 snails (which seem to be fine, I even saw a very small neritina other day).

Last time I checked everything was fine, My Ca test is over so I can't check it but it was a little over 500 last time I used it (Tropic marin Ca/Mg test - can't use the Mg either but last time it was around 1050 I think). Ammonia was zero until this test I did yesterday, where it reached 1.5 (!) kind of unexpectedly, maybe the hammer is dead after all. Immediately I did this big water change and tested it again this afternoon (before these last pics were taken) and it was between 0 and 0.25. The old water was very yellow, which I didn't notice just looking at the tank. Nitrites were 0 last time I checked (didn't test them in the last days but it might have raised due to the ammonia peak), nitrates 0.5. Alk is in the light blue scale of the Red Sea test (impossible to determine a specific value... but it's in the "normal" range), pH 8.2. Salinity 1024, temp 25C (10C outside late night...). Phosphates was in the first faint blue value of the Salifert test (can't remember the value).

I'm almost sure that it isn't due to any parameter change/problem, it's more something that went wrong with the hammer and it's spreading, the ammonia peak was a result of the hammer dying and not the reverse. The hammer was burn when I was setting some other coral in place other day and it fell on the hammer as I've said in the beginning of the post, and although I think this could have been some sort of a trigger, the hammer wasn't in good shape since the start (small, not opening that much, although colourful). The frags I saw for sale yesterday at my LFS are in way much better health than this one was.

I have some small pieces of green hair algae growing here and there, but I don't think they could have suffocated the corals or something, there wasn't any near the hammer, just near the caulastrea.

This ammonia peak made the xenias (which were the healthiest so far) to close a little more than they were 2 days ago (they are really a good warning sign that something is wrong! If they weren't strange I'd probably not have made an ammonia test...), but they don't seem to be decaying, there are even some small polyps that were released elsewhere and seem to be fixed and growing. If this other caulastrea I have start to show any sign of problems, then I'll guess it's really a virus or something that is spreading out...

There is a lot of good stuff in these new live rocks (lots of red tube worms, small sponges, dark green/red algae and even an asterina came out today), I hope it can help fix things.
 
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