Dendro flaking and shedding? What's wrong?

[Nemo Niblets]

Hi,

I've had my dendro for a while now. This morning, it was looking really wierd with yellow flakes coming out of the base. About 3 days ago, my heater was off and the temperature dropped to 70 in the tank (shame on me). This same thing happened last time I had a temperature drop, but it always went back to normal. This morning it was really bad though, what could it be? I am uploading a video of it soon.

Thanks!

 

[Nemo Niblets]

Here is the video. Youtube is still processing it so the image quality isn't great, but hopefully you can get the gist of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEv3wmZO8A

 

[aninjaatemyshoe]

I think you have the same problem I had. The yellow things are colonies of small worms. They overtake the dendro pretty quickly. You could try a dip in a dewormer of some kind. I've tried flatworm exit; it didn't work or was too little too late. I wanted to use a product called Levamisole, but it is hard to get (now banned for sale by FDA) and I didn't have time to find a source.

Luckily, it seems that the dendros have a defense against being completely wiped away. A few weeks after my colony was completely destroyed, I had a bunch of small baby dendros all over the skeleton. Here's a link: http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1727065

 

[Nemo Niblets]

Are you sure this looks the same? It's happened before and it was fine.

 

[uhuru]

looks like tissue necrosis to me... possibly stress leading to bacterial infection

not sure what you could do other than try to keep everything as stable as possible, keep the water clean and hope for the best. good luck!

 

[Nemo Niblets]

Ok, thanks. Hopefully it does alright. It should.

 

[aninjaatemyshoe]

It does look pretty similar... Though, the heads on mine sheared off when this was happening. If it happened before and they got better, I would doubt it is the same problem.

 

[mak3mydae]

Whats the worst a dip could do? right?....

 

[blasto_master]

That scares me. I hope my dendros never get those worms.

 

[SanJuan]

Darn it, they are gorgeous dendros.
have you tried the dip? have you tried manual removal? try with a soft toothbrush.
can you isolate it? I would hate to see it spread to others. After treatment try placing it
in darkness, see if that helps. I hope they get better soon. Keep us posted and best of luck.

 

[suta4242]

If its worms, try Melafix.

Make up a double strength dip & leave the coral in there for 20 minutes. With a turkey baster keep swishing water onto the polyps.

I do this now as part of a quarantine process and I've seen a couple of different FW & nudis come off dendros & tubastrea with this dip. At least you'll know whats there before you put it in the display.

HTH

 

[Nemo Niblets]

I left it alone, didn't feed it, and it was fine. It took a while, and lost a little bit of it's color, but is coming around now...

About 4 days later I glued some SPS frags in my tank with Coraffix. The exact same symptoms appeared, but a little less extreme. Of course, they came around again! Maybe the super glue gel had something to do with it...

I still don't understand why my more yellow dendro's flaked, but the brighter red ones were not affected one bit.

Anyways, my dendro is tough as nails... and after that happened it sprouted two new babies!