Duncan melting?

[starionesir]

I have been battling a hair algae issue lately and have been running biopellets in my recirculating avast reactor and started about a month ago running brs high capacity gfo in my other avast reactor. I've noticed the duncan and xenia are looking rough but everything else looks fine. The other corals are some fuzzy mushrooms, zoas and polyps and a large frogspawn. They all look fine and have been growing like crazy. Only thing I have changed really is running the gfo as the biopellets have been running for about 2 months. Also the hair algae is really not going away either which is frustrating as I am trying to make it disappear and it looks like I've only managed to hurt my coral instead. Here is my tank parameters

salinity 1.025
ph 8.3
calcium 400 ppm
mag 1300 ppm
dkh 9.6
nitrate 0 ppm
phosphate .19 ppm

After about a month of running the gfo and pellets my phosphate has dropped from .27 to the .19 so its working.

Any ideas will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Scott07]

My thoughts would be that you may be lowering phosphates too quickly with the GFO. At 0.19, you're still going to have hair algae if it's in your tank. It isn't until you get your phosphates down to.... probably 0.05 or under that you're going to see that start to die off. Go slow.... both the duncan and xenia like dirtier water, and may take some time to adjust to lower phosphates. Just my $0.02 : )

 

[starionesir]

There both still opening some but for sure not near as happy as there were before. Phosphate dropped about .10 ppm in about a month so not sure if that was too quick or not. So probably doing large water changes would not make anything better maybe even make them more upset?

 

[Scott07]

There both still opening some but for sure not near as happy as there were before. Phosphate dropped about .10 ppm in about a month so not sure if that was too quick or not. So probably doing large water changes would not make anything better maybe even make them more upset?

Honestly if it were me.... and I am relatively new here also... so take that for what it's worth. I would just cut back the flow to your GFO reactor, and observe for a few days to see how things react. I wouldn't shut it off completely or anything... I would just slow down your flow and try and take your phosphates down a little slower.

Of course it could be something else entirely... but that's just what I would try first based on the info you've provided.

 

[starionesir]

I changed the gfo out last night and did turn it down a good bit. I always thought mushrooms and polyps liked dirty water too which you would think they would be affected as well.

 

[starionesir]

Anybody else think it's just because of the lower phosphate that it doesn't like?

 

[Crusinjimbo]

What do you use to test water parameters? Maybe your kits are not prov.iding accurate test results. Some info on your setup (size, lighting, other filtration, etc).

 

[starionesir]

Here is a picture of the duncan when I got home yesterday. As for the test kits I'm using red sea and hanna checkers to I know the numbers are correct. And if the water was so far off I would expect all to show signs of a issue not just the duncan and xenia.

Tank is 100 gallon with a 40 gallon sump. Running two avast reactors one with bio pellets and the other with brs high capacity gfo. Skimmer is a rlss 6i skimmer. Lighting is two ocean revive T247's running at about 60%

I also included the picture of my frogspawn to show its seeming to do just fine and so are the zoas, polyps and leathers as well.