Elegance Coral theory

[elegance coral]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10333637#post10333637 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Serioussnaps
Does this mean anything to you elegance coral?

"A parasitic gall crab has recently been found beneath the tissue of almost all Catalaphyllia examined with this condition (Shimek pers comm, www.rshimek.com)."

Yes it does. I couldn't open the link, but I remember reading something about this. I just pulled a gall crab out of one of my Elegance corals a few days ago. Nasty looking things. However I don't believe they are the cause of the problems we are having. In Shimek's case I believe his research system, holding tanks, or the area where they were collected must have been contaminated with these crabs. They get plenty big enough to see with the naked eye. I would find it hard to believe that all the people that have studied this problem have missed something as large and nasty as this crab. I have lost more Elegance corals in this study than I would like to admit. This is the first gall crab I have found in any of my corals, even after examining their dead skeletons. This is a problem that seems to be getting worse. Not just with Elegance corals though. I just hope they can not reproduce in captivity. The one I found and all the pics I have see (not that I have seen a ton) all had eggs in them.

 

[elegance coral]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10334805#post10334805 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by DrDNA
elegance coral-

have another question for you. I had picked up a small elegance coral at the LFS that was mostly brown, i.e. very little GFP. I put it under a mix of the 10K and 14K and it shrunk up and wouldn't expand after a couple days. I moved it to the back under indirect 14K light and it is opening some. It does produce quite a bit of slime overnight and I blow it off in the AM. Basically its oral disc will open after the lights have been on for a couple hours and tentacles are short little "nubs". It sounds a lot like the ones you have had and are "rehabbing". It also did not do the routine where it swells up like a balloon.
My question is... is this always lethal, or do they eventually recover? I have not seen any tissue recession from the skeleton and have not seen any bleaching. it just won't open and expand its tentacles. It did produce some of the "white spiderweb" stuff for a few days, but has ceased doing that. It has been this way for about three weeks and isn't getting any worse. Moving it to a lower lighting has helped some...

When you say that the oral disk will open up what do you mean? It's very easy to confuse the beginnings of swelling with normal expansion. I have done it many times. If the lights are slightly to intense for the coral after a few hours of exposure they will begin to swell. The first stages of this can be seen in the area between the mouths and tentacles. This area should be flat or almost straight. If this area arches or balloons up between the mouths and tentacles it is in the beginning stages of swelling. The lights will need to be reduced in strength or period. The lights may go off before the coral reaches the full swollen posture you see in the pics. However every day that the coral goes through this it is being damaged. Over time its health will deteriorate and the coral will surcome to an infection and die.
This is by no means always fatal. I have seen them come back when even I didn't think they would survive, and I'm an optimist. These are some tough corals. It is amazing the amount of damage they can sustain and somehow pull through.
With that said, they can not be permitted to swell up at all. Every time they do they sustain more damage. Eventually even the toughest coral will lose the fight. It sounds like you may have made it through the toughest part. When they are discharging filaments and producing slime at night, they are in very bad shape. You did the right thing by removing this slime every morning. (have you been reading my posts?) The road to recovery is very long. If you can keep the coral from swelling up it can make it. It will not feed for some time, however. I am experimenting with dosing vitamins and amino acids to speed up this process. I have no idea if this will work or not, but I figured it wouldn't hurt. Only time will tell.

 

[elegance coral]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10335406#post10335406 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by gsellers1245
just a suggestion keep some full frozen water bottles for the next time that happens that way you can drop them in your sump and it'll cool the temp down ok.

Thanks for the advice. I see your from Florida. Has it been freakin hot or what? I have 10 water bottles. I keep 5 in the freezer and 5 in my sump. I switch them out twice a day to keep the temp below 80. That's with the AC going, the cabinet open and fans blowing. I need a chiller.

 

[gsellers1245]

yeah im in brandon, which is a bit south east of tampa. We hit 96 tuesday and wednesday. At the fish farm we hit 97 inside where the tanks are and humidity was off the charts. If i run across any chillers il let ya know
BTW both elegance are doing great thanks again for the help man ill keep the thread updated

 

[elegance coral]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10336407#post10336407 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by gsellers1245
yeah im in brandon, which is a bit south east of tampa. We hit 96 tuesday and wednesday. At the fish farm we hit 97 inside where the tanks are and humidity was off the charts. If i run across any chillers il let ya know
BTW both elegance are doing great thanks again for the help man ill keep the thread updated

Thanks. It looks like you been slackin though. It has been a while since any updates. and your thread is on page 3 . Just kiddin. I ran into a guy at a new LFS in the area and he started talking to me about your thread. I thought that was cool. It's amazing how many people read these things.

 

[elegance coral]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10133353#post10133353 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by DrDNA
As for nutrients, I recall it still having some nitrates and phosphates, definitely enough to make hair algae grow. This was about ten years ago, I don't recall what the parameters were, but I seem to think we'd be happy if nitrates were under 10ppm. Also, there was a lot less flow too than your modern day SPS tanks.
When people say that currently most elegance corals are collected from deeper waters, what exactly do you mean? Are they coming from 20 feet, 50 feet, etc? From what I understood in the past, most elegance corals were found in seagrass beds or laying on soft sediments. Seagrass itself doesn't grow in deep water since it is an angiosperm and supposedly needs bright light, at least fromwhat I understand (could be wrong of course)...
Just curious!

Jeff

I'm sorry! I don't know how I missed this post. According to Borenman these corals are coming from as far down as 114 feet, or at least were photographed at this depth. I have heard other reports of these corals being collected at 60 feet. Either way the available light at these depths is much different than the light in the shallow grass flats. Elegance corals can be found in a wide range of environments. This is the reason for all the myth and misunderstanding of this corals requirements.

 

[DrDNA]

Let me elaborate a little more on the condition of the "sick" elegance coral I have. The oral disk does not seem to swell up. It does open up but doesn't get "puffy", but the tentacles don't inflate much either. It is like the coral is trying to expand but doesn't fill up with water. I really should take a pic. It doesn't look like the characteristic "sick" ones that look like a water balloon. As for gently blowing off the mucus, it just seemed like the common sense thing to do to allow fresh seawater to get to the polyp.

Regarding amino acids etc, I dose my tank daily with "ecosystems reef solution". I don't know what is in the bottle, but it does seem to have a positive effect on my tank (more polyp extension, better colors, etc). I recently tried dosing Elos amino acids and stopped after a couple days when all my zoas refused to open and the other LPS seemed unhappy. So, that is a mystery there...

I don't buy into the pathogen theory either, but I also can't offer an alternative hypothesis. My gut level feeling is that there is just something simple we are all missing that changed somewhere along the line. Just because Borneman says it is a pathogen, everyone jumps on the bandwagon. But, to this date, no one has demonstrated a cause and effect of a pathogen causing the "disease". No pathogen has been isolated, cultured, and then demonstrated to cause the condition when a healthy elegans is exposed to it via a challenge.

 

[elegance coral]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10337045#post10337045 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by DrDNA


I don't buy into the pathogen theory either, but I also can't offer an alternative hypothesis. My gut level feeling is that there is just something simple we are all missing that changed somewhere along the line. Just because Borneman says it is a pathogen, everyone jumps on the bandwagon. But, to this date, no one has demonstrated a cause and effect of a pathogen causing the "disease". No pathogen has been isolated, cultured, and then demonstrated to cause the condition when a healthy elegans is exposed to it via a challenge. [/B]

I'm glad to hear that your coral is not swelling. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference so I just wanted to make sure. It sounds like your coral will be fine. It will just take a long time to fully recover. It's tentacles will remain small for quite some time. They are a good barometer of the corals recovery. Over time the tentacles will slowly get longer and longer. It's sting will become stronger as well and it will begin feeding. This just doesn't happen over night.


Your right. Borenman found several different organisms living in dead and dieing Elegance coral tissue. It would be a lot of work to culture these organisms then expose a healthy coral to them to test the results. Even then I don't believe this would prove that they are the cause of the problem. We have known for a very long time that infections can be contagious in a closed system. In your case and many times in my system there have been very ill corals in with healthy ones. I assume your two large Elegance corals are still doing fine. This problem is not contagious. The only time it becomes contagious is after a coral has developed an infection. The infection is secondary and not the cause of the problem.
I think you should trust your gut feeling. There is something simple that changed along the way that many of us have been missing. Including myself. It is the fact that these corals are coming from deeper waters. They have a much harder time adjusting to the brighter lights of our aquariums. They show their distaste for bright lights by swelling up and withdrawing their tentacles. After their tissues have been ravaged by this exposure they shrivel up, discharge these filaments, produce a great deal of slime, and require a very long time to rebuild this damaged tissue. It can be done though.
I hope my lfs gets in an appropriate Elegance soon so that I can make the video showing the coral swelling up under bright lights and the rapid decline in health after the fact.

 

[John Kelly]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10136478#post10136478 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by elegance coral
John Kelly, have you noticed a connection between temp and your corals bleaching?

I must have missed this question...

No, not directly. My main tank is consistently 83-84 during the day in the summer. Sometimes it hits 85-86 in the spring when I'm adjusting between using heat and AC and forget to turn on the AC. I would hate to let it get any higher than that. They do appear stressed above 85, but haven't bleached. I do keep a few layers of black fiberglass mesh between the lights and water surface, which act as gentle shading for the corals. This probably keeps the internal temp of the corals down a little bit.

 

[John Kelly]

I previously worked as a professional grower at a greenhouse. It is amazing the amount of bugs, diseases, and afflictions that set in when a plant is in less than perfect health, which usually comes from giving it less than ideal care and/or keeping it in a less than ideal environment.
Corals are very similar to plants in this regard.

 

[Rockitmakr]

Ok,
perhaps I should wait until tomorrow but I am really excited about what happened today. I went to the SRC conference in Orlando, hoping to see Eric Borneman, had no luck. I did however bump into a gentleman named Paul Hines, as we struck up some small talk , we began to talk about how I really wanted to see Eric so that I could ask him about his progress on the Elegance Coral Project. Paul told me that he knew of a guy locally that has really done a lot of research on Elegance corals & might have a cure to my issue.... Well, I recently bought a beautiful Elegance that looked awesome in the LFS display, looked good in mine too, for a day or two.... Then as luck would have it, this coral began to really look sick. I thought that my tank might be out of whack or something but it was not at all. So, after finally finding this thread, I read some posts & decided to move the coral out of the light & into a more secluded area of my tank. Within 1 hour of moving it, things were already starting to look better. I will see how it looks tomorrow but I will say that low light & flow are really making a difference thus far.
Thank you!
:beer:

 

[elegance coral]

I'm glad to see things looking up for you. Keep us posted on its condition.
I picked up 3 very sick Elegance corals from my LFS just over a week ago. I picked them up for $25 each because they were on deaths door. Here are pics of the day after placing them in my tank and at one week.

Day one

week one

Day one

Week one

Week one

They still have a long way to go, but as long as they are improving I'm happy.

 

[jman77]

what kind of light are you putting the elegances under ? i picked up a very sick elegance at a LFS over a month & 1/2 ago and it's doing very good so far. I've got it on the sump on some eggcrate, feed it ever 4 days, very loowwww flow, and have it under 130w of 3 year old CF bulbs.

 

[elegance coral]

My lights are listed at the bottom of my posts. The MH is 14K and it only runs for a few hours a day. What are you feeding your Elegance?

 

[Serioussnaps]

At what point is there not enough light for these corals. I am currently in the process of saving some pennies for a new 180, but there is an elegance(very large) that has been doing outstanding in an LFS around here for about 2 months. I am tempted to buy it, put it in my sump under some actinic PC lighting(2x65 or 1x65) but didnt know if it would be too little? What do you think? My gut tells me to hold off, but this is an unreal specimen that I dont thin kI will see again in an LFS around here for a while. I dont want to buy an elegance off the internet so you see the pickle I am in. There is no way this specimen can be in my display/growout......its a full fledged SPS tank with lots of flow and no room.

 

[elegance coral]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10350145#post10350145 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Serioussnaps
At what point is there not enough light for these corals. I am currently in the process of saving some pennies for a new 180, but there is an elegance(very large) that has been doing outstanding in an LFS around here for about 2 months. I am tempted to buy it, put it in my sump under some actinic PC lighting(2x65 or 1x65) but didnt know if it would be too little? What do you think? My gut tells me to hold off, but this is an unreal specimen that I dont thin kI will see again in an LFS around here for a while. I dont want to buy an elegance off the internet so you see the pickle I am in. There is no way this specimen can be in my display/growout......its a full fledged SPS tank with lots of flow and no room.

What lighting is it under now? If it is still very large after 2 months under the same lights I would try to mimic those lights. I have been told that they have just opened a new area for collecting Elegance corals. I Recently bought a shallow water coral that was not from Australia, so I think there may be something to this story. The coral you are talking about is probably a shallow water coral. Most of the deep water corals have been damaged to some extent by the time they reach our LFS so they aren't very large. If you could snap a couple of pics of the coral and post them here I would most likely be able to tell you if it is a shallow water coral or a deep water coral. A shallow water coral would not do well under the PC lighting. I'm sorry I can't be of more assistance, but with shallow water Elegance corals coming into the hobby now it's difficult to say what lights an Elegance needs without seeing the coral.

 

[gsellers1245]

i would say with lots of flow id wait.

 

[Serioussnaps]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10352915#post10352915 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by elegance coral
What lighting is it under now? If it is still very large after 2 months under the same lights I would try to mimic those lights. I have been told that they have just opened a new area for collecting Elegance corals. I Recently bought a shallow water coral that was not from Australia, so I think there may be something to this story. The coral you are talking about is probably a shallow water coral. Most of the deep water corals have been damaged to some extent by the time they reach our LFS so they aren't very large. If you could snap a couple of pics of the coral and post them here I would most likely be able to tell you if it is a shallow water coral or a deep water coral. A shallow water coral would not do well under the PC lighting. I'm sorry I can't be of more assistance, but with shallow water Elegance corals coming into the hobby now it's difficult to say what lights an Elegance needs without seeing the coral.

The lighting its under is kind of a skewed subject. It is under a 6 foot long tank that has a 400W and 250 W halide over it, however, the lights are about 3-4ft off the surface!!!!They are really up there. Not to mention the elegance is in a far corner of the tank, away from the point source of the MH bulb about 2.5-3 ft horizontally from it. Not to mention the tank is probably 24-30 inches deep. I wouldnt call it high light at all albeit obviously under PC's it will still be less light than it is getting now.

Flow was mentioned by another poster. The flow in my sump is weak sauce...intentionallly. Thats where it would be residing, definitely not in display.

I want to be very careful as this specimen is quite pricey. List price is 250, of course I wont pay this, but will likely be around 200 bucks for it so I dont want to go killing the sucker or having to buy more lighting that would be applicable to the tank I am about to set up.

 

[Serioussnaps]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10352915#post10352915 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by elegance coral
What lighting is it under now? If it is still very large after 2 months under the same lights I would try to mimic those lights. I have been told that they have just opened a new area for collecting Elegance corals. I Recently bought a shallow water coral that was not from Australia, so I think there may be something to this story. The coral you are talking about is probably a shallow water coral. Most of the deep water corals have been damaged to some extent by the time they reach our LFS so they aren't very large. If you could snap a couple of pics of the coral and post them here I would most likely be able to tell you if it is a shallow water coral or a deep water coral. A shallow water coral would not do well under the PC lighting. I'm sorry I can't be of more assistance, but with shallow water Elegance corals coming into the hobby now it's difficult to say what lights an Elegance needs without seeing the coral.

Are you basically saying an elegance that is coming from a high light area in the wild can't adapt well to a lesser lit environment in captivity? and vice versa? I would be more personally concerned with taking a low light/ elegance from deeper water and placing it under more light. This would obviously cause expulsion of zoox but I am not so sure in the other scenario? Maybe you could clarify what you think would happen in either case?

I would go out on a limb and say the specimen I speak of is definitely not a deepwater, but I dont think it came from 4 feet of water either. If i had to guess my t5 lighting would be too much. The area in the tank it is in now is likely much less PAR/PUR than anywhere in the actual display of my system.

 

[jman77]

I feed it mysid and little pieces of silversides. My elegance is doing fine under the 130w CF bulbs,, it's actually grown 2 more mouths while i've had it ....and expands twice the size as when i got it. I'll post some pics tonight

I think we are blasting these corals with too much light and flow.