Green monti caps are now pale pink/beige color but growing quickly

[Homeytwist]

Hey everyone I hate to be "that guy" asking another question about coral coloration but I haven't found much material on my particular issue. I picked up 3 frags of green monti cap (2 from the same all-green colony, 1 from another colony that's green w/purple polyps) and in the 3-4 months that I've had them they're all growing quickly, have regular polyp extension and look very healthy aside from the fact that they're not green anymore! The one still has purple polyps but its main green color is gone.

When I picked them up they were on the fellow's frag rack in low light conditions. They were green-ish but not as green as the parent colony still under the lights (which were LEDs by the way). I used my LUX meter to measure the light intensity the parent colony was receiving and placed the new frags with the same or greater light exposure (after acclimation of course). Over a few weeks they faded from somewhat green to the pale pink/beige color they are now (see photo below).

I'm sure there can be a hundred things that can cause corals in general to have poor coloration, but I'm wondering if anything would stand out as causing green montis to pale out like this. Turning brown? Ok lots of information on how to resolve that. But to be pale with little color? Not so much. My only lead so far has been a possible iron deficiency in the tank.

Quick background on the tank, well established 70gal system running a 250w HQI lamp (was Phoenix 14k, moved to Ushio 10k) with 2x 24w T5 ATI blue+. Photoperiod is about 7 hrs for the halide. All the usual water params are in normal range and are primarily maintained by Kalk dosing in the top-off. System is heated and cooled, held within 1deg. Water movement is handled by an MP10 at 100% and an MP40 at about 65% both running on reef crest mode. The 3 frags are spread from 1/3 to 2/3 of the way up the 24" deep tank.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Louis]

Looks like its been blasted with too much light too fast. When introducing new sps you need to acclimate them to your light. You mentioned the person you got this piece from had a low light environment. My best guess would be that this coral is getting too much light at the moment and has expelled some of its zooxanthella. Turning brown would be quite the opposite, not enough light - a build up of zooxanthella to absorb more energy from the little light that's available = brown.

It is going to take some time to get this piece back to its original color, I would start by moving the piece to a dimly lit area. The best way to know exactly where to put it would be to put a par meter to the spot this piece originally came from and matching that par in your tank. I would not begin moving the piece higher (higher par) until the color returns.

HTH

 

[schoolisbad1]

id say to much lighting

id say to much lighting

i agree, try moving it lower try/shadedish area.

 

[Homeytwist]

Hahah, easier said than done. It's epoxied in place and has encrusted way onto its mount. I've got two urchins in this tank and the 3" pincussion will toss (or carry) any frag that's not securely mounted. I almost have to make an educated guess on where a particular frag should be happy and permanently mount it there otherwise it'll end up travelling around the tank for a few days then into the sand bed!

Louis, I could understand if a dark coral got much lighter due to the missing zooxanthella (which are brown), but for it to lose all of its green pigment? I'm having a hard time understanding that process. On a related note it seems I've gotta get my hands on a PAR meter. I've got my light intensity meter measuring in LUX but that doesn't seem to be giving me the info I need as the frags are in similar exposures as they were in the tank that the mother colony was in but clearly something is different. (note, the frags were in a low-light area and had lost some color but the mother colonies were in full exposure half way up the tank)

I will try to un-mount one of the smaller frags that hasn't encrusted so much and move it down to the bottom of the tank as suggested. As much as I would like to find the answer I hope that it's not too much light as that would really screw my aquascaping if I have to move all those frags down from their intended locations hahah.

 

[Reefun]

I have a blue polyp cap that looks like the one in the pic and it turns green in lower light 50-80 par and starts looking more like the pic somewhere around 100par and up. I have it in 140 now and it looks just like yours. Hope that helps.

 

[Ron Popeil]

what about your magnesium? in my experience, low magnesium affects monti caps....

 

[pk_hk]

This looks like a Tyree flower petal. I took a frag from my lfs's frag tank to see if we could color it back up. It had been getting a lot of light and was growing beautifully but virtually white in color, save for the blue rim and polyps. These apparently color very differently in different lighting. Ours is doing great, growing fast and darkening toward a dirty white with a hint of yellow green but not yet achieving its advertised color. More to the point, its doing better having been transplanted from a 400W MH, very bright frag tank into our led system, placed lower in the rock work. Note, it's hardly in the dark and only about 6" below our light loving red planet that's growing like a rocket and fully colored.

 

[Hookup]

what about your magnesium? in my experience, low magnesium affects monti caps....

high mg has also had neg effects for me... 1500+ for a few weeks... it seems (and this is just an analogy, not fact) that the Mg affects the ability for the coral to "feed" or process light and after a few weeks the signs of starvation show...

i find it affects all my caps, and any of my encrusting ones are affected first... the digi's don't seem to have this issue with Mg...

 

[Reefer1225]

If you have a lid or mesh screen, I just put another layer of black window screen directly on top of the area where the coral is to block the light from penetrating so its not as intense. I light acclimate this way sometimes, removing a layer of the black window screen every week or so until is just the mesh screen lid. Good luck.

 

[Homeytwist]

Great feedback, thanks everyone. I'm not 100% sure on my mag levels as my Seachem test kit is reading an error of about 15% against its reference sample. If I take the error into account my levels should be about 1250ppm, but if the kit's correct and the reference is out then it could be more like 1100ppm.

I will move one of the smaller frags down to a lower light area and report back in a week or two.

Thanks again.

 

[Homeytwist]

Results from experiment #1: I took the frag that had the highest light exposure and moved it to the sand bed, in indirect lighting, and left it there for two weeks. After those two weeks I can report no change whatsoever. Flesh is still pale beige, and polyps are still purple (perhaps a touch lighter puple then they were before). Two weeks is long enough to see some results yes? Maybe not a full recovery but I should see some coloration I would think.

I've read that green SPS can lose coloration due to iron deficiency so I think I will explore that avenue a bit. I'd love to hear some opinions after these results though.

 

[Reef Bass]

IMHO, this was a minor bleaching event. FYI, Lux and par are not the same. That's why there are lux meters and there are par meters. And I personally doubt you dunked your lux meter in the tank where the corals were as one can with a submersible probe par meter.

Two weeks is not long enough. Negative coloration changes can occur quickly, though positive changes tend to take one to several months. Some will "sulk" for a few months and then start coloring up.

Be patient, and don't jack up the water searching for chemical magic bullets. Keep your alk, ca and mag where they should be, and your light stable as well.

 

[Homeytwist]

Hey Reef Bass, thanks for the reply. I understand that LUX and PAR are two different units of measure and are not comparable; PAR is a measure of the intensity of light over a certain spectrum over a certain area where LUX is simply a measure of visible light intensity over a certain area with no weighting on a particular spectrum. I'm not making the claim that they are comparable, simply that I do have a tool at my disposal giving me SOME measurable information which is of course better than nothing. And for the record my Milwaukee meter does have a remote probe that went / continues to go in the water where the coral was / will be.

As always I will continue to do my best to keep the big 3 params in line, and I will use my Milwaukee meter to monitor the output on the halide, dropping it as it ages.

Things will stay as they are for now, one test frag in low-light, the other two in mid-exposure. I am going to start doing homework on an iron test kit to try to figure out where things are before dosing anything (no dosing what you can't test for). I'll update as I go.

 

[MammothReefer]

you are running a 10k bulb... Switch back to the 14k or a 20k. Corals under a different lighting spectrum may colour up differently. How blue was the guys led system that you got the frag from? I've seen a lot of green caps go yellow/light green beige under 10k bulbs. Not to say there isn't SOME bleaching going on as well.. and it also takes longer then 2 weeks to recover from bleaching it can take months sometimes.

 

[Homeytwist]

Actually i was originally running a 14k Pheonix bulb, and just recently swithed to 10k (long after they lost their color). The MH bulb that was in there was about 15 months old, so arguably well overdue for changing, i'm a little hesitant to go back. May give it try for fun tho, as i'm not in love with the current look.
The mother colonies were under LED lighting with a heavy blue look, might equate it to 20k in MH.

 

[Dog boy Dave]

That coral is stressed form water quality issues, not light.

 

[Homeytwist]

Thanks for the input Dave, can you be a little more specific though as to what you mean by water "quality"? I am still challenged by small to med amounts of nuiscance algae, diatoms, cyano, but have a very light bioload and am carefull not to overfeed so to be honest I'm a little puzzled as to where this stuff is finding nutrients to gro; I know, phosphates and nitrates for algae, silicates, but I've never read any detectable amounts of any of those. That being said, I have no herbivorous fish and my clean up crew is very limited so maybe my CUC simply isn't keeping up with what would otherwise be small growth.

I'm planning to take another full round of measurements tonight but don't expect to find anything unusual. I will report the numbers again though.

 

[chrishayes]

I agree with dogboy. I have a green monti cap as well and when I broke my old tank down I had to make frags of it due to it being encrusted. When I set up my new tank, one piece went in it after a long time in a temp tank and another piece stayed in a QT tank afterward. THe piece in my main tank is the proper color and growth pattern where the pieces in the QT and temp bin turned exactly like what you show. The water in those two less than ideal tanks was not near as good as my tank water along with lighting but I feel it was more to do with water than lighting just via expierience that caps arent that picky in that respect and I had mh on both systems.

Also, youll need to give the coral more time in a good environment to show signs of improvements. As long as you see SOME improvement over the course of weeks then youre moving in the right direction.

 

[Homeytwist]

As promised, here are my current params:

Calc. - 400 ppm - (Salifert kit)
KH - 9.1 dKH - (Salifert kit)
Mag. - 1400 ppm - (Seachem kit)
SG - 1.0255 - (refractometer)
PH - 8.4 - (API kit)
Nitrate - 0.0 - (Salifert kit)
Phosphate - 0.0 ??

Phosphate kit is expired otherwise I'd post that as well, but since day one I've never ready any detectable phosphates in my system.

As I mentioned before Dog Boy Dave, if some particular aspect of "water quality" comes to mind please let me know.

 

[edsreef]

Do you dose vinegar or vodka? I have a similar problem with a few green montis in my tank. Thought it was just an caused by using led lighting then noticed alot of others had the same corals under leds that were vibrant green. My params are also spot on so I've been searching for answers myself. I've been dosing vinegar for a while and wondered if that could have anything to do with it.