Hammer Coral Branches Breaking off

[kybreos]

I have a volley ball size Green Branching Hammer coral that recently the branches have been breaking off down at the base real easily. For some back ground- I grew this coral from 2 heads a few years ago to now probably way over a hundred large heads. For the past 8 months my care for my tank has been lacking and i had a bad algae problem. The past month my interest in my tank has spiked again and i have been doing good maintenance, ie weekly water changes, gfo, carbon, skimming, bio pellets etc. The algae is going away and the tank is stabilizing. Just today though when i was picking some algae out by hand i reached in barely nudged my hammer and a big branch fell off. I was like ok let me see whats going on here. Fiddled some more and a couple more branches fell off. Anyhow where they broke off at was down by the base and the skeleton there was real skinny. Any thoughts or ideas for help?
TIA!!

 

[kybreos]

Bump for some help

 

[aquaman05]

How's you calc levels been

 

[kybreos]

I was out of co2 for like 3 months on calc reactor up until about a month ago

 

[organism]

That's weird, maybe it's some kind of self propagation? I'd love to see pics of a 100+ head hammer though, sounds awesome!

 

[mrk88]

I had a large hammer like that that i grew from a frag and its skeleton was the same way. My guess is theres something missing from your water that makes the skeleton hard.

 

[beckbrass]

If you were not using the reactor or supplementing calcium the could def. Be the problem.

 

[kybreos]

Well I can that new heads would of been weak but these are established older heads and it was the base of the branch where there is no tissue, and my ph always stayed stable so I'm not sure what caused the brittleness.

 

[Trini 2D Bone]

alkalinity mite be low

 

[kybreos]

alkalinity mite be low

I think that might of been it, would low alk weaken the existing skeleton?