Just got a torch coral

[happyface888]

I just picked on up today and its slowly opening.Just at first one of the heads closed up and I also noticed I could see the mouth wide open. Is this a bad sign or it could just be a fish that ran into it and caused it to look like what it is now?

 

[happyface888]

Now I'm seeing some other heads doing this aswell and brown stuff coming out. This is my first LPS and I have no idea whats going on here.

 

[cloak]

It's probably just going to the bathroom. It's normal. Just give it a few days to acclimate to the tank and it should bounce right back.
What are your perameters? What type of lighing do you have?

 

[ElDiabloPollo]

The brown stuff is excess zooxanthellae. The coral is basically balancing itself to its new enviroment.

 

[happyface888]

Does that explain why it closed up for no reason and than I could see its mouth wide open and the skeleton?

 

[cloak]

If your seeing the white skeleton, like the tissue is detaching or deteriorating, something is wrong. The closing of the coral and the mouth agape is just part of the process. My bubble, plate, torch, etc will do this from time to time. Not sure what kind of lighting you have, but I've seen corals behave the same way when they were placed to close to the lights. They were basically burning up so to speak.

How does it look today?

 

[happyface888]

The torch was orginally under coralvue 250 lumenarc halide at the fish store. And I have a 250w lumenarc stealth and its in the center of the tank. Well after the mouth opened later I went back to check on it and the mouth was closed back up. And it came back out kind of odd I could see inside the mouth before. And it was having all that stringy brown stuff.

 

[Jmikitz]

mine had done the same the first few days.. nothing to an extreme though.. now a month later it retracts once a day around 7 pm for a few min. and then comes back out half way till the next morning.. than its full glory all day.