LPS dying

Bcrofut

New member
New to the forum but have had reef tanks for a couple years now. I have a 120 gallon tank w/40 breeder sump asm g3 skimmer running small amount of biopellets. My water chemistry is Nitrates 0 Phosphate .15 Cal 470 dKH 8.4 Salinity 1.25 temp 78 degrees. The system has been running for over a year but moved from 60 to 120 gallon tank about 3 months ago. There are only 7 smaller fish in the tank so the bioload is low.

Recently a few of the chalice I have has died slowly. The tissue would recede from the outside until there was nothing left. I have also had this same scenario with a war coral and a lord acan but they have not died yet. the tissue is slowly receding from the outside in.

I cant really figure out what is going on. The sps in my tank is thriving as well as a few candy canes, duncans, and leptoseris. Im wondering if I am stripping the little nutrients i have in my tank and it is too clean for the lps.

Just looking for some insight or conformation of what is going on im puzzled. Thanks for any help
 
What kind of sps? I'd try some nutrients like RedSea reef energy A & B, Selcon does wonders too if your ULN, but you're not really seeing the phosphate level. Maybe you have a disease in there?
 
What kind of sps? I'd try some nutrients like RedSea reef energy A & B, Selcon does wonders too if your ULN, but you're not really seeing the phosphate level. Maybe you have a disease in there?

Ive got acros, birdnest, montis, millis, and some echinatas. I wondered about disease and dipped the receding lps in revive with no results. Ive moved and dipped the war coral which is doing the worst right now to see if anything changes. Ive been target feeding heavily to see if a can get them back to normal. I will look into the reef energy and selcon. Im not sure what disease it could be I dont see any brown jelly but am uneducated on diseases. Thanks for the reply and help.
 
I think your water might be a little too clean for the lps. I don't test nitrates anymore but had them at 20 in my 12g cube & everything was fine. I've never kept sps so I don't know how dirty the water can be before they get upset.

You can either soak frozen food in selcon for 20 minutes prior to feeding or put a little selcon directly in the tank & feed about 5 or 10 minutes later. I find the selcon wakes up the corals for feeding a little bit. I rotate my food but you can try Rods frozen, coral smoothie, clam smoothie, prime reef. The fish will eat these too. Everyone goes nuts for the coral & clam smoothie.
 
Ya Im really thinking thats what it is. Everything was doing good when it was all in a 60 gallon cube. Now that theres the extra water with the same livestock the water has really cleaned up. I had a nitrate issue in the cube and my lps continued to grow. Guess I just need to add some more fish haha
 
I'm using a 48 photon from reef breeders. All the lps are at the bottom with the light 10" from the surface of a 25" deep tank. Tissue still receding. Im grabbing red sea reef energy a and b to see if that stops it. Plus I just added some anthias.
 
I've been adding the reef energy for 3 weeks now. It seems like the receding has paused but I don't see any growth or healing to speak of. I pulled the biopellets out 2 days ago so we'll see what happens. I also feed what I thought was quite heavily those 3 weeks and my nitrates are still undetectable so I'm pretty confident my biopellets were keeping the water too clean.
 
Check your magnesium. IME, lps don't like low mag. How cycled was the new tank before you put stuff in?
 
my frogspawn was doing the same while my two multibranch hammers where perfectly healthy and growing. i stressed over the water chem and the placement in the tank but eventually my lfs gave me coral smoothie to try out and with target feeding the frogspawn after other day,it started to regrow tissue that receded and started opening up again. corals can be interesting creatures
 
My acans have made it and look much better. The chalices never recovered and lost them. Feeding had no effect on the chalices. They wouldn't even eat. Since the biopellets have been out my nutrients have come up from what I can tell. My mag was around 1350. Now I'm trying to raise it higher to deal with bryopsis.
 
I've lost a few but some bounced back.

A. dipped in Iodine for the ones that wouldn't open and looked irritated
B. I take about 1 cup of tank water and put 6 cap fulls of hydrogen peroxide in it. Then I take a soft toothbrush and brush the edges receding.
C. Ive gotten better at water changes which probably helped the tank parameters stay cleaner

I couldn't point to exactly what helped the ones I have (one is still bothered) but that's what I did.
 
Back
Top