New blue sponge rapidly turning white

[Canarygirl]

Hi

I bought a good-sized royal blue sponge last weekend. The LFS said that they'd had it a week. So I've had it the second week. I put it on the bottom of my 28" tank in a sheltered area (less light and flow). It looked fine until today, but today I see that it's rapidly turning white. The tips and outer edges are completely white.

Is it a goner then, and I should get it out of my tank? (system water volume 380 gallons). Or could it mean that it's still getting too much light and if I put in a completely shady spot it might recover? I'm not feeling very optimistic by the looks of it, but didn't want to take a premature action either...

 

[TheH]

Did you expose it to air when you transferred it?

 

[Canarygirl]

yep, for maybe 3 or 4 seconds. I didn't think that could be enough to hurt it. But tonight I read the sponge articles on ReefFrontiers and think that maybe that was enough to start the cascading necrosis-gas production-more necrosis process. I am surprised it didn't start for a good 6-7 days after that exposure, but in any case it looked to be dying so I removed it from my tank and discarded it. Then I put in a new bag of carbon in my sump for the toxins released. Hopefully that will be enough until I can do a waterchange tomorrow.