Once you severely brown out/bleach a coral will it ever return to its former glory?

[shelburn61]

Over the past two months I've had Interceptor treatment and a heat pump failure wreak havoc on my tank. After the Red Bug treatment I had a fairly substantial nutrient/cyano problem with loss of color and STN on a few pieces. Then the heat pump failed on an especially cold night and the tank temp dropped to 70F with a lot of bleaching.

After all this abuse, I am wondering if the corals will ever regain their full color. I am sure the new growth will be just as brilliant, but will the older growth color up again? I have a few frags from wild colonies and I am mostly worried about them

 

[SeanT]

If you provide proper wataer parameters, flow, lighting it most certainly can bounce back.
After a bleaching event I recommend you lowering the coral down in your tank giving it less light for awhile.

Sean

 

[shelburn61]

I guess you are becoming an expert on this Sean. Sorry about your incident.

I know there are tons of variables here, but what kind of recovery time have you seen for bleached corals given proper conditions?

This applies to wild/maricultured corals too?

 

[PUGroyale]

I've been meaning to do a little update on this piece. I'm sure recovery [or not ] will differ based on your tank conditions and how bad off each coral is. Some are just hardier than others too... This one expelled almost all of the zoox's on the underside and the top was as bleached as could be without losing the zooxs. Now it is substantially darker [browned out] and has some meager/ok PE [had no PE at all in this pic] Unfortunately there is a little cyano on it now but that should go away as it grows stronger. Last couple of weeks I've been seeing some purple luminescence in the tissue which I think is another good sign

I'll take a current pic later to contrast the improvement [this might be a little confusing cuz it still looks like crap :lol: but it is recovering...]