Pink Lemonade bleaching?

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Bill Nye

Member
I just switched over my tank last week from an 8 gallon to a 20 gallon long. All of my sps have been having better polyp extension but it has been too soon to see better coloration. One piece in particular was a small frag of pink lemonade that was doing fine but last night I came home to see it was having small circles of white on it. Now when I woke up there is a large circular bleached area on it. This frag was pretty much just the frag plug it was on and it had started to encrust onto the rock but it had no branches. Of of my other SPS/Acros are fine and show no bleaching. What could have caused this?

My only thought is that my 8 gallon was kinda dirty so could this be from going from a dirty tank to a very clean one? As I understand decreasing phosphates too low can cause bleaching from the top down but since its been in the tank for about a week now I cant imagine that would be the problem?
 
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Just checked my parameters.

Calc - 480 (salifert)
Alk - 9 (API)
Mag - 1470 (salifert)

I typically keep my tank at 10 alk so I'm not sure why I had a 1 dkh swing from Sunday to today. I have been testing my alk every other day to make sure my dosage locked in and for the past week at the dose I have been using it has stayed steady at 10. Last night when I got home from work I added my normal dose of Alk and Calc in but I got a 1 dkH swing to 9. Not sure if this is the culprit but I am surprised to see it at 9.

I actually ran the test twice because I was sure I counted wrong the first time....
 
The first thing I would do is make a 15% water change, Do not put any additives in the tank in 48 hours take a calcium alkalinity and magnesium test again. Personally I think your calcium is too high it should be between 400 and 410.
 
I actually just switched the bulbs on my t5 unit. I was planning on upgrading a while ago so I bought a 24 inch t5 light but ended up staying with it hung over my 8 gallon (goofy looking I know...). I waited way too long to buy bulbs as they were probably older than 7 months old when I got the fixture. I have been slowing increasing the amount the lights are on every day starting with 4 hours for all 4 bulbs and Ive worked my way up to 6 over the past 4 days but you can tell its far brighter than my old bulbs just by looking at the tank.

Yesterday I was a little impatient so I increased my duration by a half an hour instead of the usual 15 minutes but I don't think that would make a huge difference. Unfortunately I am gone all day on monday till 10 or 11 oclock usually so I didn't get to see the tank with lights on yesterday and only noticed some damage at around 10:30 when I got home. This morning when I checked the tank it was far worse as all the small dots turned into a solid circle but it didn't seem to be getting worse. I have water already cooked up so I'm going to do a water change when I get home.

I went from 2 blue + 1 purple + 1 generic actinic to 3 blue + 1 purple + if that makes any difference.
 
Ok I attached a crappy pic I took on my phone. Sorry for all the crap I just blew all my rocks with a turkey baster getting ready to do a water change. I dont think its AEFW since I haven't added any coral to my tank in a long time and I haven't had this problem before.

 
I would have to agree. Looks like bites being taken out. In my experience bleaching corals look the same as when colored, just pale/white.

Did you add more live rock when you upgraded? Perhaps picked something up there.
 
No nothing new was added yet. Everything was just taken out of the my old tank and put in the new one. I have two sexy shrimp in there and they did eat all the dead flesh off a red planet that I got a year ago that came in kind of half dead. They only ate the dead/dying flesh though and I still have that frag today.
 
So I think I may have found my problem. I believe low phosphates may have been the cause of the random bleaching on my pink lemonade. My last tank was a 8 gallon AOI but the AOI portion didnt work very well so not all the water was forced through my media so it was very passive. This new tank I am using a canister filter to run media and I believe it is a lot more efficient.

I was running rox carbon, purigen and phosguard in the filter. After seeing the bleaching and reading some threads about low phosphates I removed the phosguard. This was about 3 or 4 days ago. Today my Hanna Phosphorus checker came in the mail and I ran a test using it. Came out to .02. I would imagine with phosguard it was probably lower than that. The coral in question is already recovering and regained its color in the spot that was completely white and is even regrowing polyps.
 
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