ricordia shriveling and dying

[watchndsky]

This is a new/old tank - it was old (and neglected) but was broken down and moved (so its kinda new too) With the tank came about 10-12 mushrooms - which were all doing well despite bad water parameters. Its a 72 gallon with 20 gallon sump. I moved approximately half of the existing water with it - replaced the substrate from cc to 1 inch sugar fine sand - and used the existing rock etc to try and minimize cycling.

Current params are
PO4 <.25
PH 8.4
Sal 1.024
Ca 460-480
KH 11-196
N04 15-20
Temp 80-81

and thats about all I can test for.

The tank was in bad shape when i got it - nitrates way over 40 and phosphates at 2 -hair algae everywhere. Then I started getting an outbreak of cyano evewhere. Ive been working to get the water quality down, replaced the halides and 4x65 pc - but still.....everything inside (new and old) was doing real well. Now all of a sudden the orange ricordia shrooms are shrinking and dying off. (doesnt seem to be the normal shrinking and expanding they sometimes do - they seem to be reaching the "melting" point)

The tank has definitely been through changes since Ive had it (roughly 2months) and the only thing I can think of that was done to cause this was a large drop in phosphate (my fault - was using bluelife phosphate, cap came off 1/4 of the bottle flowed into sump) That was 8-10 days ago - the first two days the water column turned chalky and most of the precipitate landed in the sump which was emptied and removed. I replaced with carbon bag in sump and I did a 20-25 percent water change last weekend and this weekend. 4 days ago I noticed the mushrooms started to shrink - waited a day and didnt think much of it - but they never perked up and expanded (these are large mushrooms one 3.5 incher is down to about an inch with the mouth sitting wide open all day long today.

Most everything else in the tank is doing well and nothing has been moved near them and they are located in different areas of the tank.

So - if you took the time to read all that - can you tell me what is wrong what I can do? I know the phosphate incident could bother inhabitants since it was such a large sudden change but they seemed to do well despite the overdose (and I would have thought the mushrooms would have taken a turn for the worse sooner if they hadnt liked the drop in phos.

Any ideas? I really hate to lose them - but I dont know of anything I can do (except wait and see what happens)

Thanks in advance

 

[romsoccer12]

IMO it seems corals need to slowly acclimate from high nitrates to low nitrates, or they get a little stressed, soft corals especially because ive realized they seem to like nitrates. sounds like the large drop of nitrates/phosphates when u cleaned the tank probably agitated them a little, but since you dropped the phosphate remover in, it was a little to much to handle.
best thing you can do is just wait it out and stop using phosphate remover for a while until you see them rebound, than gradually bring it down
also, if they do melt, a lot of times mushrooms will rebound and create lots of smaller mushrooms where the main colony melted, but rics are more delicate than most shrooms
gl