Shrinking Yellow Polyps

[herring_fish]

I am having problems with my yellow polyps shrinking. They are almost down to little buttons. The rest of my tank is doing very well with all parameter in the normal or good ranges.

I add Seachem products and Purple up. I also feed my tank powdered foods from Marc Weiss. In my old tank, the yellow polyps loved his powders so I don't think that it is the powder.

I have the polyps sitting on the bottom of an 18" deep tank, in a low light area with mostly actinic light from 2 VHOs. The single 250 Watt 10K Metal Halide lamp is over the other half of the tank.

I added vodka last month as well as a little bit of bottled bacteria. In my old tank, I added to much enzyme product and they didn't like that but I have not used any in my new tank.

Why do you think that they are not happy?

 

[stingythingy45]

The vodka.
Why are you adding vodka?
Do you have SPS corals in this tank?

 

[herring_fish]

Too Clean

Too Clean

Yes I have a few SPS. I read that Vodka was use by growers of non-photosynthetic filter feeders like dendros because, with even higher levels of feeding, vodka helped keep the tank clean, with low nutrient levels and the additional bacteria was good for the pods.

I have a 130 gallon tank with a 55 gallon sump full of coral rubble and an algae scrubber. I found that the tank was running too clean with both system and the vodka suppressed the scrubber so I stopped dosing. My old tank had the same scrubber but no sump. Everything run great and was happy.

 

[stingythingy45]

How's your water parameter,specifically alkaline?
I recently had some orange paly start to disappear and found my alk was down to 7 dkh.Could there be fish or crabs picking at it during the night?I have yellow colonial polps growing up my side glass and various patches here and there in the tank.

 

[herring_fish]

Alkalinity might be low. I do have to dose 8.4 to keep my pH up my leather coral tells me when to use that additive. I haven't been using Balance and haven't tested alkalinity lately.

Thanks for the help.

 

[lancer99]

If you mean the Yellow Polyps that are commonly called Parazoanthus gracilis but are an undescribed species (despite being so common in reef tanks), it's just because they don't get enough energy from photosynthesis and need to be fed.

If not, no idea!

Purple Up and the Marc Weiss products are all considered unnecessary...do a search for what others think

-R