sick kenya tree?

[sillygoose]

When I first noticed one of my Kenya trees looking bad, my first thought was, "Big deal." Now several are looking bad and I'm worried that they may be canaries in the coal mine - which is a weird thought considering how tough they are compared to my delicate stuff that looks fine. I've attached pics. Has anyone seen this?

BTW - my water quality while not perfect is OK. It has actually improved since we added an algal turf scrubber - but that's a whole other post.

 

[sillygoose]

oops here are the pics

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[sillygoose]

OK so all of our Kenya trees are looking really bad- even the ones in the fuge:sad2::sad2:. We seriously pruned the worst one. I've searched around to see about diseases but I'm coming up empty.

 

[fishaholic911]

From the pictures above they look closed up (not sick). Mine do this from time to time. When one does it they usually all fill follow. Do you have any updated pic's ?

 

[sillygoose]

Don't have a new pic but they are worse - one is withered and we cut a bunch off. There is not a single healthy one and we had tons to the point of being a little annoying. Very weird...

 

[brbrem]

if you want more I will give you some free! I have tons of it.

 

[sillygoose]

Hey thanks for the offer. We slashed and burned all of ours and figured if it comes back, fine. Although I hate to lose anything, cleaning them out has opened up some valuable real estate. But thanks for the offer brbrem.

 

[Bifferwine]

How long have you had them? They are leathers, and leathers periodically shed. During this time, they often wilt and look like crap. But they come back after a week or so. If you have not had them long, then you may not have ever seen them do this before.

 

[sillygoose]

We had them about 9 months I'd say. They weren't just wilted - they were dropping arms like crazy the last week. They really grew like weeds, so they might come back after serious pruning. I'll just wait and see.

 

[Bifferwine]

That's how they reproduce and spread -- they drop arms.

 

[sillygoose]

Yeah, mine have done that before (tons), but this was different. This appeared to be a blight of some kind - all of them went at the same time, even the many frags I had down in my fuge. I recently reduced my light cycle to control a bit of brown algae which seems to have helped a lot. I wonder if that had anything to do with it. Everything else is doing great. I upped the light some this weekend just in case my phytoplankton have suffered. I also added some to bolster the bottom of the food chain.

 

[Tanque Verde]

I wonder if you're seeing an allelopathic reaction. Have you recently added any new or different sorts of corals? Alternatively, during your bout with red slime, did you make any dramatic changes to your chemical filtration (yank your carbon, for instance?) Some leathers are aggressively allelopathic (not necessarily kenya trees), or so I've read. Maybe you've got some warfare going.

 

[sillygoose]

That's an interesting thought. We did get a blastomusa, favia, and acan a couple of weeks ago but none are close to where the Kenya trees were. The favia and acan almost 48" away and the blasto was 10-12". I wonder if they hated each other even from a distance. Of course, what I saw seemed pretty systemic so physical proximity probably didn't have too much to do with it.

As far as the red slime, we did many and massive water changes, cut back on feeding,and cutting the light a bit took care of most brown and red issues. We never had to get too crazy with chemicals (I guess 30-40 g water changes once a week was a little crazy).

The other thing that has happened two weeks ago was that we put an algal turf scrubber to work. I think I'll start another thread if anyone wants to talk scrubbers.