soft corals not opening

[ask499]

Hey all,

After about four years I am getting back into the reef world. My tank is about 3 or 4 months old. It's a 90 gallon display with a handful of corals right now as I take my time to slowly stock corals and fish.

Right now I only have
- hippo tang
- fox face
- 2 clowns
- long tentacle toadstool
- green nepthea
- colt coral
- kenya tree
- xenias
- green star polyps

The green star polyps are opening perfectly fine, but the Kenya, the colt, and even my xenias are not opening for the last three weeks and I can't figure out why. In the beginning they were opening great and large but now they don't even make an attempt.

I dropped my light time from 12 hours to 8 hours and still no luck. I moved them to different locations and still no luck.

My water parameters are as follows

ammonia - 0
nitrite - 0
nitrate - 10 ppm
salinity - 1.025
temperature - 78.3
Ph - fluctuates between 7.8 and 8.0

I do a ten gallon water change weekly, so my mind is blown as to what can be wrong. If I fail with xenias I may quit the hobby :headwally:

 

[blowmecius]

Try more flow. Also colt corals are pretty nasty so make sure you keep it away from the other softies. A bag of carbon will also help remove the terpines excreted by leathers.

Can't help you with xenia never kept them.

 

[ask499]

Try more flow. Also colt corals are pretty nasty so make sure you keep it away from the other softies. A bag of carbon will also help remove the terpines excreted by leathers.

Can't help you with xenia never kept them.

Everything is pretty far apart. Can the terpines prevent them from opening up?

 

[Sk8r]

Current in a tank is like wind in your front yard. You can catch a whiff of something from next door depending on the route the wind follows and the direction from which it comes.

Use your hand as a sensor to tell what the flow is and where it goes.

In terms of corals, put your mild-mannered sorts upwind, your problem children downwind, and run carbon, because leathers can set off a whole tank. We had a cabbage leather that would turn purple for no reason, signalling a temper fit that would shut down the whole tank full of softies until we sopped up enough of its hysterics with carbon.

 

[blowmecius]

Everything is pretty far apart. Can the terpines prevent them from opening up?

Yes. It is trying to poison the others who in turn retaliate with their own chemical warfare. As Sk8r said its all about positioning. Your colt and toadstool are likely the main offenders. I have one of each also and they are on opposite sides of the tank below the powerheads where they still get good flow but it is from the other side so the others "stank" gets diluted.

In my experience nepthea/tree corals are not that bad. When the colt gets angry, everyone suffers.