Softies not growing much

K

Kaiser699a

New member
Hi folks. I'm just looking for a bit of general guidance for mushrooms and zoas. I have 5 or 6 individual mushrooms, 2 individual ricordea and 2 frags of zoas with 5 - 6 heads. I am wandering why they are not growing, splitting or spreading at all. I have acans, blastos, candy canes and torch that are all growing and "pupping" but the softies won't do much. Params are ok, ok in that LPS are doing great. Do I need softer light? Less flow do you think?
 
Well.... looks like your lps is doing good but the softies not so much?

what are you params?

If I had to take a guess alkalinity is a little high or no nitrates in the water at all.
 
I have noticed the same thing in my tank, but the few zoas I have are growing new heads. Just growing much slower than the LPS.
 
Nitrates are 0. I thought softies would still grow though. I feed quite light as I only have 3 small fish. Should I try no skimmer for a few days or something?
 
Tank is 100g UK with Evergrow LEDs currently running at 40% max during my profiles 3 peak hours. Maybe I should start ramping that up some but do I need nitrate in the water too?
 
Kaiser699a said:
Hi folks. I'm just looking for a bit of general guidance for mushrooms and zoas. I have 5 or 6 individual mushrooms, 2 individual ricordea and 2 frags of zoas with 5 - 6 heads. I am wandering why they are not growing, splitting or spreading at all. I have acans, blastos, candy canes and torch that are all growing and "pupping" but the softies won't do much. Params are ok, ok in that LPS are doing great. Do I need softer light? Less flow do you think?
Click to expand...

Have you tried moving them around in the tank? I don't glue corals in my tank until I find where they are happiest. Some enjoy low current and high light or low light and high current or some combination. Move them around if you can and see if they improve.
 
Kaiser699a said:
Nitrates are 0. I thought softies would still grow though. I feed quite light as I only have 3 small fish. Should I try no skimmer for a few days or something?
Click to expand...

Personally I have found phenomenal success if I have Nitrates around 5ppm. That is a very happy place for mine, and my toadstool is massive in 6 months.
 
My leathers seem to like a dirty tank. Once I started not doing a water change for 6 months at a crack they took off like wild fire.
 
A while ago I found my sg was too low due to incorrectly calibrated refractometer. That was a problem. I am trying a few "easier" SPS now and they are going well. It must be the low nutrient levels I am running at that are stunting the softies. I'll be carrying on this way though because I don't want algae problems. Probably when my fish stock gets nearly full the nutrients will creep up and the softies will take off.
 
My tank used to be at 0 Nitrate and my lps was doing good my blasto grew a bunch of new heads but my xenia shriveled up to not even visible. my zoas were barely ever open.

I got a Dino outbreak and started dosing KNO3 and my pink zipper zoas are bigger than ive ever seen and grew 3 new polyps and my xenia grew back from what I thought was certain death.

5-10ppm nitrate seemed to be a good spot but I got overboard with dosing it and went up to 30+ and everything still looked amazing. so dirty your water up a bit and I bet that will help a ton.

you probably don't have to manually dose it. just cut back on water changes and feed more! I just wasn't able to raise it past 0 with the dino's besides manually pouring it in.
 
Zoos love good moderate flow and medium light, that is say 150 to 250 par. They are usually the easiest to please so if the don't look right try moving them. Watch changes in intensity, they need to acclimatize to higher lights
 
I have been running fishless for around 70 days now to rid the tank of ich. I have been feeding for clean up crew and shrimps. I haven't done any water changes for the duration and the softies are now starting to grow. Must have been just too nutrient free for them. I am getting some algae growth as well now though and hopefully my fish will help with that when they go back in in a few weeks time. I will start small water changes when the fish are back in.
 
My leather tank likes it dirty. No water change in 2 years. Everything grows like wildfire. I am going to be moving the tank and I am actually worried by putting fresh water in it when I restart it I will have issues. I used to try to keep doing water changes to keep the water nice and clean, but nothing grew and the corals seem to hate it when I did them for a few weeks.

Haha! I didn't notice I replied to this way back in march also :)
 
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