SPS Corals Losing Color

Ok, I've conducted another experiment. A friend of mine gave me a beautiful bright blue acro frag that I've placed on the bottom of my tank. It's been a week and it had slowly changed from all bright blue to half brown half blue. Upon close examination I can see a that the body of the coral is turning brown. Zoox appear to be brown.

Does this help with the diagnosis?
 
Oh, my bad. Sorry about that. For me GFO has been a killer on my corals in the past.

No worries. Thanks for helping.


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As for my blue frag, I want to point out that polyp extension on it is great. Just the colour is changing from blue to brown.
 
Couple things that I have noticed. Your lighting is not excessive you can run that on full for 10 hours and most likely not cause any problems. If anything the color issue may be your lighting, I don't see any bleaching on your corals which would be the cause of excess light. Everyone missed the obvious. A lot of the coloration of SPS have to do with the lighting. What color bulbs are you running?

Alk swings are not causing your SPS to not color up. Alk swings would most likely cause SPS to RTN or STN. Yes alk swings should be avoided but usually alk swings cause greater problems than just not enough color on corals.

It would NOT take weeks for you to add excess PO4 into your system, even if you stripped out every bit of PO4 available in the water column, which you haven't. 1 cube of mysis shrimp can add 0.015 PPM PO4 in your size system(That would be in one feeding). If you would have too low nutrients you would have experienced a brownish cyano covering your substate and rocks. This is because, due to the lack of PO4, there are few species of algae that can kick into overdrive and utilize inorganic phosphates. If this were to happen it would leave me to believe that you would have too low of nutrients, have you reported a problem similiar to this at all?

Your calcium is low, bring it up to 450ish. Many aquarist, including myself, have reported better color/growth with higher Ca levels. I got it from the sticky in this forum, which made me raise my levels and I noted better coloration and growth.
 
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