STN Weird

[fullmonti]

Without going into what started it, is this usual? I have a 180 sps tank & 29gal frag tank, (same water system) I have frags of a couple of affected corals from the main tank & the frags are not affected at all. Also one frag has the STN but the original coral in the main tank is fine. The top of one affected coral has never looked better but the bottom continues to dieback. Looks like the STN has stopped on some, is going to wipe out some, & others are growing & look great. Usual?

 

[beeker]

stn can happen to anything at anytime, rtn is more unpredictable though and normally kills the whole coral, stn you can normally save the coral or whatever caused the stn to start seems to stop, this doesen't mean it can't happen again, nothing is ever certain in a reef tank and corals aren't often predictable

I'd have to say it's usual since i've have the same happen in my main tank as you, i've also lost piece's in a 24hr period that had been doing great in my tank for month's, sometimes they live and sometimes they die, i like to think everything with reefing and coral surviving is 50/50

water quality plays a huge part and as i uderstand alk more it is the biggest factor for any coral, though there are those times things die that leave you scratching your head for weeks/months as to why

you can have mg swings and calc swings but when alk starts going out of whack everything is normally i'll affected somethings adapt better to this situation though, so make sure you always watch alk closely, even though i'm not sure that was the cause of your corals stn or not

 

[fullmonti]

I had ask a couple weeks ago what might cause STN, every one seemed to agree hard to impossible to know for sure. Between two quotes from that thread (sps will die at the drop of a hat, & you have to be prepared to lose every thing over night) and your 50/50 comment it would be hard not to get discouraged. I'm not sure I would have started keeping sps had I known all this before. But I'm afraid it's too late now, I've been hooked by the colorful fuzzy sticks.

Sure have learned a lot in the last couple months, hopefully enough to keep this from happening again!

Thank you to all those how have helped!

 

[beeker]

Well it is all about lighting and water quality as well as husbandry

It's not to say that out of the 50+ piece's i've put into my tank that i've lost half cause i haven't lost anywhere close to that, i think in my 3+ years of reefing i've lost only 10-15 total pieces of Zoa's Lps' Sps, so for my amount of time in the hobby i honestly haven't lost all that much, granted what i did lose was money about 500 dollars worth of it...but that happens in this hobby

A lot of things in life that are uncertain, all you can do is try to maintain the tank as consistant and stable as possible, providing the best unatural enviorment for things to survive and thrive in, you have to also be a good Visual judge of what is going on with your tank, i look at every piece in my tank everyday of the week for 5-10 minutes or more and over the years this has helped me to gauge when my calc is out of whack when Alk is too high or too low, when i'm lacking mg or need more

To me reefing has honestly become something a lot more visual to judge than just using standard test kits to monitor it's stability, i am hardcore when it comes to knowing my system's in's and out's but that still doesen't mean i don't have my issue's or have STN or RTN happen to me sometimes as well, it's expected

 

[fullmonti]

Thats a lot of what I've learned. I am a Very consistent person in general & with my tank especially. Near as I can tell this STN was a misstep on my part, made too big of changes too fast.

I have had fish in one form or another all my life, & reef keeping is by far the most challenging, rewarding, expensive, interesting, & beautiful of all,

 

[beeker]

if it wasn't so amazing i wouldn't have stayed in the hobby, you have to be able to take the good with the bad and even i've made mistakes and miscalculations on my tank before, but as with anything it's all trial and error, you never learn unless you try

 

[hk855]

+1 to beeker's advice on observation. A lot of my maintinance is just at my whim and how my corals look but I do test every week to make sure I'm in a ballpark range for Mg Ca, Alk, Po4, No3, vodka dosing and salinity. My local salt water is also low in Ca, Mg and potassium so I need to adjust those and dose potassium stricly on appearance. Over the holidays my room mate looked after my tank and after a week it looked noticably different with some stn on one piece, within a few days it was back to normal and stn is recovering. I have also had crashes in the past where I lost all my sps once and another time all my fish but not one coral. Somewhat odd. IME the stn happens at the base when supergule hits the flesh and then travels up till it just stops. I just recieved a bunch of frags and two had bad rtn/stn in the first few days. Then just shy of the tips on one and from the tip and base on another it just stopped and the remaining looks great. This was also right after comming back from vacation so I expect my params were partly to do with it.