Sun Corals Bleached

[Romulox234]

We recently moved about 2 weeks ago to a new house and we had all ofour corals in these plastic bins with the original water from the tank.

By the time we had the tank all set up and ready to go pretty much everyhing had died, my 2 chromis were dead, my brittle star magically dissapeared and is nowhere to be found, my acans are just skeletons along with every other coral including mmy orange and black sun corals. I dont know why all my corals decided to bleach and maybe i never will know but as of now all the corals are in the tank and have been there for a couple of days.

Can my sun corals and the rest of my corals bounce back from all this?

The orange one has some very faint coloartion still left on the left side but the right side is more or less totally bleached, the black one is a branching type and has completely bleached its body but some of the polyps still have traces of black on them.

My tank is stable as of now and im feeding phyto every other day in an attempt to allow them to heal quicker and faster.

Is there anything else i should be doing to help them recover from the bleaching or is all hope lost?

Once they recover enough to extend there tentacles i plan to spot feed the hell out of them.

Any and all help would be verly greatly apprecieated

Thank You

 

[ReneX]

Sorry to hear of your loss. Sometimes despite our best efforts the unexpected happens. It's all the more frustrating when you don't know why.

It sounds like what happened was not bleaching, where corals loose their photosynthetic algae, but actuall tissue death since you describe looking at the white skeletons.

I don't know about your other corals, but I can report from experience that if there is the tiniest bit of tissue left, your suns can regrow given TLC and a lot of time. I had a massive tank wipeout (several, actually) due to a toxic sponge and it stripped most of the flesh from my large polyp NPS. It seems like the tissue deep inside the cup of the polyp was best protected, so this is also where I had most of my remaining tissue. If things were especially bad, you may not be able to even see any hint of flesh for several days, so don't give up hope and throw out the skeletons for at least a week. The thin film or spots of flesh will reorganize over the course of several weeks and turn into tiny polyp mouths. Once they have mouths you'll need to keep feeding them with tiny foods like cyclopeeze until they get big enough to take larger foods again.

 

[Romulox234]

I can kinda see some little orange films and theres hints of colors on both of them, the rest of the skeletons look like some kind of paste

I was never planning on throwing them out, just really wanted to know how and when they would be able to bounce back.

When they have the little mouths should i dump cyclopeeze directly into the water stream or would spot feeding be a better choice.

How long would you say it would take until i was able to start feeding them mysis and blood worms again?

 

[ReneX]

Without knowing how much tissue remains, it's impossible to say when they'd be ready for bigger food. How fast they grow depends entirely on how much you feed them. When they have mouths, I'd tupperwear feed them as described elsewhere in this forum to give them the best chance of getting the food. The tentacles around the mouth may be very short and not sticky at first. If you can get them eating, you're on your way to recovery.

 

[Romulox234]

Thanks for the info, it cleared up alot of things for me.

Hope it doesnt take them too long to recover

 

[pleasants9]

I like to use the top of a 2 liter botle when i feed mine, it fits the concave of my suncoral better

 

[Romulox234]

that doesnt work for mine because ones too big for the bottle and the others too small lol

 

[pleasants9]

gotchya, well good luck with bringing it back!