Very unhappy, deflated acans starting to lose tissue.

[Andelain]

Hey there!

I'm new to the hobby, and very new to the forum (like, I just joined 5 minutes ago. Haha!). I've had my first tank up and running for 7 months now, and everything has thus far been going well. It's a 5 gallon Fluval Spec with Coral Compulsion's 14W Par30 18K LED bulb. I've got an acans in it that's having some serious trouble, and in all my Googling and forum searching I haven't been able to find anything that sounds like what's happening with this little guy. I just purchased it from the LFS probably about a month ago. It's just a tiny frag, with two dime sized heads and a new baby one. It was doing fine for about two weeks and has been doing terribly since. It's been super deflated, and about a week ago started losing some flesh. It stopped responding to feedings two weeks ago as well, and just sits there all apathetic like when I place it's regular dinner of brine shrimp on it. It weakly extends a few feeding tentacles at night, but still no response to feeding. Water parameters are all in line. Any ideas or recommended treatments?

 

[jraker]

Can you post your parameters? That would be good, even if you know they are fine. How high up is the acan and how much intensity is your light on?

 

[Dkuhlmann]

I would suspect too much light for too long of a period. The same thing happened with all of my acans when I put my new lights on just last week. It happened very quickly. They're still recovering.

What lights do you have and what are their settings and how long are they set for each day.

 

[sixpackgarage]

I'm still figuring Acans out myself. I discovered that they like a ton of flow.. Mine were really deflated also. When I go to my LFS, I always admire how incredibly fluffy all their acans are.. I asked them what the secret is and they said light and flow. Light I had covered, but I never realized that they like really pretty strong flow. Within the last week, my acans have fluffed up again.. I have them in areas of strong flow enough to where they wiggle around a bit when inflated. Not sure if that helps, but it's worth trying.

 

[Dkuhlmann]

One thing to watch for is having too low of nutrients in your tank. Ideally you want Phosphates .03 and Nitrates <10 if you have less than that they will look frumpy and get washed out colors. Mine were doing amazing until I damn near fried them with the new lights. :hammer: I'm hoping for a full recovery, the only downside to that is I just started treating Prazi yesterday because my fish had flukes. Now most of my corals are in a funk. Sunday I'll do a very large WC and then start back up the skimmer and charcoal and see what a few days brings after that. They still have lots of florescence so I'm assuming they're alive still.