What is going on with this acans?

[fftfk]

It is new for about a week. Today I look in my tank and one polyp appears to be receding/receded. They are covered by a white mucus looking material.

Any idea what is going on? Is that some sort of predator? I dipped the colony before putting it into my tank.

 

[cloak]

I'm not really seeing a white mucus, but that pink thing might be an encrusting sponge. These have been known to smother certain corals over time.

 

[fftfk]

This is a little better photo

It's clear with a purplish tiny I guess. I don't think it's a sponge. It wasn't there yesterday.

 

[fftfk]

I used a turkey Bastet to clean it off. I'm not sure what to call it but basically it was decomposition goo. One polyp is gone to the bone and another (the goo in the picture) is half decomposed.

They were perfectly fine over the past week. The other day I saw a rock boring urchin climb over. I didn't think anything of it. However, I just caught the same one sitting on top of another acans colony.

Will the urchin eat the polyps? That's what I think happened.

 

[Newstead]

That happened to one of mine when it fell over into the sand. Two partial heads turned into goo and the others started receding. I am lucky to have a quarantine tank so removed it and gave it a light iodine dip. It is recovering and now after several weeks is growing new heads. Hope yours does the same.

 

[fftfk]

I don't know if it will. It is pretty rapidly receding. Of course - it was my favorite one.



How long did you dip for?

 

[Dkuhlmann]

Here is a link for iodine dipping

http://www.athiel.com/lib/bacterial.html

 

[fftfk]

Thanks for the info

 

[rt67ghy]

If the whole thing dies I wouldn't toss the skeleton. After 2-3 months baby acans should grow from the skeleton.

 

[fftfk]

I've never heard that before. Do you have any additional info?

 

[Dkuhlmann]

fftfk, many different hard corals can do this. Not any guarantee but it's always worth a shot to just leave them in once they die for up to 6 months.

 

[rt67ghy]

I've never heard that before. Do you have any additional info?

Yes, I got an acan that was dying when I got it but I left it in my tank. After 2-3 months I can see up to 7 babies growing on the dead skeleton. At the moment they're tiny. I'll try to take some pics with a macro lens and post it here.

 

[fftfk]

Very interesting! I had no idea.

 

[rt67ghy]

Here's the pic I promised. I can identify 8 red acan babies on one acan skeleton.

http://imgur.com/teVF7Y7

 

[soeminpaing]

Looks like brown jelly disease. I used to have this kind of problem on euphilia corals especially after fragging due to tissue damage. I would assume that your hermit injure the corals and infection set in. Usually even with dipping and removing the damage parts by further fragging, the disease spread and usually kill the corals.

 

[Dkuhlmann]

Here is the treatment for brown jelly, and just a good idea to dip new frags in an iodine dip solution

http://www.athiel.com/lib/bacterial.html