Euphyllia glabrescens Withering

[sukeband]

Something's wrong my Euphyllia glabrescens. It has 2 torch-like heads. The polyps look kinda of like E. ancora except it's a bright light pink color and the tips are bright white.

 

Well they were bright white. Now they are smaller and browning up. They're looking worse everyday.

 

Tank Specs.

 

12 gallon cube. Wet dry running without anything when it started.

Then i started with carbon replacing every two weeks to try and help. 12 pounds live rock. The nano cube pump and a rio 180 for water movement.

 

No other corals in the tank. The lights are 24 or 32 watt and nano ballast from hellolights 50/50, and the default 27 watt that comes with the nano cube.

 

There's a handful of mexican and zebra hermits, 3 astreas, 1 conch, about 100 tubeworms. 1 Blue Damsel. Since the begining, tanks been up for 5 months.

 

The corals been going south for about 4 weeks now. I tried daily water changes, calcium dosing, carbon, and adusting power heads, light cycles, etc. Infact, i went from 12 hours of light a day to 9 to try and get rid of some diatoms, and thats what seemed like caused its stress at 1st. I immediately went back on a 12 hour of light schedule. Lots of mucus strands seem to accompany this.

 

I also tried dosing micro-vert, which didn't seem to help

 

I started running phosban afterwards. Helped with the diatoms but not he coral. Thats when i ran some carbon.

 

I'm using crappy red sea test kits. so bear with me.

 

80 degress

Amm 0

Nitrite 0

Nitrates 5

-

 

Calcium 450

Alk "Normal" according to the crappy red sea kits

PH 8.2

o2 60

 

Could it be a pathagen? I done several water changes but is that enough? Doesn't seem to be alot of tissue loss but its considerably less colorful / smaller.

 

No skimmer

 

What if any further steps should i take? If at all possible, i dont want to lose this coral, but if it died, i'd hate to have a mystery on my hands to take out any others [corals] i might get.

 

 

BOO YAH!!

 

 

p.s. would a picture help? its closed up now but if it'll help i'll try and post some tommorrow.

[tinyreef]

could be a couple of issues. phosphate could be one of them. keep switching out the phosban to make sure the po4 is as low as possible.

 

the lighting changes could be another (light shock). the mucus strands may have been excess symbiont algae being expelled when you switched back to the 12hr cycle. it was trying to survive with 9hr of light with more symb-algae and then you went back to full blast, i.e. over-abundance of symb-algae.

 

i don't think it's a pathogen. that would've ripped thru the coral quick. it may be the various lighting cycles. corals aren't very complex creatures and can't adjust as easily (if at all sometimes) to varying conditions. for example, a swing of a couple of degrees in the wild and you've got wide-scale coral die-off (and habitat re-location it seems from recent literature, hmmm). lighting changes are probably more difficult to adjust to because of the overall process involved with photosynthesis.

 

if the coral looks healthy flesh-wise/dimensionally but 'off' due to coloration/shading it's likely a lighting issue imo. keep the light steady and replace the bulbs as they wear out (don't be cheap). keep all the 'nutrient' readings low and stay with your regular maintenance (wc's, filter cleaning, carbon, etc.). time and care usually take care of the animals best. don't run the system according to the algae or obvious nuisances, run it according to the corals/underlying issues. sometimes you have to just manually address the algae/nuisance issue slowly. hth

[sukeband]

Thanks!

 

I'll keep at it. And see what happens.

[birdman204]

My divisia showed similar symptoms when i switched bulbs. It's better now. I simply let it acclimate.

[JohnnyMTB]

Most torch's like low to med water flow, if you have this in a high flow area it would show the described effects. You may try moving it to a different area of your tank and see if this helps.

[sukeband]

Okay today, during the day, its mouth was open very wide and a stringy substance was coming out? Is this a good or bad sign?

[birdman204]

brown = poop