Blastomussa Turning White - HELP

[Mr. Arbuckle]

Hello,

 

Im usually lurking around the forums and don't post much....but I'm having some issues with my tank at the moment. Namely, my Blastomussa coral, which seems to have lost a lot of color on the largest polyp overnight, and has gotten progressively worse over the past couple days, and now spreading to another larger polyp. Pictures are attached.

 

I just checked the water parameters, and they are as follows:

 

Specific Gravity = 1.025

pH = 8.4

Ammonia = 0 ppm

Magnesium = 1380ppm

Calcium = 400ppm

Alkalinity = 11 dKH

Phosphate = 0.25ppm

Nitrate = 10ppm

 

For lighting I have a 42W LED system (Steve's LED's Biocube 14 upgrade kit), and I'm running white lights at 55% and the blue lights a little higher at 57%

 

Temperature generally stays between 74 and 79F.

 

The rest of the setup is a Biocube 14 tank with a MJ900 (Italian made) pump, and I'm running a media basket with filter floss up top, siporax in the middle, and on the bottom I'm running activated carbon, Rowaphos, and Puirgen. 

 

Ive had this blasto be very healthy for about 8 months, and this seemed to have lost a lot of color quickly; I didn't change anything in the tank.

 

About two two days after the initial color loss, I added a bunch of new livestock (3 shrimp, two clownfish) and moved the rocks around a bit, and did a 25% water change which seemed to make things worse, with a second large polyp now losing color.

 

Please help!

 

 

 

[Mr. Arbuckle]

Also I don't know if this helps or not but here's a list of the livestock I have in my tank currently:

 

1 skunk cleaner shrimp

2 peppermint shrimp

1 lettuce nudibranch 

6 nassarius snails

2 astrea snails

5 head blastomussa coral

many-headed Duncan coral

Acan coral

pulsing xenia coral

green/green-orange Zola colony

a small-ish sun coral

a galaxea coral hitchhiker (just a few polyps)

[gena]

74 degrees is pretty low.  Is there any way to keep it from having such a big temp swing?  That could be a possible cause of the bleaching.  And I bet your peppermints finished them off.  Doesn't look like there is much flesh left on it. 

 

I would try to get your temp to stay at 79 with little to no swing.

Did you ever feed it during the 8 months time?

[Mr. Arbuckle]

4 hours ago, gena said:

74 degrees is pretty low.  Is there any way to keep it from having such a big temp swing?  That could be a possible cause of the bleaching.  And I bet your peppermints finished them off.  Doesn't look like there is much flesh left on it. 

 

I would try to get your temp to stay at 79 with little to no swing.

Did you ever feed it during the 8 months time?

Thank you for your response. You make a great point about temperature; I actually knew about this beforehand... Before getting the shrimp and the Clownfish I never had a problem with 6-8F temperature swings during the day and night - I used to think it was important, but my previous inhabitants didn't mind and I seem to have gotten complacent. 

 

Anyways, now I'm a believer and wanted to get this solved right away. I scrounged around and actually was able to rig up a couple of D.C. fans from my stock BC14 lighting setup with a D.C./AC adapter and was able to cool it down to 75F...so I went ahead and set my heater to 76F and I'm monitoring it now. Look like it's found a sweet spot around 76.4F and I'm just going to keep it there for the time being. I hope this helps.

 

The weird thing is that the rapid bleaching of the blastomussa seemed to happen overnight, after it had survived that long with 10+ months of temperature swings, and without peppermint shrimp in the tank. I do feed it and it eats ok - I have grown 4 new heads since I got it. The two primary heads (which I originally bought) are the ones really struggling right now.

 

Anyways, besides controlling the temperature (or attempting to anyway), I have moved it to a shadier area (underneath a Duncan coral up above) with a bit more flow. The bleaching/damage doesn't appear to be spreading to the other heads.is there anything else anybody might recommend doing?

[Clown79]

Temp swings are bad. Stability is the key with temp.

 

78-80 is what the tank should be set at.

 

74-76 is too low.

 

Your peppermints may have chosen to eat the blastos. Peppermints can go after fleshy corals.

 

Lighting. Blastos like low to moderate lighting. If they are under direct light, it may be the cause. They also like moderate to low flow.

 

Your phos is too high.

 

Do you have alk fluctuations?