Thanks!

[Konichiwa]

Hi, I am newish to corals and reef tanks in general. I mainly wanted to say thanks to the forum members en masse for all the great info that I have found here. I purchased a fungia coral and for a couple weeks it looked amazing, and was so fun to feed. I fed it one day and the next day the mouth stomach area was completely gone and the skeleton was exposed! It was a matter of hours and total annihilation of the center of the coral! After a lot of watching and worrying I looked online and did a lot of reading here and copied a cover for it and then with much experimenting I figured out that it was most likely our very large left handed hermit crab had ripped at the coral to get to the food. Every time I uncovered the coral he hopped on and would start tearing at the coral. I have a 10gallon tank I had not intended for corals and I prepped that one to put the fungia in and started feeding it Goni food under it’s dome every other day, not expecting much, but hoping for a recovery, that was a couple weeks ago and it is regrowing it’s mouth! I noticed it moving sand and detritus outwardly yesterday and moving food inwardly today. I am so thrilled that I might be able to save it. There is noticeable tissue recovery in the mouth/stomach area that was skeleton a short week ago and it started extending its tentacles today. The coral is about 2 inches across and at the worst point the tissue had visibly receded from the center about 1/4 inch in all directions and all there was left was skeleton.  Thanks to everyone that gave great info in this forum, a fungia thanks you too ?. 

[Clown79]

Hello

 

Are you feeding the plate directly in its mouth?

They love mysis, but it needs to be placed on its body and allow the tentacles to move the food to it's mouth.

 

Hopefully it recovers. Corals are more resilient than we give them credit for.

[Scruffy_77]

Glad you were able to save your plate coral! I am going through a similar situation with mine at the moment which I think I caused a problematic acclimatisation to it by re-scaping my rock work the day after introduction. I am going to do the same with the dome and mysis because I anticipate if I feed it direct the other inhabitants might want to steal the food!