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HELP corals slowly wasting away😥


FISHnChix

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So I've been doing this for a little while now and tank was humming along . Now I'm starting to loose corals and im stumped. I dont normally panic if one coral start to suffer but now it seems like half of them are suffering.. the weird part is I have a one acan cluster of 15 heads that is withering away to skeleton then I have another acan colony thriving. And the list goes on like this.. here are some examples hammer colony thriving then a single head hammer frag is all shrinking up. One lobo looks good one is dieing.  I have two big frogspawn and now one of them is losing a head and the other is thriving...

 

Would love to hear any suggestions as to why this is going on... I'm starting to wonder if it's a pest of some sort..

 

Water seems fine but here are my params

Red sea reefer 250. (55gallons)

 

Alk 8.4 (has been moving from 8.4 to 9.0 so I took my doser offline and started hand dosing the brs 2 part)

 

Ca 420

Mag 1320

Phos .11 on hanna ulr 

Nitrates 10

Ph 8

 I try and do 10 gallon water changes using rodi and fritz salt weekly , sometimes its every other week.

 

I run a skimmer , floss , rox carbon..

 

 

Livestock is just a fire fish, cardnial fish, cleaner shrimp, 20 red legged hermits, turbo snails , margarita snails, trouchus..

 

Pests that I can see are:

Super small flat worms think pen head size (on glass )

Bristle worms

Astrea stars

Brittle star 

And I have noticed recently these small little snails multiplying. Dunno what they are but the are like 1/4 inch in size.

 

One thing I did see is a hermit crab on my acans.. now there was a little algae between the heads so maybe he was picking at that.. can red legged hermits or cleaner shrimp go rogue and eat corals?? There isnt much food as I only feed the fish every 2 to 3 days...

 

 

Ok reefers got to help me out before I loose everything and shut this tank down for good😥 I will try and post some photos of the corals tonight.. please feel free to ask questions or throw out random ideas

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Do you have any chemical filtration in the tank like activated carbon ? Because your prams seem fine to me.

 

Your crabs are probly eating dead flesh.  My hermit did that to a bubble coral i have when it nearly all melted a year ago.. its big and bushy now but yea.

 

Skimmer take micronutrients out of the salt.  Are you running that skimmer 24.7 ?  Id turn it off and do a 50% water change and add activated carbon if this were my tank. But thats just me.  I do huge water changes if i see corals dying like that

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What’s your salinity and how are you measuring it?  I had something similar happen and my salinity had dropped significantly.  Fish and soft corals were fine but lps was not happy.  

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2 hours ago, Candymancan said:

Do you have any chemical filtration in the tank like activated carbon ? Because your prams seem fine to me.

 

Your crabs are probly eating dead flesh.  My hermit did that to a bubble coral i have when it nearly all melted a year ago.. its big and bushy now but yea.

 

Skimmer take micronutrients out of the salt.  Are you running that skimmer 24.7 ?  Id turn it off and do a 50% water change and add activated carbon if this were my tank. But thats just me.  I do huge water changes if i see corals dying like that

So I only run the carbon.. specially the brs rox carbon.. yes I run the skimmer 24/7 but I do have it set to barely skim, meaning it pulls very dry skim mate and not very much of it.....

 

I have thought about doing a huge wc just for the hell of it.. I just changed everything in my rodi system too hoping that might help. Kinda concerned about some sort of containment too bc my tank is right in the kitchen...

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2 hours ago, Poodges said:

What’s your salinity and how are you measuring it?  I had something similar happen and my salinity had dropped significantly.  Fish and soft corals were fine but lps was not happy.  

This has kinda been going on for a little over a month now , but I havent chwcked the salinity since last week.. it was 1.026 then. I use a refracometer that was caled oh I dunno maybe 6 months ago.. I will make a point to check tonight..

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30 minutes ago, FISHnChix said:

This has kinda been going on for a little over a month now , but I havent chwcked the salinity since last week.. it was 1.026 then. I use a refracometer that was caled oh I dunno maybe 6 months ago.. I will make a point to check tonight..

Buy some calibration fluid. I was assuming mine was correct and my salinity slowly crept to 1.030. This affected some corals more than others (even of the same type)

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44 minutes ago, FISHnChix said:

This has kinda been going on for a little over a month now , but I havent chwcked the salinity since last week.. it was 1.026 then. I use a refracometer that was caled oh I dunno maybe 6 months ago.. I will make a point to check tonight..

I lost a few fish when I first started my tank because my salinity wasn't what I thought it was. I've noticed that my refractometer's calibration can be off sometimes after just one use, I would highly recommend calibrating it before every use, can't hurt and it only takes a few seconds

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44 minutes ago, SaltyBuddha said:

Buy some calibration fluid. I was assuming mine was correct and my salinity slowly crept to 1.030. This affected some corals more than others (even of the same type)

Yea I have some cal fluid I can use. Funny bc when I first got my refracometer I used rodi .. about a year later i bought some cal fluid and yea it was dead on.. havent checked the cal in months so I will do it tonight for sure, just to eliminate it...my money's betting it's still dead on.. 😊

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36 minutes ago, Ckane2 said:

I lost a few fish when I first started my tank because my salinity wasn't what I thought it was. I've noticed that my refractometer's calibration can be off sometimes after just one use, I would highly recommend calibrating it before every use, can't hurt and it only takes a few seconds

Yikes yours was off after one use ?? That's crazy... now when I first tried a refracometer I pulled it from the mailbox on a 100 degree day and caled it.. tried it the next week and it seemed off so I caled it again. Yea it was way off , i think the metal being really warm had something to do with it.. Since then it's never drifted in oh I dunno about 2ish years... everyone talking about this makes me hope maybe it is just off. I would love it if it was that simple 😉.. I'm going to check first thing when I get home...

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If you're losing that much it might not hurt to just do a 50%+ Waterchange with known-mix (with similar/identical parameters) from a trusted LFS or something. Hope you can get things figured out.

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When I first read your post, I was wondering if your salinity was off.  If you can, just do a quick salinity test before the water change if you are going to do a water change so we know what it was at.  Recently, my Pom Pom Xenia started shriveling up at 1.028+ and now they're looking lively and gorgeous once I got the salinity down to 1.024.

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1 minute ago, Tamberav said:

Anything potentially stinging something else? I had a snail push a lobo all over the tank and sting like a dozen corals before.

You know I was thinking about that but now a few corals that arent around anything are suffering as well.  The acans that are dieing are pretty close to a gorg, the lobo that is dieing is just above a Duncan,  but the frogspawn isnt near anything and it's just the lowest most head that is receding.  Oh and the hammer isnt by anything.. 

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17 minutes ago, kimberbee said:

How long has the tank been set up? And do you siphon out the sand with each water change (how often?)?

This tank has been set up for about 15 months .. yep I clean the piss out of the sand bed 😆.. I clean it every water change which is normally weekly every now and then I skip a week but no more..

 

Maybe clean it too much??🤔

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3 minutes ago, FISHnChix said:

This tank has been set up for about 15 months .. yep I clean the piss out of the sand bed 😆.. I clean it every water change which is normally weekly every now and then I skip a week but no more..

 

Maybe clean it too much??🤔

No idea if there is such a thing as too much. 😕

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1 hour ago, mitten_reef said:

Check equipment for rust? 

 

I might do that... kinda hard though don't have much equipment,  but come to think of it I havent inspected the stuff in the sump... I wanna do a icp test but it might be too late

 

 

 

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59 minutes ago, Amphrites said:

Maybe grab a meter and check for stray voltage too?
Temperature swings maybe?

Nan temps perfect... 

 

I have heard about stray voltage .. I might need to see how to test for that in a tank..🤔

Screenshot_20191219-162853_Apex Fusion.jpg

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So checked the refracometer and yea it was dead on and tank was still 1.026.. man in was hoping it was something dumb I'm doing

 

Here is some pictures of dieing corals

20191219_162553.jpg

20191219_162532.jpg

20191219_162506.jpg

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You dump a bud light in there......................:unsure:

 

So when you tested the refractometer how did you do it ?

 

Had issues years ago and it was salinity.........................to be honest anymore I only trust my milwaukee digital one anymore...............or a old school glass one............

 

 

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