Acro help please 🙏

[Echoplex]

Hello everyone. This may be a little long winded but I believe context and history may be important here.

I am a newer Reefer about 8 months in. At 6 months I got into acros. I like a challenge. I currently have a walt disney, home wrecker, cherry bomb, ice breaker and voodoo magic all from TG.

About a month ago I finished a 76 day fallow period. Before the fallow ended I was running on ultra low nutrients which is expected. Phos was about .01-.07 and required me to dose phos to keep the levels up. Generally at .03-.06, at times it did bottom out at .00 for a day. My nitrates would sit at 5-7 pretty steadily and required nothing extra. Alk was stable at 9.8 for weeks with no change.

I have a 161 gallon system. 131 display 30 gallon sump. Red sea skimmer 900 reef matt 1200 and I run the red sea 4 part dosing on an automated dosing schedule.

Fast forward to fish reintroduction. I do have a larger bioload. Purple and sailfin tang, one spot fox facce, two chromis, two dispar anthias, 2 clowns, 2 flasher wrasse, 1 lemon wrasse a pajama cardinal and a yellow and demon gobie.

Within two days alk tanked to 8.4, I got it back to where it should be over a period of days. Took about a week and a half to make it back to 9.4, and i continued till it hit 9.8. I did a water change recently and it jumped from 9.8 to 10.1. Alk is officially stable. I assume this happened due to the increased nutrients, I also noticed coraline growing on the wave makers and snail shells. With alk now stable a new issue. My nitrates have jumped to 11 and my phos is at .2!!!

I noticed some very slow STN on my homewrecker from the base. Pics posted, after watching it over the past week I confirmed it was stn and moving up the branch. I don't want to lose it so I fragged it above the line that was receding. Pics of that here as well. The thing is when I did the fragging the darn thing was extremely brittle, the bone cutters made a crunch feel instead of a cut. Almost as if the core was slushy or hollow.

Research tells me the high alk and the high phos cause the calcification to act too quickly and since the high phos it's not calcifying into a solid structure, rather the hollow bones I am describing.

Is this the case? Have I nuked all my sps and just can't tell they are slushy under the skin? They all have polyps extended and I am hoping the homewrecker is just sensitive to the alk swings or something.

Will a gfo reactor work and will they recover if that is the case? I plan to slowly lower phos to not shock the system, I'll use half the recommended GFO and test daily. Hoping to not bring it down by more than .02 a day. I ordered the recatorntoday from brs to be here Friday.

I would really like some advise on this. These corals were not inexpensive by any sense of the word but more importantly I want to be successful. I'll put in the work but without a mentor I find myself running in circles.

Thank you for your assistance.

 

[Dburr1014]

Hello everyone. This may be a little long winded but I believe context and history may be important here.

I am a newer Reefer about 8 months in. At 6 months I got into acros. I like a challenge. I currently have a walt disney, home wrecker, cherry bomb, ice breaker and voodoo magic all from TG.

About a month ago I finished a 76 day fallow period. Before the fallow ended I was running on ultra low nutrients which is expected. Phos was about .01-.07 and required me to dose phos to keep the levels up. Generally at .03-.06, at times it did bottom out at .00 for a day. My nitrates would sit at 5-7 pretty steadily and required nothing extra. Alk was stable at 9.8 for weeks with no change.

I have a 161 gallon system. 131 display 30 gallon sump. Red sea skimmer 900 reef matt 1200 and I run the red sea 4 part dosing on an automated dosing schedule.

Fast forward to fish reintroduction. I do have a larger bioload. Purple and sailfin tang, one spot fox facce, two chromis, two dispar anthias, 2 clowns, 2 flasher wrasse, 1 lemon wrasse a pajama cardinal and a yellow and demon gobie.

Within two days alk tanked to 8.4, I got it back to where it should be over a period of days. Took about a week and a half to make it back to 9.4, and i continued till it hit 9.8. I did a water change recently and it jumped from 9.8 to 10.1. Alk is officially stable. I assume this happened due to the increased nutrients, I also noticed coraline growing on the wave makers and snail shells. With alk now stable a new issue. My nitrates have jumped to 11 and my phos is at .2!!!

I noticed some very slow STN on my homewrecker from the base. Pics posted, after watching it over the past week I confirmed it was stn and moving up the branch. I don't want to lose it so I fragged it above the line that was receding. Pics of that here as well. The thing is when I did the fragging the darn thing was extremely brittle, the bone cutters made a crunch feel instead of a cut. Almost as if the core was slushy or hollow.

Research tells me the high alk and the high phos cause the calcification to act too quickly and since the high phos it's not calcifying into a solid structure, rather the hollow bones I am describing.

Is this the case? Have I nuked all my sps and just can't tell they are slushy under the skin? They all have polyps extended and I am hoping the homewrecker is just sensitive to the alk swings or something.

Will a gfo reactor work and will they recover if that is the case? I plan to slowly lower phos to not shock the system, I'll use half the recommended GFO and test daily. Hoping to not bring it down by more than .02 a day. I ordered the recatorntoday from brs to be here Friday.

I would really like some advise on this. These corals were not inexpensive by any sense of the word but more importantly I want to be successful. I'll put in the work but without a mentor I find myself running in circles.

Thank you for your assistance.

What test kits are you using?

Being brittle doesn't happen overnight it's the constant uptake as they grow. Be careful with the GFO, don't start swinging PO4 all around because it's easy to do. Phosphate gets bound to the rock as you probably know and released as it gets lower.

It's super hard to recreate natural a environment in a box. We must remember with every action, there will be a reaction.
High alk, high uptake of nutrients. Low alk, lower uptake. Spike the alk, stop the uptake all together. I think/feel a 9.x alk is high. Natural alk in the oceans is closer to 8. When coral build to fast they do tend to get brittle. Keeping a 8ish alk is a sweet spot in my book
So, when you have spikes in anything, it's important to check all parameters that you can for a week or so because coral can stop uptake (nutrients will raise) excel uptake (nutrients will lower) or not change at all.

My trick when coral are stressed is to simply turn down the light intensity and let them rest. 10% for a week or two until I see the stress has stopped. Then start to raise it up every couple of days.

All in all, you haven't nuked anything. Just get them to reset, check parameters daily for a week if possible, don't do any drastic changes (GFO can do this, be careful), and I suggest to lower you light intensity while you get the reset.

 

[CHSUB]

Ultimately SPS corals need food, clean water, stability. Your focus seems to be hobby parameter results, which are inaccurate and only marginally important. Corals don’t consume no3 and po4, their zooxanthella do. So corals can starve with high nutrients because the zooxanthella use the nutrients for their growth instead of transferring energy to the host coral. You need to ensure corals have adequate food while simultaneously lowering your inorganic no3 and po4. This is achieved be feeding and vigorous, consistent maintenance.

Feed the corals, lower inorganic nutrients and stop focusing on Alk. Personally my tanks have run anywhere from 6 to 10 dKH with fine results and bounces between there almost daily are fine.