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.

 

[Echoplex]

Ultimately all acros thrive on rock solid Alkalinity and Calcium levels. Mag, NO3, and PO4 are somewhat secondary but if you can keep those in a range, you should be OK. SPS in general are also enormous consumers of many trace elements that are also very important. Keeping SPS, LPS and softies is TOUGH because they all require different things.

What SPS DO NOT LIKE is sudden change. Drastic change to Alk is the backbreaker. I haven't done a full blown WC in my acro tank in 2 years. Albeit I run Moonshiners and replace elements based on ICP. The BIG caveat is that my Alk and Cal are ALWAYS kept extremely solid. If you want a thriving SPS reef, you MUST keep those 2 from drifting. Water changes, unless absolutely necessary, must be kept at a minimum and only ~10% at a time.

My 2c.

I did decide to keep the alk stable rather than try to drop it down to 8. Call is generally always at 450 with minor shifts of 10 or so. I appreciate the response. At this point the .2 phos seems to be my biggest issue with chemistry. No gfo so I'll just limit the feeding till I can skimm it back down I guess.

 

[Reginald Reefer III]

Ultimately all acros thrive on rock solid Alkalinity and Calcium levels. Mag, NO3, and PO4 are somewhat secondary but if you can keep those in a range, you should be OK. SPS in general are also enormous consumers of many trace elements that are also very important. Keeping SPS, LPS and softies is TOUGH because they all require different things.

What SPS DO NOT LIKE is sudden change. Drastic change to Alk is the backbreaker. I haven't done a full blown WC in my acro tank in 2 years. Albeit I run Moonshiners and replace elements based on ICP. The BIG caveat is that my Alk and Cal are ALWAYS kept extremely solid. If you want a thriving SPS reef, you MUST keep those 2 from drifting. Water changes, unless absolutely necessary, must be kept at a minimum and only ~10% at a time.

My 2c.

I did decide to keep the alk stable rather than try to drop it down to 8. Call is generally always at 450 with minor shifts of 10 or so. I appreciate the response. At this point the .2 phos seems to be my biggest issue with chemistry. No gfo so I'll just limit the feeding till I can skimm it back down I guess.

0.2 PO4 is not worth chasing lower artificially with GFO or something else. Look into what you are feeding or dosing and let it fall to whatever range you find acceptable. There are tons of reefs that run at that level with beautiful acros.

Have you had an ICP-MS done on this tank? Often times doing that will point directly to a culprit and you can easily fix it without guessing.

 

[Echoplex]

0.2 PO4 is not worth chasing lower artificially with GFO or something else. Look into what you are feeding or dosing and let it fall to whatever range you find acceptable. There are tons of reefs that run at that level with beautiful acros.

Have you had an ICP-MS done on this tank? Often times doing that will point directly to a culprit and you can easily fix it without guessing.

No, I didn't really consider doing it tbh. I see it's value don't get me wrong, it just never occurred to me that I should.