Assuming in range and stable water parameters, what else will harm sps?

[Murraydar]

Hi guys, I'm looking to compile a list of different things that may be irritating or harming sps corals. My tank and others I see online can have perfectly acceptable flow, lighting, and water paremeters and the sps just seem to hate existence. Generally the symptoms I see are bleaching, low to zero polyp extension day or night, zero calcification / growth, eventual stn / rtn.

So, assuming acceptable paremeters and nutrients what can be causing these corals to hate life so much in some of our tanks? What problems have you personally or anecdotally seen that were fixed and allowed sps to thrive once again? I'll throw out a few examples.

- Pests. Redbugs and flatworms cause these symptoms but they're usually easy enough to spot.

- Disease? Unsure about this one.

- Rust from magnets or corroded metal parts. Quite a few stories out there about rust harming sps. Anyone know how to test this?

- Heavy metal contamination? Copper is known to be very bad for reefs. What other metals or elements would harm corals besides copper?

- Stray voltage. Lots of misinformation and confusion here. Many confuse true stray voltage with inducted voltage. Unsure of the how to properly test or check symptoms.

- Toxins. Usually carbon / protein skimmers are used to combat this. Are there toxins that these methods will not remove?

- Fish predators. Usually pretty obvious if this is the issue.

What else can you guys think of? What is it about some tanks where not even a birdnest will survive?

 

[Crabs McJones]

I'll add lighting in the sense of type changes. I've seen quite a few threads where people have gone from T5 to led and cooked everything from the leds being to intense.

 

[29bonsaireef]

I think lighting is one of the top SPS killers nowadays. Many people, usually new to the hobby struggle with LEDs. They either set the % too high or hang the lights too low. I know quite a few people that could never keep SPS corals thriving under their LEDs. After switching to T5 fixtures or adding T5s to the LEDs they've been successful keeping SPS long term. IMO, lighting is almost as important as maintaining stable parameters.

 

[Murraydar]

Agreed that leds can be deceptively strong. I personally have the reefbreeders photon v2 that can crank out par like nobody's business. I can imagine people without par meters can do some damage when switching.