Brown jelly disease?

[arg101]

Hey all,

This is our first post and hopefully we are posting in the right place.

We just got some corals for black friday. We are new to the hobby this year and have not yet had an issue with any corals yet. However, the octospawn we just bought never fully expanded and now it looks like one of his heads is dying. Could this be brown jelly? How do we make sure our other corals don't die?

I just tested the water today:
Magnesium: 1400
Calcium: 450
Alkalinity: 8.8
Phosphate: 0
Nitrate: 0

Help!! Attached are pictures of both heads.

 

[cdemoss01]

@vetteguy53081

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Going to get the rest of the #reefsqaud on this one.

Did you dip the coral?

 

[vetteguy53081]

Hey all,

This is our first post and hopefully we are posting in the right place.

We just got some corals for black friday. We are new to the hobby this year and have not yet had an issue with any corals yet. However, the octospawn we just bought never fully expanded and now it looks like one of his heads is dying. Could this be brown jelly? How do we make sure our other corals don't die?

I just tested the water today:
Magnesium: 1400
Calcium: 450
Alkalinity: 8.8
Phosphate: 0
Nitrate: 0

Help!! Attached are pictures of both heads.

Opposed to BJD, this looks to be polyp bailout and often due to too much flow as these coral don't need the requirements and flow of SPS coral. The polyps should sway in the current, but not sustain so much current where they are constantly bent over their skeleton. Too much flow will tear the polyps. Also too little light will cause this. While they dont have high PAR needs, they need some light. Hammers require stable tank conditions, and is intolerant to major swings in water quality, and is sensitive to almost any level of copper in the water. Since they are a large polyp stony coral, calcium and alkalinity are two very important water parameters that will affect the growth of your coral.
My suspect - flow and elevated phosphate

 

[BryanM]

A video would help as well.

And yes, I missed the fact that you have zero nutrients, you need to get nitrates up to 5-20, and phosphates up to .1-.3. Without these you are starving corals.

IME sometimes a head just dies too.

 

[ReeferMo]

Phosphate and nitrate levels are bottomed out


I have 0 coral experience. but that I know is not good

 

[Marco_99]

I received a single head hammer about a week ago and have had it on the sandbed in a medium flow area acclimating. It was out day one all nice and fluffy, always fully extended, and beautiful. I did my bi-weekly water change and I had put together some more Marco rock to heighten my scape a bit. I had one mp40 low in the tank running while I was getting this all situated, probably took half hour to 45 min with water change and scape work. Next day about 24hrs passed I noticed the hammer was still pretty much fully retracted, when it somewhat opened up half the polyps were gone as well the side tissue from that area.

I have 5 other older hammers and they are all fine. I also noticed a small patch of rtn on my blue zing birds nest and a small patch on a cobalt blue tenuis frag. The only thing I can think of is I tried (first time ever using) some Aqua Stix epoxy puddy to secure two sections of rock down and I could see it leaching film in the water, kind of cloudy. I ended up taking the epoxy pieces out and got things situated without it. I don’t know if the epoxy triggered it as the corals were kind of on that side i was using it combined with a lower flow at the time in the tank of only one power head going it might of upset them.

The hammer looks like your Octo, probably worse lol. I pulled it and dipped and tucked it back behind some rock so maybe (highly doubtful) it can start healing. The whole thing was weird, it looks as though half the hammer just said no thank you and bailed.