Coral Stressed Out Big Time After Water Change

mbarber87 · May 7, 2020

I was doing my weekly water change today. Nothing different at all really.

however about 10 minutes after I did the water change, I noticed that my Coral were acting very weird. In particular my Zoas and Lobo. Most of my Zoas have closed up and my Lobo started to shrivel up and immediately show dark spots. The spotting was fairly quick, going from perfectly red to shriveled and dark spots.

The only thing I could think of is that the temp dropped 2-3 degrees and salinity dropped about 2ppt.

Any ideas?

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Aquavaj · May 7, 2020

Why did your salinity dropped so much? Temp I'm not so worried about when I do my water changes but I make sure my salinity is on the dot with my tank though.

mbarber87 · May 7, 2020

Aquavaj said:
Why did your salinity dropped so much? Temp I'm not so worried about when I do my water changes but I make sure my salinity is on the dot with my tank though.

Yeah I normally hit my salinity on the dot with how I measure water and salt mixture. Over time doing it so much I just trusted my routine. With this big of a difference really hurt my Coral that much?

ScottB · May 8, 2020

mbarber87 said:
Yeah I normally hit my salinity on the dot with how I measure water and salt mixture. Over time doing it so much I just trusted my routine. With this big of a difference really hurt my Coral that much?

Quick salinity and temp changes will shock corals for sure. (It is worse to go UP than down though.) They'll likely settle down.

I gotta point out though that 32ppt is definitely on the low side. I really try to stick close to 35. Lastly, never trust a conductivity probe for accuracy. Always use a calibrated refractometer.