Difficult to keep soft corals

[LukeSivyer45]

Hello everyone, I am hoping this will spark a few comments. Now we all know soft corals are labelled as beginner corals but has anyone had difficulty any alive? Personally I have had green star polyp die on me and although my xenia pulses it hasn’t yet spread like a weed.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Yes, I have not been successful with several types of soft corals in my new tank. Yellow leather, Koji wada, and a long tentacle leather.

While some shipped hard coral frags also failed, all local hard corals have done fine and are growing. A magnifica anemone is also doing well. I just am not sure what the issue is/was. I may try again with a local soft coral.

 

[StartingATank]

Sometimes it takes Xenia a little bit to spread, it needs to fully establish itself, as for the GSP, bad water quality, disease, or some other variable

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

Do you have success with other types of coral?

 

[BryanM]

Hello everyone, I am hoping this will spark a few comments. Now we all know soft corals are labelled as beginner corals but has anyone had difficulty any alive? Personally I have had green star polyp die on me and although my xenia pulses it hasn’t yet spread like a weed.

can you also give us some tank history, age of tank, water parameters, etc.

GSP is pretty dang hard to kill, that is strange.

 

[LukeSivyer45]

Do you have success with other types of coral?

Yea I have green and purple kenya trees which have grown a fair bit. I also have a toadstool which although I’m not sure if it has grown much since adding it it has really good polyp extension and seems to love where it is

 

[LukeSivyer45]

can you also give us some tank history, age of tank, water parameters, etc.

GSP is pretty dang hard to kill, that is strange.

So the GSP was on an old setup which I think a factor may have been me having lots of hair algae yet my test kits showing I have no nitrates/ phosphates so probably just a me error. My current parameters are 1.025 salinity, temp 77, my alk is on the lower end for some reason at 6 even though I use red sea blue bucket. Also my nitrates and phosphates were quite low a week ago like the salifert test kits showed 2-5ppm nitrate and 0.03 phosphates so I have been slowly trying to increase those. My tank is about 4 months old

 

[BryanM]

So the GSP was on an old setup which I think a factor may have been me having lots of hair algae yet my test kits showing I have no nitrates/ phosphates so probably just a me error. My current parameters are 1.025 salinity, temp 77, my alk is on the lower end for some reason at 6 even though I use red sea blue bucket. Also my nitrates and phosphates were quite low a week ago like the salifert test kits showed 2-5ppm nitrate and 0.03 phosphates so I have been slowly trying to increase those. My tank is about 4 months old

Alk is low for that salt mix for sure, doesn't really match up with the salinity, so I'm kinda questioning if you're really at 1.025. Not sure how you tested that, but refractometers need to be calibrated.

I had a milkwakee fancy tester and it always changed, so I started using a refractometer instead.

 

[GHOSTLY]

Personally I have had green star polyp die on me and although my xenia pulses it hasn’t yet spread like a weed.

From my last few tanks I've had lps/sps do way better than softies. My gsp is grown slightly but ive had more leathers, xenia, and budget softies melt on me. The only ones I keep now are zoas and gsp but with the high light high flow they've shrunk into super tiny polyps

 

[Marquarium]

In my first tank I could absolutely not handle corals. All my "easy" corals wouldn't grow and often died. That tank is broken down and long gone now, but I was never able to get the solid growth I was hoping for.

Fast forward to my new house and I have more tanks up and running again. One of them has growth I never thought I would get to experience. GSP that started as a small frag now covers a massive rock and is now growing on the back walls. Zoas gone from 5 polyps to 50+ in a few months. It's absolutely insane.

I realized what I was doing wrong in my first tanks and am slowly improving. That's what this hobby is about, constant learning and improving. It is demotivating when you read about all these people having great luck with coral growth and then you're struggling to even keep the coral alive. Trust me though, we've all been there. Sometimes you're doing everything right and still corals will die. You're trying to simulate the ocean in a tank and it's not easy.