Duncan possible BJD - Wish me luck

[bratfink]

Well, it finally happened. A random disease popped up that I had no idea about, what it looked like or how to treat it.

Doing a water change today, to help bring Nitrates down after adding GFO yesterday to help bring phosphates down. Neither were way out but much higher than I normally allow. 13.2 Nitrate and 0.16 Phosphate. I normally run 5 Nitrate and 0.05 phosphate.

I have also been chasing increasing pH. It was getting up to 8.65 at the end of the light cycle. That’s another story, but I think now my probe has gone out of cal. As I was dosing small amounts of distilled vinegar to help bring it down (and encourage bacteria growth), but when I do a fresh water change the pH goes right back to 8.6. So now I suspect the probe and it’s probably the whole reason behind me noticing my Duncan wasn’t happy and one of the polyps looked like this.

Thanks to everyone here for all the threads and knowledge! After a search I followed the advice of remove coral to separate tub, trim the dead away (although I stopped short of fragging off the whole head as I caught it super early), peroxide bath, salt water wash off, and put back in tank.

We’ll see how it goes.

 

[Troylee]

That’s all I’ve ever done… frag and iodine bath then back in my tank. I’ve had great luck with this personally.. I know people like the kfc dip but I’m not into all those meds myself.

 

[bratfink]

Well, 24 hours later. He’s not happy with me for the trauma yesterday. But he’s not going Brown Jelly again yet. Time will tell.

 

[bratfink]

Confirmed…. My pH probe was way out of cal. It must have been creeping for a few months. pH by the Hanna probe is showing 8.0 and the recalibrated 13 year old premium aquatics branded probe is now showing 8.2 (was reading 8.6 before).
Probably the source of all my trouble.
Started slowly bring it back up with some Eight 4 buffer.
Annoying as I’ve had it in the back of my head to check the cal on that probe for a while.

 

[bratfink]

2 days later.

Some of the polyps are coming back out, including the 1 I did surgery to (you can see the trimmed away area).
So far so good. From the horror stories I read I’m beginning to wonder if it was BJD, or maybe I just hit so early it didn’t have time to take hold.
pH is on the mend too. Although I think I might need to buy a new probe for my RKL.

 

[bratfink]

I think we might be in the clear:

The trimmed polyp is center at the bottom, you can see the missing tentacles.

 

[Reefkeepers Archive]

I think we might be in the clear:

The trimmed polyp is center at the bottom, you can see the missing tentacles.

Don't know if it was BJD as the first photo just looked like some waste by the coral, but it looks good now!