Extremely low Magnesium, a Torch and hammer upset

[StartingATank]

So I am unsure of how long my low magnesium has been going on, but this morning and last night, I noticed that my new torch and one of my hammers have shriveled up a bunch, and one of the heads on the hammer has released or lost grip of some of its heads, and I am starting to make water to do a water change. Hopefully they will recover. I'm not seeing any brown jelly, so I don't think they have BJD. It will be ~3 hours until I am able to change the water, so will my corals be ok until then?

 

[StartingATank]

Also I forgot to mention, magnesium was ~1140

 

[Reginald Reefer III]

Need measurements, pictures, etc. When did it start? Any kind of flatworms visible? Same thing as doctors do in triage - need the basic info to start understanding the issues.

Alk -
Cal -
Mag (range) -
NO3 -
PO4 -
Salinity -

 

[StartingATank]

Nitrates - ~5
Phosphates - ~0, have been low as I have had the tank FALLOW, so haven’t fed food.
Unsure of magnesium and all, but I am pretty sure salinity is 35. Will add pictures once I can. I couldn’t see any flatworms when I looked closely at it.

 

[Reginald Reefer III]

Did you just do a nutrients test? PO4 at 0 might be exactly why they are suffering. They are starving.

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

Pictures and full parameters will help a lot, corals should not show stress when parameters are slightly lower, and I would call your mag slightly lower, it shouldn't affect anything IMO. Alk is much more important.

IMO even if the tank is fallow I would still ghost feed once or week or every 2 weeks, to feed the bacteria's.

 

[Reginald Reefer III]

Whatever you do with suggestions, please do it slowly and don't rapidly swing parameters with dosing corrections. If it's something like PO4, start feeding more and let the PO4 naturally rise into the 0.08-0.15 range. Don't dose a bunch of PO4+ like NeoPhos to whatever level you want it at as the correction jump if it's too fast is often worse than the underlying issue.

 

[StartingATank]

I will start feeding a bit more, hopefully that will help. I will check alk once I am back at home, and do the water change. Thanks for all the great advice. Will attach pics once I get home. I just find this ironic because I have the hardest time with phosphates, because 6 months before this, my tank was running at phosphates at 2 ppm for 3 months, so phosphates have never been nice to me.

 

[StartingATank]

Here is a quick video of the torch and the hammer

 

[StartingATank]

Alk is ~9 dKH

 

[StartingATank]

Calcium is ~460 ppm

 

[KGscv]

0 po4 is your problem imo. Your corals are starving

 

[StartingATank]

I will be adding my clownfish pair into the tank today so I should be able to start feeding full half cubes of frozen instead of little pieces that broke off of the cubes. That hopefully should raise the phosphates.

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

IMO the torch is getting hit with some pretty high flow, it looks bent over. I also see some corals look like they are stretching, the hammer looks like it is stretching to me.

 

[StartingATank]

I did have a thread I posted earlier asking about the flow and they said it was fine. Do you think I should move it? Also I do plan on increasing the light a bit as I have been slowly increasing it for a while as lots of my corals are stretching. Also, the torch is showing some of its mesementerial filaments, so I don’t know if something like that will cause this

 

[KGscv]

Your flow is good. I got my torches on much higher flow than that. slowly dose po4 or feed pellets to increase your nutrients

 

[BryanM]

Salinity, ALK, Nitrate, and phosphate.

Mag is notoriously hard to test for at home, chances are pretty good yours is a test error and not actually that low.

This thread talks a lot about this:

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/just-say-no-to-magnesium-testing-rmm-is-born.1017528/

 

[StartingATank]

Well, torch and hammer heads are gone. It appears that the torch melted, as some remnants of disintegrated tissue still remain.

Sorry for the blue, but I did just stress out my fish a bunch by trying to fix their schedule, so I didn’t want to stress them any more

 

[StartingATank]

But I never saw any white or brown jelly on it, so I don’t get how it would have melted that quickly.

 

[BryanM]

Polyp bailout can happen pretty fast too, thats the only other thing I can think of, beyond some critter eating it.