Forest fire Monti is dying

[synapticfire]

Woke up to this tissue loss and bleaching, seems to be isolated to my forest fire monti.
Any advice?

I am working on parameters now.

Edit:
Salinity 35
KH 6.7 (lower than normal)
Mg 1360
Ca 420

So far seems isolated to two sections.
I changed carbon and am about to do a water change.

Tank has been running smoothly.
I had some issues when the tank was new, but this is the first time I’ve had a random coral bleach, so sorry if I’m a little freaked out.

 

[lapin]

Any alkalinity swings lately?

 

[synapticfire]

Just measured KH, 6.7. Which is a lot lower than I keep it.

 

[synapticfire]

Just measured KH, 6.7. Which is a lot lower than I keep it.

Ca 420

 

[synapticfire]

Ca 420

Salinity 35

 

[synapticfire]

 

[synapticfire]

One of the white spots under the microscope.

 

[dwest]

Not an expert on this but aren’t there monti eating nudibranchs? Any chance that’s the problem?

 

[synapticfire]

I am actually looking into that. It happened very fast and it is my understanding that they cause damage as their numbers grow so i think I would have noticed. Not ruling it out though.

 

[sjfishguy]

That alk swing will do it. Has happened to me going from 8 to 6.7

 

[synapticfire]

That alk swing will do it. Has happened to me going from 8 to 6.7

I hope that is it. Easier to recover from a chemistry problem than a pest problem, i hope.

 

[synapticfire]

KH is 7.6 after my 10% water change. Hope I didn’t raise it too fast.

 

[synapticfire]

I found what is eating my montipora…
But i don’t know if these are the cause or eating the dead tissue. I can say that the damage is spreading from across like a wave which makes me think pest vs chemistry problem.

 

[synapticfire]

 

[synapticfire]

In case anyone finds this in a search, here’s an update.

As far as I can tell from reading other posts, talking to friends, and weeding through chatGPT hallucinations,
My RTN of my Forest Fire Montipora was probably caused by a combination of low Alkalinity and reduced flow from my coralline encrusted powerhead.

It blew through a large frag of my monti in one evening, jumped over to another frag and over two days slowly spread to the rest of that monti, and started spreading across my plate montipora.

I managed to snap off a few healthy pieces and they remain unaffected.

This is where I learned about RTN cascade, likely caused by bacteria and poor oxygenation at the leading edge of the RTN that causes it to keep spreading even after the initial cause has been corrected. (This may be one of those AI hallucinations but sounds good)

So to stop it, broke off what I could of the affected portion of my plating monti ( at this point the FF monti was toast) and I etched the RTN boundary with some metal tweezers, making sure I was a little into the healthy area.
Then blew it off really good with my turkey baster.
This seemed to stop the cascade.

I also learned as part of “reef CPR” you should turn your lights down. So I put it in cloudy day mode where it has been the past few days.
I have to add that I turned up the flow on my powerhead and actually bought I replacement that I will install this weekend. That way I can clean the old one and have it as a backup.

So far the damage has stopped and everything seems happy.

In fact, I think I see a little orange tint coming back on some of my bleached pieces. Time will tell if it is just algae or regrowth. But I can say the snails and bristleworms have already had their way with that frag. We’ll see.