Green slimmer bleached out overnight

[jrloyd]

I bought a green slimmer about 10 days ago. Looked exactly like this nice green one in the picture. Today I come home, it’s completely bleached out. Parameters nearly stable. Temp stable. IM 50 gal AIO. Radios xr 15 light at about 50%. Par roughly 150, medium flow.
SG 1.026, alk 8.2, nitrate 17.3, phos 0.05. It was at the top of my rockscape. I just dropped it down to the bottom just in case the light was too strong and there was some life left in there somewhere but I think it’s toast. So much for hard to kill. Everything else looks pretty good. Maybe a turbo snail ate it! I put a blue slimmer next to it and I think it still looks good, at least it’s not white. Any thoughts? 6 month old tank that has quite a few copepods and gets phytoplankton.

 

[Matt L]

Yeah, it looks like it rtn’d on you. Your parameters look okay, and this is an easier acro to keep. If you try again and it doesn’t work out again, I’d give the tank a few more months. The same thing happened to me until my tank got to around 8-10 months old. If you are newer to reefing, that extra time will also allow you to hone your skills. But sometimes, stn and rtn just happens for no apparent reason.