Hammer coral closing during lights on

[Uzair Aiman]

Hi. Firstly, I would like to say that my hammer coral is unhappy in the first place. Ive tweaked with the parameters a little bit and it looked abit happier and puffier. Right now Ive come to another problem. The hammer isnt really opening but is abit "puffy" when the lights are off. (At night I close the lights and in the morning, just before I turn the lights on it looks more puffier).

The moment I turn the lights on, its retracts more into the skeleton after a few minutes.

Does it mean my lighting is too strong? I dont have the option to lower the brightness as Im only using Aqua Knights Spectra (which is quite uncustomizable, I can only change the blues and whites).

Should I put it under the shade? Problem with under the shade is its quite dark under the rocks. Say about 10% of the lights go there. ITs on the sand bed right now

 

[outhouse]

not enough info to know. The light is weak for a hammer but we have no idea how high the light is or how deep and big the tank is. You could have water conditions causing this, and you could try raising the light away from the coral and see if you get a positive response

 

[Uzair Aiman]

not enough info to know. The light is weak for a hammer but we have no idea how high the light is or how deep and big the tank is. You could have water conditions causing this, and you could try raising the light away from the coral and see if you get a positive response

My lights are at the highest point it can go. Its around 5inches (12cm) away from the surface of the water. The tank is also around 14 inches deep. (35cm). Right now I do have high phosphates. It closed up at 1ppm of phosphate and I tried lowering it down with a fluval phosphate remover pad. Last time I checked it was at 0.5ppm. It looked better at that lower phosphate level. My nitrates are at 0 and I am also trying to raise that up abit. Is moving it not an option right now?