Heartbroken

SabrinaC · Dec 12, 2022

I’m absolutely heartbroken about my beautiful hammer. I ordered it from an online vendor and it arrived with 2 barnacles. I had some people say they were harmless and would eventually die off in the home aquarium, so I left it alone. It started to really irritate my hammer and it started to recede. I did an iodine dip, super glued the barnacles as suggested, and stuck it in QT. I made sure not to get any glue on the coral itself. Anything I can do to save it, or is it pretty much a lost cause? It got covered in that white stuff. It was so beautiful. My other 2 hammers are doing great in my DT, so I figured it was the barnacles.

wakejumper22 · Dec 12, 2022

The only thing I’d recommend is fragging the healthy head that remains to try and save that.

SabrinaC · Dec 12, 2022

wakejumper22 said:
The only thing I’d recommend is fragging the healthy head that remains to try and save that.

Oh man. I’ve never fragged anything before. I guess it’s time to learn.

kevgib67 · Dec 12, 2022

Get a dremel with a diamond blade and it will cut through the skeleton like butter. If there are polyps there is still a chance for the second one. I got a hammer and as I tried to remove it from the plug with bone cutter it split vertically leaving 3 pieces with polyps. Thought they were toast but mounted them and the one with the most polyps made it. That was 9 months ago and this is it now. Lesson I learned, hammers skeleton is to brittle for bone cutters. Dremel works like a charm. Good luck.

SabrinaC · Dec 14, 2022

kevgib67 said:
Get a dremel with a diamond blade and it will cut through the skeleton like butter. If there are polyps there is still a chance for the second one. I got a hammer and as I tried to remove it from the plug with bone cutter it split vertically leaving 3 pieces with polyps. Thought they were toast but mounted them and the one with the most polyps made it. That was 9 months ago and this is it now. Lesson I learned, hammers skeleton is to brittle for bone cutters. Dremel works like a charm. Good luck.

Bought one yesterday and cut it today. We’ll see what happens. I believe it’s a wall hammer, because it didn’t have the branching arms. It was just one big piece.

ISpeakForTheSeas · Dec 14, 2022

SabrinaC said:
I’m absolutely heartbroken about my beautiful hammer. I ordered it from an online vendor and it arrived with 2 barnacles. I had some people say they were harmless and would eventually die off in the home aquarium, so I left it alone. It started to really irritate my hammer and it started to recede. I did an iodine dip, super glued the barnacles as suggested, and stuck it in QT. I made sure not to get any glue on the coral itself. Anything I can do to save it, or is it pretty much a lost cause? It got covered in that white stuff. It was so beautiful. My other 2 hammers are doing great in my DT, so I figured it was the barnacles.

I hope the frag does well for you.

Questions for you about the barnacles and white stuff, though - has the white stuff been growing on any healthy parts of the coral/have the healthy parts been receding away from the white stuff?
Was there any white stuff around the barnacle when the hammer started receding?
How do you know the barnacle is what irritated the hammer (I don’t doubt you that it did, I’m just wondering what indication there was - for example, did the flesh recede around the barnacle itself without the presence of the white stuff nearby)?

From everything I’ve heard, regular barnacles fair poorly in our aquariums, but I’ve been hearing recently that these coral-boring barnacles tend to do better/live longer in them (somewhat unfortunately).

That said, this is the first I’ve heard of barnacles actually damaging a coral (i.e. causing irritation and receding flesh) - they usually just cause deformities as a result of their burrows in the skeleton from what I’ve seen. Since this is the first time I’ve heard of something like this happening, I’m wondering if the irritation was caused by barnacle itself (which would lead to me wonder if hammer corals are particularly susceptible to irritation by the barnacles methods of feeding or by the process of the production of their shells), or if it’s the white stuff growing on your coral (which I would guess is a sponge - some sponges are known to produce chemicals which are used to combat corals and such for space to grow in the wild, so if the cause might be the white stuff, I’d guess it’s a potentially invasive sponge with anti-coral chemical defenses).

SabrinaC · Dec 15, 2022

ISpeakForTheSeas said:
I hope the frag does well for you.

Questions for you about the barnacles and white stuff, though - has the white stuff been growing on any healthy parts of the coral/have the healthy parts been receding away from the white stuff?
Was there any white stuff around the barnacle when the hammer started receding?
How do you know the barnacle is what irritated the hammer (I don’t doubt you that it did, I’m just wondering what indication there was - for example, did the flesh recede around the barnacle itself without the presence of the white stuff nearby)?

From everything I’ve heard, regular barnacles fair poorly in our aquariums, but I’ve been hearing recently that these coral-boring barnacles tend to do better/live longer in them (somewhat unfortunately).

That said, this is the first I’ve heard of barnacles actually damaging a coral (i.e. causing irritation and receding flesh) - they usually just cause deformities as a result of their burrows in the skeleton from what I’ve seen. Since this is the first time I’ve heard of something like this happening, I’m wondering if the irritation was caused by barnacle itself (which would lead to me wonder if hammer corals are particularly susceptible to irritation by the barnacles methods of feeding or by the process of the production of their shells), or if it’s the white stuff growing on your coral (which I would guess is a sponge - some sponges are known to produce chemicals which are used to combat corals and such for space to grow in the wild, so if the cause might be the white stuff, I’d guess it’s a potentially invasive sponge with anti-coral chemical defenses).

Thank you for your response.

I just assumed the barnacle is what irritated the hammer, because I could not see anything else that could have caused it, even though something else very well may have.

The flesh started to recede around the barnacle itself without the presence of the white stuff nearby. The white stuff did not begin growing until after the flesh started to recede around the barnacle. There was not any white stuff around the barnacle when the hammer first started receding. When I fragged the hammer, the white stuff scrapped off easily. When I first looked at it, it seemed as though it was calcifying over, but it was more of a film, which is now covering more of the frags.