Help with tissue loss in corals

[moosevandyke]

Where did you get your frags from?

Don't dump all that garbage in your tank. Just feed the fish the corals will get fed and grow and lea rish of nutrient swings, bacteria blooms good and bad etc..

icp test are great once a month. Yes I have mostly dominated sps tanks but also lps that are thriving on just feeding fish, stable parameters, good lighting, good flow, and rigorous qt of all corals and fish and trace elements.

Now more then ever even your premier vendors are shipping pests.. grey bugs being the most common.

 

[ichiban812]

My tank is 100g and about a year old. I don't have much in the way of corals but I had an encrusting monti, a small acro, a pectinia, 2 hammers, a goni (or something closely related) and an octospawn that have been with me for maybe a little over a year (they came from my other tank about 6 months ago). All these corals have been fine. About three weeks ago I got an order of various sps frags in and put them in a frag rack on the bottom of the tank and they had been fine. About two weeks ago I noticed that the goni and monti had stopped coming out, but everything else seemed to be ok.

Then I lost two of the sps frags after about a week. It was kind of rapid. However I've noticed that basically all of them seem to be in trouble with tissue loss.

I also have a stylo that has lost quite a bit of tissue from the base while mainting extended polyps... But I can't find the picture.

I'm also now seeing that the pectina looks bad.
It looks like it's losing tissue and I can see the point skeleton sticking through.

The hammer/octo look totally fine to me and one of my old sps still looks ok.

I mostly test alkalinity. I test it everyday at a similar time and it tends to range between 8.5 and 8.7. salinity is 35ppt.

Any tips for what I should do here?

• Raise the Temp (if it's low): If they are below 76°F, they should slowly bring it up to 78°F.
• Check Alkalinity: This is the #1 cause of SPS tissue loss. If their "Alk" swung by more than 1.0 dKH in a day, the coral will peel.
• Check for Pests: White spots or peeling at the base often means Acro Eating Flatworms (AEFW) or nudibranchs.
• Iodine Dips: Instead of changing the tank temp, dipping the affected coral in an Iodine-based solution (like Lugol's or Seachem Reef Dip) acts like an antiseptic to stop the "infection" from spreading.

 

[Areseebee]

I'm not super experienced with coral pests, but speaking from my perspective I don't think that was the cause. I don't really have hard evidence for this, just how I feel it went and the fact that I never saw anything on them. My suspicion right now is tin contamination. I replummed my UV and my main return line not too long before this shipment of corals. I also plummed a 2 part doser with cheap airline tubing, which I've also read can be an issue. Then the biggest red flag in that ICP report is tin. I suspect that's the cause.

Alkalinity is the parameter I was taking super seriously, and while I don't have a trident I tried to check it once or twice a day and get the doser dialed in. I think over the course of this time it was quite stable. I can't promise it wasn't going through insane swings between tests but I tried to test at different times of day and it was always pretty flat.

I've replumbed the UV and the doser. I added metasorb for a week (it's unclear if this will do anything) and I'll try another ICP in about a week. I've also stepped up water changes.

I don't THINK the issue is nutrients, but I guess it's not a crazy thought. I've stepped up feeding and I have actually added a number of fish.

 

[moosevandyke]

The alk thing just isn't true.. my tank can swing 1-2 points in a day no issues.

 

[moosevandyke]

the cheap tubing could for sure be an issue if not cleaned etc.. you won't see bugs well sometimes but most of the time need a scope.

 

[Areseebee]

Yeah overall I'm not sure. It didn't feel to me like pests just because it was kind of quick and happened broadly to all the corals that were effected. I also feel like, in retrospect, I could see some signs on my older corals that died even before they arrived. The montipora which I'd had for roughly a year took its polyps in for the first time, the goniopora was retracted for days (it had retracted in the past, but usually just for short periods).

I'm really not sure. The tin idea does seem to fit a lot of the observed behaviors and measurements though. It seems ridiculous though that small sections of tube would matter so much.