Pastronomer
New Member
Long time reader here on these forums, been a huge help on my mission to learn reef keeping after spending years and years keeping high end aquascape freshwater tanks, finally thought I'd sign up to ask a question I can't find the answer for.
I had a beautiful Lobophyllia, the centrepiece of my little desktop Waterbox 10, this is how it started:
In hindsight my tank was too new to successfully keep it and so far it's been a battle to keep it alive. Well today I lost the battle and I'm now the owner of a £160 LPS skeleton.
I've been struggling with algae in my tank due to elevated phosphates, which I've ever so slowly brought down, but otherwise all softies and a Frogspawn are thriving. However, no matter how the other corals in my tank have done, this Lobo was never happy, eventually it shrank back then started to bleach. It refused many types of food and only last week did I find a pellet it would accept, albeit very very slowly with minimal feeding response. I even thought I started to see a little bit of colour come back.
Last night however, I noticed a lot of mucous coming from the coral and since then it has been getting more and more. I got the turkey baster out to see if there was any detritus I could blast out in case it was a stress response, but I think all of the flesh on the coral simply dissolved and was blown away into the water column.
This is now how it looks, please ignore the algae, it looks so much worse out of the water. Hair algae has been my nemesis for the last few weeks, but I'm slowly winning, but it did start growing all over the rocky base of the coral, but not the fleshy area and skeleton.
To me, it's clearly a very dead coral. The question I have, will all of the dead flesh now floating around my tank cause a significant detriment to the water quality? I am looking for a boost in my nitrates but trying to avoid PO4 rise, will this pollute my tank? I would do a large water change but I don't want to upset the water parameters.
Water:
1.025 - stable
pH 8.4 - stable
Nitrate 0-0.2 - trying to increase
Alk 9.5 - stable
Calc 390 - stable
Mag 1290 - stable
PO4 0.07 - reducing
Temp 25C/77F
Thanks!
I had a beautiful Lobophyllia, the centrepiece of my little desktop Waterbox 10, this is how it started:
In hindsight my tank was too new to successfully keep it and so far it's been a battle to keep it alive. Well today I lost the battle and I'm now the owner of a £160 LPS skeleton.
I've been struggling with algae in my tank due to elevated phosphates, which I've ever so slowly brought down, but otherwise all softies and a Frogspawn are thriving. However, no matter how the other corals in my tank have done, this Lobo was never happy, eventually it shrank back then started to bleach. It refused many types of food and only last week did I find a pellet it would accept, albeit very very slowly with minimal feeding response. I even thought I started to see a little bit of colour come back.
Last night however, I noticed a lot of mucous coming from the coral and since then it has been getting more and more. I got the turkey baster out to see if there was any detritus I could blast out in case it was a stress response, but I think all of the flesh on the coral simply dissolved and was blown away into the water column.
This is now how it looks, please ignore the algae, it looks so much worse out of the water. Hair algae has been my nemesis for the last few weeks, but I'm slowly winning, but it did start growing all over the rocky base of the coral, but not the fleshy area and skeleton.
To me, it's clearly a very dead coral. The question I have, will all of the dead flesh now floating around my tank cause a significant detriment to the water quality? I am looking for a boost in my nitrates but trying to avoid PO4 rise, will this pollute my tank? I would do a large water change but I don't want to upset the water parameters.
Water:
1.025 - stable
pH 8.4 - stable
Nitrate 0-0.2 - trying to increase
Alk 9.5 - stable
Calc 390 - stable
Mag 1290 - stable
PO4 0.07 - reducing
Temp 25C/77F
Thanks!
