LPS help please

kalina174

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Hi everyone!

I am currently experiencing issues with our LPS corals. They are receding more day by day and so far I have lost a blasto and a 4 polyp hammer colony among other livestock. We have been battling dino (still are) but that has been going on since November and it wasn't until 3 weeks ago that the LPS started dying. Here's a timeline of our tank. It's long but I wanted to be sure you all had the total rundown of what we did.

Sept 2017: Set up Nuvo Fusion 20 with live rock, live sand, and a Hydra 26 (blues/purples at 70% power, red/white at 10%). Temp at 78 and stable. No skimmer. Tank cycled for 30 days before we added anything to the tank.
October 2017: Added a clown fish, cleaner shrimp, a few zoas, a frogspawn, and an acan. 5 gallon water changes were done every week (BRS RO/DI unit and Res Sea Coral Pro salt). Livestock was added spaced out.
Early November 2017: Added an algae blenny, another acan, more zoas, and the hammer. 5 gallon water changes were done every week (BRS RO/DI unit and Res Sea Coral Pro salt). Livestock was added spaced out.
Late November 2017: Dino showed up. 5 gallon water changes were done every week (BRS RO/DI unit and Res Sea Coral Pro salt).
December 2017: Added 6 line wrasse before we knew we had dino (thought diatoms). Dino confirmed by microscope mid December. Stopped all water changes because of Dino. Tried just doing 3 day blackouts with no luck. Added peroxide dosing (2ml every day) mid December as per our local LFS.
January 2018: Did a water change and then started DinoX for 21 days. Followed the directions and paired this with one 3day blackout at the beginning. Dino receded a ton but not gone (confirmed by microscope) Corals seemed really stressed so we did nothing to the tank (other than water changes) for a month. Lost all brittle stars in live rock and the algae blenny
February 2018: Decided to just let Dino run it's course. It was suggested to lower our Hydra 26 (blues/purples at 50% power, no red/white) but increase biodiversity in the tank (recommendation from World Wild Coral). Began adding copepods weekly. Corals began to recover and we saw the frogspawn split and the zoas recover. Dino still littered the sand and increasing slowly.
March 2018: Dino not getting better so added Vibrant to increase biodiversity further (1.5 ml 2x a week). Lost our Illuminati zoa (ugh!) and Turbo snail
April 2018: Seeing a slight increase in Dino so we kept up with everything but increased Vibrant to every other day 2ml as per the company that makes Vibrant. Kept adding copepods and Ocean Magik. Zoas are taking OVER. Our WWC Superstar went from 4 polyps to 20 in a month. All remaining LPS is unhappy and won't open fully. Lost our hammer, blasto, Astrea (sp?) snail, 6 line wrasse, and two turbo snails. Seeded the tank with new brittle stars only to lose them too.

I am so confused as to what is happening. We are following the recommendations of our LFS (WWC) and keeping up with tank maintenance. As of yesterday my TDS meter is 0 for our RO/DI water, the pH of the tank is 8, phosphates and nitrates are 0. I cannot test for anything else right now but plan to have our LFS test it themselves tomorrow. Help please? How can my zoas be exploding but I am losing snails and LPS coral?
 

SuperHaze57

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Hi everyone!

I am currently experiencing issues with our LPS corals. They are receding more day by day and so far I have lost a blasto and a 4 polyp hammer colony among other livestock. We have been battling dino (still are) but that has been going on since November and it wasn't until 3 weeks ago that the LPS started dying. Here's a timeline of our tank. It's long but I wanted to be sure you all had the total rundown of what we did.

Sept 2017: Set up Nuvo Fusion 20 with live rock, live sand, and a Hydra 26 (blues/purples at 70% power, red/white at 10%). Temp at 78 and stable. No skimmer. Tank cycled for 30 days before we added anything to the tank.
October 2017: Added a clown fish, cleaner shrimp, a few zoas, a frogspawn, and an acan. 5 gallon water changes were done every week (BRS RO/DI unit and Res Sea Coral Pro salt). Livestock was added spaced out.
Early November 2017: Added an algae blenny, another acan, more zoas, and the hammer. 5 gallon water changes were done every week (BRS RO/DI unit and Res Sea Coral Pro salt). Livestock was added spaced out.
Late November 2017: Dino showed up. 5 gallon water changes were done every week (BRS RO/DI unit and Res Sea Coral Pro salt).
December 2017: Added 6 line wrasse before we knew we had dino (thought diatoms). Dino confirmed by microscope mid December. Stopped all water changes because of Dino. Tried just doing 3 day blackouts with no luck. Added peroxide dosing (2ml every day) mid December as per our local LFS.
January 2018: Did a water change and then started DinoX for 21 days. Followed the directions and paired this with one 3day blackout at the beginning. Dino receded a ton but not gone (confirmed by microscope) Corals seemed really stressed so we did nothing to the tank (other than water changes) for a month. Lost all brittle stars in live rock and the algae blenny
February 2018: Decided to just let Dino run it's course. It was suggested to lower our Hydra 26 (blues/purples at 50% power, no red/white) but increase biodiversity in the tank (recommendation from World Wild Coral). Began adding copepods weekly. Corals began to recover and we saw the frogspawn split and the zoas recover. Dino still littered the sand and increasing slowly.
March 2018: Dino not getting better so added Vibrant to increase biodiversity further (1.5 ml 2x a week). Lost our Illuminati zoa (ugh!) and Turbo snail
April 2018: Seeing a slight increase in Dino so we kept up with everything but increased Vibrant to every other day 2ml as per the company that makes Vibrant. Kept adding copepods and Ocean Magik. Zoas are taking OVER. Our WWC Superstar went from 4 polyps to 20 in a month. All remaining LPS is unhappy and won't open fully. Lost our hammer, blasto, Astrea (sp?) snail, 6 line wrasse, and two turbo snails. Seeded the tank with new brittle stars only to lose them too.

I am so confused as to what is happening. We are following the recommendations of our LFS (WWC) and keeping up with tank maintenance. As of yesterday my TDS meter is 0 for our RO/DI water, the pH of the tank is 8, phosphates and nitrates are 0. I cannot test for anything else right now but plan to have our LFS test it themselves tomorrow. Help please? How can my zoas be exploding but I am losing snails and LPS coral?
I’m no expert by any means but I went through some of the same with the exception of no Dino. I lost several coral, a red star fish a mated pair of clowns. I removed all existing coral to my sons frag/ qt tank and bought the remaining test kits so I could check all parameters. Seems my water was to clean. I had to dose some elements to bring levels up to recommend specs I found in the reef chemistry section of the forum. Once that I felt things were stable I purchased some more inverts for clean up crew. After about 2 months I started introducing one coral a week back into my tank. My nitrates are still 0 and phosphate barely above 0 so I’ve been trying to bring those up a bit. I added a sand goby and a royal gramma and have one torch coral to bring home from my sons. My lfs recommended more live rock so I added another 8-10 pounds. But for me being able to test all my parameters gave me some peace of mind. Everything is thriving and doing well. I test daily my salinity and make sure my RO/DI TDS meter is 0. I do weekly testing of PH, Nitrate, Phosphate , Alkalinity, Calcium and Magnesium. I feed my coral every other day and fish daily. Not sure why my nitrate is still 0 but I hope to bring that up a bit. I’m new to all this and in the beginning I moved way to fast and paid the price. I’m currently building a 75g and making the mistakes on the 20g has helped me so I don’t do that with the 75.
Hope you find a solution to your problems. Good luck and happy reefing!
I’ll post the link to what I found very helpful for me, plus there are lots of experienced reefers here and I’m sure many of them have gone through the same or similar issues.
 

mav3rick478

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Do you have any pics and you haven't talked about your flow.

Your chemistry balance is probably all screwed up, even though your parameters that you test for are ok, it's the balance of other things that we can't test for. The last time I had dinos my tank was fairly young and I was fighting a losing battle, syphoning brown snot daily and using skewers to clean off corals. Miraculously I went on a 2 week vacation and came back to a dino free tank and a booming pod population. Tank wasn't fed at all during that time period. I suspect that while I was away and didn't feed the tank at all and had done a 90% water change prior that my tank had stabilized itself. Sometimes you just have to leave things alone and they work themselves out. The only time I referred to using chemicals to fix something was with cyano and that was a last ditch effort when adjusting flow and blackouts didn't work.
 
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kalina174

kalina174

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Thanks everyone. All parameters were perfect except our Alk and that was at 11. Not horrible but on the higher end of normal so we did a water change today (despite doing one on Sunday) and we have stopped dosing Vibrant. I went back through our logs and we started experiencing coral distress after the Vibrant dosage was upped. Could this be the cause? These ******* Dinos are going to be the death of me. Ugh!
 
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kalina174

kalina174

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Do you have any pics and you haven't talked about your flow.

Your chemistry balance is probably all screwed up, even though your parameters that you test for are ok, it's the balance of other things that we can't test for. The last time I had dinos my tank was fairly young and I was fighting a losing battle, syphoning brown snot daily and using skewers to clean off corals. Miraculously I went on a 2 week vacation and came back to a dino free tank and a booming pod population. Tank wasn't fed at all during that time period. I suspect that while I was away and didn't feed the tank at all and had done a 90% water change prior that my tank had stabilized itself. Sometimes you just have to leave things alone and they work themselves out. The only time I referred to using chemicals to fix something was with cyano and that was a last ditch effort when adjusting flow and blackouts didn't work.
We have the spin stream nozzles on our tank (with an upgraded pump) and our tank seems to have great flow. Rocks aren't pressed up to the glass and there don't appear to be any dead areas. With the tank only being 20g we were told a powerhead would be overkill. Here are some photos of the tank and layout.

Right as we were adding stuff back in Nov
IMG_4552.JPG


What it looked like when the Dino was starting to take over.
IMG_5312.JPG
 

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