LPS issue driving me nuts

[rvamarcel]

Question from a newbie here: since the issue is progressive and seems to affect a colony, finish it and move on to the next, could it be a pest instead of water parameters? Wouldn't water parameters affect, for example, all torches in your tank in a similar way? If a parameter affects a torch to the extent to kill it, I would not expect another torch in the same tank to be fine.

 

[MaccaPopEye]

Question from a newbie here: since the issue is progressive and seems to affect a colony, finish it and move on to the next, could it be a pest instead of water parameters? Wouldn't water parameters affect, for example, all torches in your tank in a similar way? If a parameter affects a torch to the extent to kill it, I would not expect another torch in the same tank to be fine.

Hey mate, sorry I didn't get a notification of your comment for some reason or I would have replied sooner. I strongly suspected a parasite as well initially, but I took some of the dead skeletons and broke them up, absolutely no signs of parasites or anything boring into the skeleton at all.

Whatever it is it's also causing issues with multiple different kinds of LPS and also my zoas but is leaving my leathers, clams and mushrooms alone - I'm not sure if that is weird for a parasite or not but it's what made me think more along the lines of an infection. But apparently bacterial infections act and spread fast (all colonies dead in a week or two max) which isn't really happening to me.

In general I thought (and still think) the same about water parameters, however a lot of people kept telling me that coral can sometimes look fine and tolerate heavy metals for a while before slowly letting go, and that some colonies will just hold on that little bit longer than others so it can appear progressive. Hence why I got the Triton test done. And the results of the test are in! I'll post them in a separate reply in a minute

 

[MaccaPopEye]

Unfortunately I don't think the Triton test has helped too much here. Unless you guys can see something that may be an issue I have overlooked then I only see 2 possible issues, 1 of which is likely a testing error (maybe) and the other I am not sure about but seems like it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

The only things that stood out to me are the below:
- Aluminum 42μg/L (recommended 2μg/L) Expected as I have marine pure and use Aluminum PO4 remover. Still in the green though.
- Sodium 10058mg/L (recommended 10700mg/L) A bit low but still in the green.
- Potassium 328mg/L (recommended 400mg/L) Low but only just.
- Sulfur 1076mg/L (recommended 900mg/L) High but only just.
- Iodine 0μg/L (recommended 60μg/L) Came up as 0. Never tested for it so maybe this is an issue? Seen posts where Randy says it's not something he recommends people test or dose as it has nil impact.
- Barium 252μg/L (recommended 10μg/L) This one worries me a bit, but after a bit of searching apparently a few other people have gotten super high Barium readings and it is generally chalked up to a testing error on Triton's part as that much Barium is supposedly not soluble in salt water.
- Silicon 272μg/L (recommended 100μg/L) Slightly high but was expected as I have silicate sand. As far as I can tell Randy seems to think slightly elevated silicates are fine.

Any further suggestions or other things I could check/try or what this issue might be? Thinking I might try and give the hammer a dip in betadine just to see if it helps.

 

[Fine_Distinction]

I think your potassium is very low, I would definitely raise it up (but no more than 20 ppm/day). I do not know if that can cause corals dying, but definitely can cause loosing colors. Iodine at 0 does not look good either, I would try dosing, although should not cause LPS dying. I think alk had not much to do with it, I once accidentally raised Alk 4.6 dkH one day (several doses), no ill affect in a new tank full of LPS with couple SPS frags. I am also using Marine Pure and even have an aluminium rods in my aquascaping, no ill results so far.

 

[MaccaPopEye]

I think your potassium is very low, I would definitely raise it up (but no more than 20 ppm/day). I do not know if that can cause corals dying, but definitely can cause loosing colors. Iodine at 0 does not look good either, I would try dosing, although should not cause LPS dying. I think alk had not much to do with it, I once accidentally raised Alk 4.6 dkH one day (several doses), no ill affect in a new tank full of LPS with couple SPS frags. I am also using Marine Pure and even have an aluminium rods in my aquascaping, no ill results so far.

Yeah I don't think either iodine or potassium are the issue either. All the coral I had was looking good and colourful until the polyps bailed. Either way I will look into raising potassium and iodine slowly just in case. Any recommendations on what to dose to raise them?

I honestly don't know about the Alk either. I don't think it was the cause as in my old tank I had also done a couple of steep raises will no ill effects, just maybe a stressor that kick started this whole mess as it started the day after. Alk has been really quite stable since yet this hasn't stopped.

I really can't think of anything else this could really be caused by.

 

[Cherim7]

Would love to know what on earth it could be. Just can't seem to keep lps alive in my client's tank.

 

[MaccaPopEye]

No improvements. Around 5 weeks ago I added a favia and a moon coral. At pretty much the 1 month mark on the dot they started to deteriorate. I also added a fungia plate 5 weeks ago which so far (touch wood) is still looking OK.

One development that I hope could help is zoas. Until recently no soft coral I have has been effected, and to this day morphs and leathers are still going strong (as are anemones and clams). But I have 2 rocks with the same zoas on them, both are on the sand bed and are under the same light intensity just separate sides of the tank (should be very similar flow too). One rock, on the left side of my tank has had the zoas slowly die off over the last 3 months. They just shrivel up and let go. The other rock is doing fine. This is 3 months difference on the same rock.

 

[erk]

I have read stories of people buying live rock and later finding metal wire inside. The wire would've been used to hold the rock in place on the seafloor or to hang a coral in a mariculture setup. I recommend removing that rock since it seems suspect.

 

[MaccaPopEye]

I have read stories of people buying live rock and later finding metal wire inside. The wire would've been used to hold the rock in place on the seafloor or to hang a coral in a mariculture setup. I recommend removing that rock since it seems suspect.

Thanks for the suggestion, since all the zoas on it have pretty much died off I agree it is suspect and I will be removing it.

However, I collected that rock (and every rock in my tank) personally from a reef. That particular rock is also from my old tank which had no issues at all for almost 2 years before I upgraded to this tank. The only coral I have is direct from the collector or collected myself (unique location) so I can guarantee that there is no wires in my rocks.

 

[MaccaPopEye]

One thing I just thought of that could be important because it's weird, maybe?

If it wasn't for coralline algae I would never, and I really mean never, have to clean my glass. The back and right hand panels have not been cleaned once since setting up the tank and both only have coralline algae on them. No brown or green algae at all. I scrape the front and left panels around once every 2-3 months just to get the coralline off but no other algae grows, even with 25ppm nitrate and 0.5ppm phosphate.

 

[eLReef]

Seems like the exact same issue that is going on in my tank. At the moment it's only my euphyllias that have been affected. I hope you can resolve this overwhelming lps issue. I am thinking of just redoing my whole tank using real reef live rock and new bags of fiji pink sand as my last attempt to continue this hobby. I'll follow your thread to see if anyone can help you with this. Here is my thread if you want to follow:
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/corals-dieing-please-help.307692/

 

[sdavi66572]

Sorry to hear you guys are going through / have been through a similar issue still with no "answer" as to what, why or how to stop it. Hopefully this thread may eventually lead to some answers.

My my remaining hammer coral still hasn't had any polyps bail, although a different one looks sick each day, some "recover" in 24hrs some look sick for a week. But so far none have bailed.

This week I collected (all quite plain) a fairly large acan, a medium heliofungia and a small moon coral, we will see how they are doing in a months time as that seems to be the rough time frame before coral is effected.

I also sought advice on an aussie fb page. It seems that the overwhelming majority of experienced reefers (who took the time to comment) are sure this is caused by heavy metal contamination and not a bacterial infection (they think it's likely from bad pumps leaking into the water even if they look and work fine). Apparently with bacterial infections polyps bail out much faster than one or two a day.

I'm not convinced my pumps are leaking heavy metals and don't know any other way metal could have gotten into my tank but to make sure I have ordered a triton test. I live "rural" so it will take a week to get to me and then a week to get back and then a few more days to get to triton but I will put the results up here when I get them.

After I get the triton water sample shipped off I will also be giving at least my Hammer coral a dip in betadine (anti bacterial) if not the other corals too. Even if it's just to make me feel better.

Instructions I've been given are 40 drops to 1gal of salt water, leave in for 10-15min, swirl every now and then, rinse in fresh salt water and back into the tank.

Been having same problems losing lps corals. Had a triton test done. Not sure what is going on.

 

[john.m.cole3]

Been having same problems losing lps corals. Had a triton test done. Not sure what is going on.

what is flow and lighting like?

 

[reefluvrr]

I have a very heavy bio load and frequently feed my fishes. I measure my tank parameters weekly. For the last six month my NO3 had measure 16-20 ppm and PO4 0.3 to 0.4. SPS did not grow much, Euphyllias were polyped out and happy. Acans grew and were happy as well.

Being unhappy with my growth of SPS, I decided to put a refugium to grow chaetomorpha. Over the last month, my NO3 dropped down to about 4-6ppm. PO4 interestingly did not drop much until just this week. It stayed relatively high until this week. Then I started to see it go to about 0.18-0.12.

During the past month, my Alk has been hovering between 7.75 to 8.5 and Calcium at about 380-400.

What I did notice during this past month as my NO3 was going down 1st was:

1. I lost 2 wall's frogspawn, 2 hammer corals, 1 bubble coral. They slowly receded and died.
2. My Acans are doing fine
3. I have lost 4 SPS colonies from STN from the base up.

I wonder if our corals have a difficult time adapting from high levels of NO3 or PO4 to lower levels in a relative short amount of time? (short amount of time being if my corals were used to high levels of NO3/ PO4 over the last six month to a sudden drop over a one month period)

Just sharing my observation, since I too am struggling with this issue right now.

What do fellow reefers think about the idea how quickly NO3 or PO4 drop may affect our LPS from a stable but higher NO3/PO4 levels?

 

[john.m.cole3]

I think they do respond in a negative manner to sudden drop in nutrients. I recently had my nutrients bottom out over the course of a month. I started feeding the corals 3 times a week instead of 2 and dosed potassium nitrate to where I could keep the NO3 at 7.5. Now when I test for NO3 I know if I should keep dosing the same amount , hold off, or increase my daily dose. Simply feeding more was causing cyano and a strand like sponge to grow on and suffocate a few zoas. Only one SPS STN'd from the base during all of this.

 

[305Reefer]

Man what a mystery.. It seems you've gone thru everything. What brand salt do you use? Any settling occur in the bag/bucket? What brand of alk/calk/mag do you use? Heavy metals not being in the Triton test was suprising. So is the apparant 1mo. life span of certain corals in your tank. What fish are in the tank again? Anything that likes to peck? Ive had a few hammer branches just die for no reason, but usually one of 20 and very randomly, not a whole colony. Have you double checked your tests against other tests? Do you run carbon? Could it be Alleopathy?

 

[MaccaPopEye]

what is flow and lighting like?

Flow is pretty decent, I had 4x RW8 pumps (one each side + 2 on the back wall) running at 100%. I have no way to know for sure but it appears that jebao pumps run a bit slower than advertised but I assume I still had at least 35-40x times DT turnover/hour depending on how clean the pumps were.

Around 2 months ago 1 RW8 recently broke. While on paper I have enough flow I also thought that I could step it up and see if that helps so I replaced it with a QP-16 and I have another QP-16 coming for Christmas. If I ran those at max with 2 RW8s I would have ~65x DT turnover, I will be able to lower it a bit and play around to see if I can find a sweet spot.

As for lighting I have 3x Mars Aqua lights. I know they are cheap and at the bottom of the pile when it comes to lights but I know for a fact heaps of people have no issue growing coral with them. I have tried having them on low light to not blast coral but that didn't stop anything so I ramped them up over a few weeks and still didn't get any improvement.

I have a very heavy bio load and frequently feed my fishes. I measure my tank parameters weekly. For the last six month my NO3 had measure 16-20 ppm and PO4 0.3 to 0.4. SPS did not grow much, Euphyllias were polyped out and happy. Acans grew and were happy as well.

Being unhappy with my growth of SPS, I decided to put a refugium to grow chaetomorpha. Over the last month, my NO3 dropped down to about 4-6ppm. PO4 interestingly did not drop much until just this week. It stayed relatively high until this week. Then I started to see it go to about 0.18-0.12.

During the past month, my Alk has been hovering between 7.75 to 8.5 and Calcium at about 380-400.

What I did notice during this past month as my NO3 was going down 1st was:

1. I lost 2 wall's frogspawn, 2 hammer corals, 1 bubble coral. They slowly receded and died.
2. My Acans are doing fine
3. I have lost 4 SPS colonies from STN from the base up.

I wonder if our corals have a difficult time adapting from high levels of NO3 or PO4 to lower levels in a relative short amount of time? (short amount of time being if my corals were used to high levels of NO3/ PO4 over the last six month to a sudden drop over a one month period)

Just sharing my observation, since I too am struggling with this issue right now.

What do fellow reefers think about the idea how quickly NO3 or PO4 drop may affect our LPS from a stable but higher NO3/PO4 levels?

Thanks for the input, it's quite hard as there are so many possible reasons and everyone could have the same issue or completely different ones :/

I've tried SPS a couple of times and even got one to live for a couple of months in my old tank (heavy feeding and 0 NO3 & 0 PO4 but full of derbesia). But I couldn't get any to live for long in the new tank, I tried one frag back when I had low nutrients and tried another one after I raised the nutrients up a bit, no luck for either.

I do think massive drops might cause a temporary impact on sensitive coral, but I would have thought it would only happen with larger drops than what you experienced.

Man what a mystery.. It seems you've gone thru everything. What brand salt do you use? Any settling occur in the bag/bucket? What brand of alk/calk/mag do you use? Heavy metals not being in the Triton test was suprising. So is the apparant 1mo. life span of certain corals in your tank. What fish are in the tank again? Anything that likes to peck? Ive had a few hammer branches just die for no reason, but usually one of 20 and very randomly, not a whole colony. Have you double checked your tests against other tests? Do you run carbon? Could it be Alleopathy?

In the old tank I used NSW but since starting the new tank I have used exclusively Red Sea blue bucket (closer to the levels I want to keep than the coral pro salt is). I was doing regular WC at the start but a few people thought I might have too low nutrients so I stopped to slowly raise NO3 to 25ppm and then started one WC every month or two to keep it there, unfortunately higher nutrients didn't seem to help either. Also no settling in the bucket, I give it a good mix before I use it.

I use Randy's for the big 3 and I mix it with 0TDS RODI and 100% pure ingredients, I mix 9L at a time and store it in safe drinking water containers.

The Triton test surprised me too, I'm doing a bit of a tank reboot atm and I'm going to try and get around to doing another one in a couple of months and see if there is any differences. The fairly consistent lifespan of stony coral is interesting, the last stony corals I added were mid May and they all kept to the 1 month +/- a week or two. The only coral I have added since then was a tiny scolly I collected early July and it actually lasted just over 2 months although it didn't look good for most of it.

The fish I had were:
1x Blue tang
1x Yellow tang
1x Bristletooth tang
1x Black Cardinal
1x Darwin glow fairy wrasse
1x Yellow tailed damsel
2x Clowns
1x Bicolour dottyback

None ever picked at coral from what I saw. And I around the time this all started I switched from Red Sea tests to Salifert tests. The Salifert were different by a little bit here and there but overall very close.

And do you mean Alleopathy from the algae issues I was having or from other coral? I did consider that the Derbesia algae may be releasing something into the water but again I had a tank full in the old tank and it never caused any issues. I also run Seachem matrix carbon, usually changed at least every 1-2 months even though they claim it lasts at least 3.

 

[MaccaPopEye]

Well I guess its a good time to update on where the tank is at right now long post warning

To start with I haven't tried adding any more stony coral since July, however since then the rest of my zoas kept dying off, first every zoa on the right hand rock and then all the zoas on the left hand rock, it was really weird that they didn't both go at the same time, especially since both rocks had the same kind of zoas on them.

Then around the time all the zoas were gone my mushrooms and rics started bailing out. One by one. They would all start to ball up and then let go. Some were fairly new but most of them had been happy where they were for almost a year. I still have a couple left over that haven't yet bailed but they don't look too far off, a couple floated to low flow areas and found somewhere to reattach for now but most just disappeared/floated to low flow areas to die.

All 3 clams, 2 BTA and both leather corals are still alive. The leathers will occasionally look a little ticked off but most days look OK and the clams and BTA are still thriving and growing (I don't know if I could stop those NT aqua cultured clams even if I wanted to )

So far the weirdest thing I have noticed is whatever this is only effects one kind of coral at a time. First stony corals, then zoas, then mushrooms and now maybe leathers. To me that points to a fish picking at them but I have been keeping an eye out for it and haven't noticed any, especially since I only have 2 fish now I would have thought it would be easier to notice.

Around mid July all my fish except my Blue tang and Black cardinal died within a week from velvet. In Australia we cant get CP and copper would have taken at least a week to get to me so I just assumed the 2 survivors wouldn't last that long. To top it off from July all the way until the end of September was hectically busy for me including a month away so I kind of just let the tank do it's own thing, the only thing I did to the tank is empty the skimmer and dose vibrant once a week, I didn't even feed the surviving fish :/

To my surprise the vibrant worked, I'm not a fan of using unknown chemicals, especially something I considered to likely be snake oil but it worked, major results within 4 weeks too. I don't know if it will come back if I stop dosing but all the derbesia algae appears to be gone. I finished one small bottle and started on a big one. I'm going to finish off the big bottle and stop dosing it to see if the algae comes back. I might order another small bottle to keep on hand in case it does come back so I can stop it in its tracks. Was the algae releasing something into the water? No idea, a few mushrooms still bailed after the algae died, and the remaining ones haven't been looking better but they are still there for now. I also can't say for sure if it was the vibrant or not (pretty sure it was though) but the cheato in my algae reactor died. I replaced it twice and both times it died off again and I just couldn't get it to grow.

As another surprise to me the blue tang and black cardinal are also still alive and well. No spots of ich or any signs of velvet (apart from the tang swimming into a power head once in a while), when I got back from my trip and realized they weren't going to succumb to velvet I started feeding them again and they are looking fine.

The plan was to pull them out and treat them while the tank goes fallow. However after doing some reading (in particular a thread by Gweeds1980) I am going to give the Paul B method a go first. I am going to try and encourage the natural immunity that these two fish appear to have to ich and velvet and see if I can run an "immune" tank. This is a big maybe and could very well fail, but worst case scenario I have to go back to my original plan and treat in QT while the DT goes fallow, no big deal.

Part of going down this path of an "immune" tank is doing a bit of a tank reboot most of which I was planning on doing anyway while the tank was fallow. As a part of the reboot I will be doing the following:

1) Redesigning the sump. Removing the filter sock section and adding in a refugium section before the skimmer. The fuge will be as large as I can make it and lit with an LED grow light.

2) Stop using ASW and go back to using NSW. This is going to be a pain in the a** as collecting NSW for a 4' tank was hard enough but that extra 2' means collecting a massive amount of water I am still undecided as to how I will do this one.

3) Remove that dang sunken ship. The ship was a compromise with the wife and I thought the Triton test might show that it was causing issues but it didn't show anything definite. However I still think there is a chance it could be a cause / contributor of my issues so the HMAS Compromise is going.

4) Remove the black sand. I loved the black sand when it first went in, it really does make coral colours pop like crazy. But I just can't stand how dirty it gets and where it isn't dirty it's growing coraline algae like crazy! I now have purple sand in most places and I have to constantly turn it over to stop the coraline. While I doubt it, the black sand also could be a possible contributor to my issues. I will be running BB while all these changes settle in and I will get some good proven white calgrit at a later stage if I ever get some fish that need sand.

5) Stop dosing Vibrant. I don't know how this well this will go but once I get the fuge done and some cheato and some caulerpa in I will stop the Vibrant and see if the macro + skimmer can stop the algae from coming back. I will also be getting a re-vamped CUC from the local wholesaler, he's got some awesome short spined urchins and some little hermit crabs that he says stay tiny and will eat any kind of algae you might have.

6) Start feeding a bit heavier with fresh DIY fish food full of bacteria. I will be getting whole fish, squid, muscles and fish guts and blending it all up with wild caught shrimp & crabs as well as frozen mysis and black worms (if I can find them). This food can apparently help fish with their immune systems and I have no doubt it will be good for coral.

I am hoping to get all of that done over the next 2-3 weeks and then on the 3rd of Jan I am going to go out at low tide and get a couple of small "tester" pieces of coral to see how they go in the tank. Fingers crossed!

Also I would rather keep this thread at least semi on topic of coral issues so please avoid comments about QT vs disease management tanks as I know many people have very passionate views on this topic and there are many other threads where this can be discussed

Cheers,

Macca

 

[ThunderGoose]

Whew. I'm sorry you've been having so many problems. I can tell you I have some blue legged mini hermit crabs that are a great part of a clean up crew and I haven't seen them go after any corals. I also have 2 urchins, one of which is pretty well behaved (a tuxedo) and one of which is a PITA that may be getting put up for sale soon. I haven't found a coral adhesive that can stop her when she wants to pick up a frag and carry it around.

Good luck.

Following.

 

[dricc]

Man what a mystery.. It seems you've gone thru everything. What brand salt do you use? Any settling occur in the bag/bucket? What brand of alk/calk/mag do you use? Heavy metals not being in the Triton test was suprising. So is the apparant 1mo. life span of certain corals in your tank. What fish are in the tank again? Anything that likes to peck? Ive had a few hammer branches just die for no reason, but usually one of 20 and very randomly, not a whole colony. Have you double checked your tests against other tests? Do you run carbon? Could it be Alleopathy?