Montipora’s might be bleaching but other SPS appear fine, thoughts?

ESH

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Hoping someone can share some guidance here. Today I came home and noticed a pretty good size red montipora colony had turned mostly white though the polyps are all still showing bright orange. I’ve had this Monti for about 2 years now, and it’s never shown any similar issues. Looking around the tank, other montis of the same kind, and other kinds of montis are also faded in color though not as significant. I have also noticed that my birds nest and pocilipora polyps are not extended, and my bounce mushroom has been looking deflated. Other than that, my acros are currently looking good which is a bit surprising as usually I’d expect any problems and they’d be the first to go.

checking water parameters, nothing seems too out of the ordinary.
salinity is good,ph is stable within my regular daily fluctuations.
alkalinity, calcium, mag are all stable and monitored with the trident.

I did notice a small nitrate and phosphate spike. This occurred Over a 4 day period, and nitrate went from 2ppm to 5, and phosphate from .02ppm to .08ppm. I did have a cyano outbreak, resulting in me dosing a liquid cyano remover 7 days ago. Tracing this back further, in the last month I believe the cyano took over once I finally beat out a prior hair algae problem.

I typically do water changes every 2-3 weeks. My only suspicion right now is that I recently removed my carbon and turned off my UV when I dosed to kill off the cyano. I did put new carbon in tonight and turned my UV , and I am making new saltwater for a water change.
Any other thoughts on why this might be happening or something I might want to check on?
 

Sierra_Bravo

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Mine have done the same twice in the past. Monti's bleached or faded while the acros were fine. Both times coincided with a phosphate spike. Not sure if coincidence or not, but that's the only thing I've been able to correlate it with.
 

Jason mack

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Are you monitoring trace elements in any way ...are you dosing or just relying on water changes too replenish....birds best corals are like the canarys they used too use down in the mines ...if anything is wrong they tend too go first ...I suspect something is off ...maybe iodine ...manganese...i would suggest an api test or Triton test ..at least that's what I would do ..in fact I'm waiting for my results coming back ...
Maybe others have other ideas ...or advice ..
 
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ESH

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I am not monitoring trace elements though that’s a good idea. I’ll have to order some of those tests. I’ve an older iodine test that I could try too. I used to manually dose trace elements 2x a week but that was only when I was doing monthly water changes. No rhyme or reason why other then recommendations from people. 2 months ago I increased my water changes to every 2 weeks and stopped dosing trace elements. I do dose aminos 2x a week.

Looking at my logs, I forgot that I changed out my C02 tank on my calcium reactor this past weekend too, which caused my alk to drop down slightly for 1 day. It ran out during the day and I wasn’t home till night to change it. Typically I run 8.5-9 and it went down to 7 for a day, though this occurred last weekend.

what’s interesting is that the same montis that I have frags of in my basement frag tank look the same. I do have some soft corals, sacrophyton, in the frag tank. Maybe some chemical warfare going on being dispersed in the water column. Hopefully the carbon I added takes care of this.
 
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ESH

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593C4AB7-3A0F-46F4-AA8A-CF66A928B963.jpeg

With orange filter, color is still showing, so hopefully I caught the issue in time.
CF4D60FB-903C-4854-9F17-C0E068755B52.jpeg

The acros next to the 2 different montis have been there for a year. It’s possible they are giving off some chemicals too.
One thing I noticed is that green montis seem to be uneffected.
Normally colors have been much brighter.
18442F96-D369-4AC7-97BE-562F32CE580D.jpeg
 
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ESH

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Unfortunately it Appears that most of my montis have died out over night. Possible start to a tank crash? Tank just got past the 1 year mark, although most inhabitants were brought over from a smaller system that was 1year at the time.
 

Jason mack

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Unfortunately it Appears that most of my montis have died out over night. Possible start to a tank crash? Tank just got past the 1 year mark, although most inhabitants were brought over from a smaller system that was 1year at the time.
I'm sorry too hear this ...i hope all turns out well ..
 

hllb

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My encrusting monti has the same issue. It seems to be correlated to a po4 spike. It had been recovering but a new spike caused issues again. I was sure mine was dead and it came back so don’t give up hope
 
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