Mushroom corals melting

toadstool_paradise · Jan 21, 2021

Been dealing with a lot of changes in life, got really sick with COVID-19 and at the same time started dealing with a diatom problem. History-tank has been running smoothly over 2 years with hardly ANY type of algae, maybe scraped the glass once a month! Did only a handful of water changes for the whole time it had been running and everything was happy and beautiful! Fast forward to December and the diatoms emerged. Only thing I did differently was add some cheap carbon since my large toadstool was shedding and for some reason thought it would affect the tank even though it’s never been an issue before...next day a diatom bloom appeared. No corals cared but the toadstools began to shed every other day to remove the diatoms.

dealt with that for a month and it still hasn’t gone away. A week ago the power was out for 6-8 hours but most things seemed ok once I got the pump and heat going. I then added some poly filter to the back chamber just in case. The day after my beautiful mushroom corals I had been growing for 2 years were ALL shriveled and looked horrible! Today they legit melted. A dozen mushrooms were goo...when I siphoned them out the water was rancid. My toadstools are unaffected.

what could cause the mushrooms to melt away like that? I find it hard to believe that the power outage could kill these dang things that are basically bulletproof.
Could the use of poly filter hurt them? My parameters have been the same for years.
Ammonia-0 always have never seen it spike after the original cycle even with the power outage.
Nitrite-0 always
Nitrate-is usually 20, has been for years.
Ph- 8.1
Phosphate-around .15
Salinity- had the salinity low according to Hanna checker and LFS. Had been running at 31 ppt and recently slowly increase to 35 ppt. Can this cause the mushrooms to melt? Was changed over a few weeks slowly.
Temp-77

im at a loss and sad because I wanted a tank full of my pretty red mushrooms and they have all melted and are gone. Any opinion is welcome, I’m not new but always learning. There is no fuge and it’s a 20 gallon tank. Current orbit marine light but have an AI prime coming today in the mail. I’ll attach a pic of the tank before they melted.

what has caused YOUR mushrooms to melt? Any idea is welcome I need some help! I’ll attach the last pic, which is what they looked like last night before they were goo in the morning..

LRT · Jan 21, 2021

How long where they acclimated to 31ppt? When you say slowly raised how slowly? I have sse my shrooms act like that with salinity swings especially after being acclimated and stable for awhile.
Did it cause yours? Idk
Could you have a toxin in tank or stray voltage? Honestly this ones kind of baffling really. Your parameters are well within healthy range.
Have you moved them into higher intensity light?
Blasting with flow?

Reefer1978 · Jan 21, 2021

Any sudden Ph Swings?

toadstool_paradise · Jan 21, 2021

LRT said:
How long where they acclimated to 31ppt? When you say slowly raised how slowly? I have sse my shrooms act like that with salinity swings especially after being acclimated and stable for awhile.
Did it cause yours? Idk
Could you have a toxin in tank or stray voltage? Honestly this ones kind of baffling really. Your parameters are well within healthy range.
Have you moved them into higher intensity light?
Blasting with flow?

Nope light has been the same for 2 years! And flow is low where they are. Salinity was raised very slowly maybe 1 ppt every week?

Reefer1978 said:
Any sudden Ph Swings?

Nope Ph is always 8 or 8.1

LRT · Jan 21, 2021

Only thing I can imagine is sudden swing of one of your parameters.
Alk, cal and mag, phosphates. Any drastic swings?
If all that's been within range and stable for awhile.
Something may be in water thats not supposed to be.
Could also be bacterial.

Reefer1978 · Jan 21, 2021

Same thought here. I don't know what else could do it.

blasterman · Jan 21, 2021

Never been able to keep red shrooms. My purple discomas grow crazy and my blue spotted do pretty good. My reds just stay small and do nothing or wither.

Reds seem overly sensitive to sudden nutrient drops.

My shrugging opinion is it's biological warfare of some sort. When more than one rapidly receedes like that it has to be biological.

toadstool_paradise · Jan 21, 2021

LRT said:
Only thing I can imagine is sudden swing of one of your parameters.
Alk, cal and mag, phosphates. Any drastic swings?
If all that's been within range and stable for awhile.
Something may be in water thats not supposed to be.
Could also be bacterial.

No swings as far as I could tell. I’m just not sure :/

LRT · Jan 21, 2021

Salty and Spooky said:
No swings as far as I could tell. I’m just not sure :/

I'm just kind of at a loss.
Its not impossible to catch a bacterial infection of shrooms where stressed at some point. I have an Og bounce completely melting away and everything is has been perfectly fine.
Some thing happened.
Cracked heater, metal fall in tank, rusted magnet, stray voltage is what id be looking at.
Just doesn't make any sense for them to be thriving and then melting away and gone.

toadstool_paradise · Jan 21, 2021

LRT said:
I'm just kind of at a loss.
Its not impossible to catch a bacterial infection of shrooms where stressed at some point. I have an Og bounce completely melting away and everything is has been perfectly fine.
Some thing happened.
Cracked heater, metal fall in tank, rusted magnet, stray voltage is what id be looking at.
Just doesn't make any sense for them to be thriving and then melting away and gone.

It’s ok. I’m giving up at this point! Checked all chambers, even put in a new heater to see if it helped. I don’t use any metal near my tank either.

toadstool_paradise · Jan 30, 2021

For anyone who’s interested, every single mushroom (rhodactis and discosomas) melted away completely. Decided to start fresh and took out the fish and trashed my rocks and sand. Gave the tank an intense scrubbing! Bought caribsea liferock shapes and Seachem gray coast sand and redid the entire tank. Put a really thin layer of sand this time and put in the new rock. Have been adding bottled bacteria every day to help tank cycle as I love my three fish and didn’t have the heart to rehome them. Hopefully I can get my tank looking as beautiful as it once did

I still don’t know why the mushrooms all melted.

Marmoset32 · Feb 19, 2021

I have different types of mushrooms and a few weeks ago one colony just starting shrinking. Nothing much has changed and 3 weeks later it started to open back up - still not as large as it use to be. I didn't do anything bc the rest of the tank and mushrooms were fine. Corals are so hard to understand sometimes.
I hope things get better for you soon.

jason7570 · May 18, 2021

So, did your tank ever recover? I noticed you have black sand? Exact same thing happened to me and I was also using black sand. I’ve been told by a pretty reputable reefer to NEVER use black sand, there’s something in it that shrooms and other softies do not like...
Switched it out and so far so good...

toadstool_paradise · May 19, 2021

jason7570 said:
So, did your tank ever recover? I noticed you have black sand? Exact same thing happened to me and I was also using black sand. I’ve been told by a pretty reputable reefer to NEVER use black sand, there’s something in it that shrooms and other softies do not like...
Switched it out and so far so good...

It didn’t recover, lost everything except fish sadly. Took out old rock and sand and used new caribsea liferock and the special grade sand (no longer black) and it’s been good so far. No fish were lost or showed signs of illness throughout the whole thing, just lost every single invertebrate including corals.

UnderseaOddities · Jun 17, 2021

LRT said:
How long where they acclimated to 31ppt? When you say slowly raised how slowly? I have sse my shrooms act like that with salinity swings especially after being acclimated and stable for awhile.
Did it cause yours? Idk
Could you have a toxin in tank or stray voltage? Honestly this ones kind of baffling really. Your parameters are well within healthy range.
Have you moved them into higher intensity light?
Blasting with flow?

Salty and Spooky said:
It didn’t recover, lost everything except fish sadly. Took out old rock and sand and used new caribsea liferock and the special grade sand (no longer black) and it’s been good so far. No fish were lost or showed signs of illness throughout the whole thing, just lost every single invertebrate including corals.

I agree with @LRT a stable sytem, the same thing happened to me when I bought a few wild purple ricordea yuma rocks from divers den...I dipped them in iodine after I acclimated them,my coral qt system runs at 1.025(same conditions as most wholesalers)constantly gets freshwater via sump maintains a dkh of 8.6 to 8.4 only dropping a few points,calcium 420-440 and mag at 1400. I had the ricordea rocks going strong under my t5s a few closer to the light began to bleach a little so I moved them to the bottom of the tank. At first I believed they were breeding as the ricordea yumas were popping out these white little egglike pellets(not guts) and the rock next to it started to fire out what I believe were gametes(not guts like a milky sperm shot into the water collumn almost looked like a bacteria bloom), this made my water murky and threw off my nitrates...all and all I ordered the 4 ricordea rocks in December and qted in my 29g coral qt/observation. After this spawning activity I noticed a few mushrooms started to bulk up and start to look really nice in the 40g b mushroom frag tank . But on one I started to notice a reddish slime growing on one of the yumas papulated bubble(a wild bacteria) this reddish slime killed that yuma in a few days and it later killed the whole rock(20 yumas)half was melted and the other half dying, I tried lugols on the neighboring rocks,freshwater dip, and al little peroxide ... but this didnt kill the bacteria... now here is the weird part my discosomas and actiniodiscus sp. Were unaffected by this bacteria however it knocked out half of my yuma population the neighbor red yuma colony that was 5 years old

took a few big rainbow and orange ricordea yuma monmas(all of which were in close proxinity) it was sad I lost 6 colonies yuma and 2 ric... and I believe it was due to wild bacteria harbored on divers den specimens(ordered in dec) it was a learning curve but a huge loss on my end as the wild bacteria ravished my aquacultured specimens the worse part was when I seen the papules shrink up on my 300$ rainbow yuma. Now mind you this wasnt do to all swings or temp or stress or swing in salinity,but bacterl infection. Rember quality in quality out. If you buy wild ,all ways have an qt observation setup that can maintain stable parameters. You never know what you can be bringing into your tanks... I learned now,that most refers wont put anything wet from wholesalers in their tanks qtd or not, I will now always cut the colony off their rock and glue it to plugs or slate or my own rock. This is the number one cause of tank crashes is crosscontamination.rember quality in quality out as buyers online were only shown a picture that is a half truth of what the product actually is. We cant look over the piece so we assume the seller is trustworthy and isnt selling us something that is half dead.. this isnt always the case know your supplier how they were sourced,where they were sourced,how long were they housed. How were they housed are all questions that they buyer should ask the seller or you'll loose time and money and beautiful specimens

Even people that work in the industry have mass die offs, but its pushed under the rug if wwc for example told you they cant keep scoly in synthetic conditions then people would stop buying scoly from them even though they are healthy and colorful they often have a short shelf life.Alot of things happen and arent mentioned. Their are alot of skeletons in closets of coral farms (get it its punny lol)whether they're selling you bjs and barnacles in your eupiliya, infested zoathids,stafish munched montis, worms in your cyphastrea or challice, or straight up duping you for 3k on a nem they spent 3 usd on from indonesia. Know the how know the why or u can and will get shisted by petshop boys