Porites Discoloration?

[JustaSunday]

Hello all,

Reaching out here to see if anyone has a good idea as to why my Fiji Yellow Porites is looking the way it is. Please disregard the rtn/stn brown spot, that has been there for a while and is slowly getting covered back up as the coral grows. For context it happened around 6 months ago when nutrients bottomed out and started my war on dinos. What I want to hear feedback on is the light spots speckled around the coral, they began around mid February and have seemed to increase in number every week. The only thing I can think that has changed is my lighting intensity increased around 30 par at that location and the dino population has been steadily decreasing. Below I will post a picture of the coral as well as some of my most recent parameters.

As of 3/1/26
ALK 8.2
Cal 410
PHOS .24
Nitrates 10ppm
MAG 1400
temo 77.5

Just to note, I have been dosing to keep nutrients up in my battle with dinos, maintaining nitrates above 10 and shooting for .15ppm phosphates, recently however my phosphate increased despite decreasing the dose so this week I have stopped dosing and will record the change at the end of the current week. The highest phosphate ever got was .29ppm, alk has been between 8.2 and 8.6 for the last 2 months or so. And yes I have been running carbon.

Any feedback or thoughts are welcome!

 

[KrisReef]

There's a lot of difference bettween "knowing" something and "suspecting that your know" something, and with the latter definition in mind I would say that I think these kinds of spots may be visible area's of microbial battles, aka a bacterial infection that the coral is waging?

I don't think that reefing and science have made a whole lot of progress in identifying bacterial infections in coral but they have recognized that it happens in the wild and so it must happen in our aquariums too? ( I think that's a fair leap? :) )

Lots of images on the internet show corals with "White Band" disease, that generally forms a white band of diseased coral polyps the progresses across a sick coral. Your spots are at least similar to this. recent outbreaks of disease in the Carribbean also have a similar look, but neither is identical.

Another similar looking damage can occur from coral nipping fishes taking bites, ususally parrot fishes make the most interesting patterns but your discolorations are not as severe in flesh damage as a parrot fish will cause.

Aquabiomics has been gathering data, one aquarium at a time. It might be interesting if you sent in a water sample for coral pathogens? (I'm currently awaiting a sample, Maybe I am projecting?)

 

[JustaSunday]

There's a lot of difference bettween "knowing" something and "suspecting that your know" something, and with the latter definition in mind I would say that I think these kinds of spots may be visible area's of microbial battles, aka a bacterial infection that the coral is waging?

I don't think that reefing and science have made a whole lot of progress in identifying bacterial infections in coral but they have recognized that it happens in the wild and so it must happen in our aquariums too? ( I think that's a fair leap? :) )

Lots of images on the internet show corals with "White Band" disease, that generally forms a white band of diseased coral polyps the progresses across a sick coral. Your spots are at least similar to this. recent outbreaks of disease in the Carribbean also have a similar look, but neither is identical.

Another similar looking damage can occur from coral nipping fishes taking bites, ususally parrot fishes make the most interesting patterns but your discolorations are not as severe in flesh damage as a parrot fish will cause.

Aquabiomics has been gathering data, one aquarium at a time. It might be interesting if you sent in a water sample for coral pathogens? (I'm currently awaiting a sample, Maybe I am projecting?)

I think what you mentioned is definitely possible, now that I think about it the spots coincide with a new bottle of bacteria I started using. I had purchased special blend microbe lift off the recommendation of some and its benefits in fighting dinos, perhaps I received a bad batch or my tank simply didn’t like what was added. Certainly much to consider and maybe stopping the weekly dose would be a good experiment to run.

 

[JustaSunday]

Bad picture update,
I actually continued to dose bacteria each week, instead of going out of my way to change things for this one coral I focused on trying to keep things stable as much as I can (within reason) in the whole tank. Now the attatched picture makes it seem like not much has changed, if anything it might make it look worse... however, about a week ago it was entirely closed up and almost shiny looking with multiple larger light colored areas. Since then it has seemed to improve greatly and is on the path to doing better, was it bacterial? something to do with a light change? a parasite!? Im not sure I will ever know but it seems it is more than capable of taking care of itself if given a stable environment.