Problems with coral

[creefyken]

I have a innovative marine 20G aquarium started mid February. I used a mix of carib sea and reef saver rock, ocean direct sand, starter bacteria and AF fiji mud. I have put in 3-4 bottles of copepods. I have mostly LPS, and soft corals except for 2 montipora digitatas and a rainbow Stylophora.i have been using reef crystals the whole time no problems. Parameters all good however recently the alk went from 8-10 to 12. The only other big change was i increased my maxspect jump L260 up to 70% and increased the blue and dropped white, red, green to 25% looked great, until all the corals turned brown/maroon and are receeding. Phosphate and Nitrate are undetected. PH 8.3, Calcium 400-440. I have been feeding reef roids, oyster feast, coral inertia NRG 2 times a week and phytoplankton 2x a day. I have added when “needed” tropic marin all for reef and np+. Since the tank is melting down. I reduce the lights to forty percent and went with a even blue red, green, white spectrum.

 

[Teddy99]

Also,

You mentioned adding copepods but how are you feeding them?

You might look into getting some established live rock from someone like TSB to help seed the tank with more microorganisms and consider feeding the pods with live fresh phytoplakton from algaebarn or copepods for sale. That will help clean the nuisance algae too.

Before i took this approach, my dry rock started tank took around 2 years to stablilize.

The phytoplankton helped my tank a lot, too. It cannot only feed the copepods but also the corals (depending on what kind of phytoplankton plankton you choose), but please consider some types suck up phosphates and nitrates faster than others, too. So maybe stay away from those used to bring nutrients down or dose only smaller amounts.

I dose some every day.