MrStoffel
Community Member
Hi All,
I don't post on reef2reef all that often since i am also active on a country specific forum, but i do read a lot on reef2reef.
I am a long time SPS keeper (20 years now), but am currently facing something i have never seen before.
First some background information about the system:
The system is 300L in total, running for 7 months now.
It was seeded with clean dry rock + cured live rock.
Salt used is tropic marin pro reef & parameters are kept stable with ati essentials pro & ati nutrition, controlled by GHL doser.
As for lighting i am using an ati hybrid with 4x39w T5 + 2 led clusters. STD ati settings.
ATO and temp are managed by a controller so very stable as well.
The sump holds a skimmer and refugium with chaeto lit by a kessil H80.
There is also some maxspect nanotech filtration media.
Flow in the tank is a maxpect gyre xf230 and two jebao 10000L/h SLW20's. All together they produce 28000L/h flow, so close to 100 times tank turnover.
However, the jebao's are running on pulse mode, so it will be closer to 50x.
I added coral at about the one month mark, as all measurements checked out.
From the start everything took off great, acros started encrusting very well, zoas and goniopora were looking super healthy, i was a happy reefer.
Suddenly a had a green tenuis rtn overnight. It looked great the evening before, and by morning 30% of the colony lost its flesh starting at the base.
The strange thing was that the living part still had nice PE and looked fine. I decided to give it a day => WRONG
By the next morning 80% was gone and i fragged what was left. I lost those bits over the next 2-3 days.
By that time i still thought this was a one off case of bad luck.
However a week or so after this event a nice frag of a suharsonoi started the same pattern. It had encrusted to the size of a golf ball. Lost that in 2 nights as well.
All other acro's looked fine, same for the other corals. As an example, my hawkins echinata has tripled in size in about 4 months.
By that time i started to measure daily and noticed my alk had crept up from my usual 8 to 8.9
A fellow reefer suggested this was probably the cause. So i lowered it again to 7.8 over the course of 2 weeks.
My nitrates were not very detectable with my testkits, but i feed 3-4 times daily so they were certainly not zero, they were just consumed very fast.
PO4 is always between 0,02 and 0,04 depending on the time of day measured.
A week after losing the suharsonoi a spathulata frag RTN'ed overnight.
I started looking in the tank at night looking for pests and found out i have a number of digitate hydroids.
Maybe these are the cause? However there are other acro's close to the hydroids that seem just fine.
Most were also deep in the cryptic areas of the rockwork.
Two weeks passed without losses, until last weekend a nice deep blue tenuis started RTNing.
This was a frag of about 8cm i got from a fellow reefer who had it for years. It was a very resilient coral that was looking incredibly healthy before.
Yet the same pattern repeated itself: day one 20% rtn at base, day two 50-80% gone, day three, complete RTN.
I am at a complete loss as to what to do. My parameters have been stable for weeks, my ATI ICP is at 98% without any parameter out of bounds.
At this moment i feel like i will loose the complete acro population over the next two months.
This week i will receive a UV steriliser and triton's RTN-x, those are my last hopes of stopping this.
I would appreciate any other insights or suggestions on how to overcome this.
I don't post on reef2reef all that often since i am also active on a country specific forum, but i do read a lot on reef2reef.
I am a long time SPS keeper (20 years now), but am currently facing something i have never seen before.
First some background information about the system:
The system is 300L in total, running for 7 months now.
It was seeded with clean dry rock + cured live rock.
Salt used is tropic marin pro reef & parameters are kept stable with ati essentials pro & ati nutrition, controlled by GHL doser.
As for lighting i am using an ati hybrid with 4x39w T5 + 2 led clusters. STD ati settings.
ATO and temp are managed by a controller so very stable as well.
The sump holds a skimmer and refugium with chaeto lit by a kessil H80.
There is also some maxspect nanotech filtration media.
Flow in the tank is a maxpect gyre xf230 and two jebao 10000L/h SLW20's. All together they produce 28000L/h flow, so close to 100 times tank turnover.
However, the jebao's are running on pulse mode, so it will be closer to 50x.
I added coral at about the one month mark, as all measurements checked out.
From the start everything took off great, acros started encrusting very well, zoas and goniopora were looking super healthy, i was a happy reefer.
Suddenly a had a green tenuis rtn overnight. It looked great the evening before, and by morning 30% of the colony lost its flesh starting at the base.
The strange thing was that the living part still had nice PE and looked fine. I decided to give it a day => WRONG
By the next morning 80% was gone and i fragged what was left. I lost those bits over the next 2-3 days.
By that time i still thought this was a one off case of bad luck.
However a week or so after this event a nice frag of a suharsonoi started the same pattern. It had encrusted to the size of a golf ball. Lost that in 2 nights as well.
All other acro's looked fine, same for the other corals. As an example, my hawkins echinata has tripled in size in about 4 months.
By that time i started to measure daily and noticed my alk had crept up from my usual 8 to 8.9
A fellow reefer suggested this was probably the cause. So i lowered it again to 7.8 over the course of 2 weeks.
My nitrates were not very detectable with my testkits, but i feed 3-4 times daily so they were certainly not zero, they were just consumed very fast.
PO4 is always between 0,02 and 0,04 depending on the time of day measured.
A week after losing the suharsonoi a spathulata frag RTN'ed overnight.
I started looking in the tank at night looking for pests and found out i have a number of digitate hydroids.
Maybe these are the cause? However there are other acro's close to the hydroids that seem just fine.
Most were also deep in the cryptic areas of the rockwork.
Two weeks passed without losses, until last weekend a nice deep blue tenuis started RTNing.
This was a frag of about 8cm i got from a fellow reefer who had it for years. It was a very resilient coral that was looking incredibly healthy before.
Yet the same pattern repeated itself: day one 20% rtn at base, day two 50-80% gone, day three, complete RTN.
I am at a complete loss as to what to do. My parameters have been stable for weeks, my ATI ICP is at 98% without any parameter out of bounds.
At this moment i feel like i will loose the complete acro population over the next two months.
This week i will receive a UV steriliser and triton's RTN-x, those are my last hopes of stopping this.
I would appreciate any other insights or suggestions on how to overcome this.
