- Joined
- Jul 31, 2026
- Messages
- 41
- Reaction score
- 24
- Location
- San Diego
- What state or country do you live in
- California
I got this candy cane coral a few months ago. It's been doing pretty well overall, but this one one head has been slowly dying and I'm not sure why. The other three heads look great and are puffy during daylight hours.
Pictures aren't great, but I did my best. The left-most head is the sad one. The tissue on the bottom of the head is barely touching the rim of the skeleton opening and the rest is on the outer edge. The mouth is sometimes gaping and sometimes closed. The head itself never puffs up.
It looks like there's a pineapple sponge growing below the sad head. There's also a vermitid snail tube, but I glued that up a couple of weeks ago. The glue was taken off yesterday by my urchin, which it's now using as a hat!
I'm fairly new to this so I just wanted to make sure there's nothing I should be doing for it and if the head ends up dying, whether I need to do anything so that the rest of the coral will have a chance to survive.
Parameters:
29 gallon reef. Running carbon but no other additives. Other LPS and softies look happy. IO purple bucket salt.
Calcium: 412 (Hanna)
Alk: rock steady at 9.9
Salinity: 1.025
pH: 8.2-ish (Salifert, hard to read the colors)
Nitrate: 15-ish (Salifert)
Phosphate: 0.18-ish (Nyos, have a Hanna in the mail)
Thanks!
Pictures aren't great, but I did my best. The left-most head is the sad one. The tissue on the bottom of the head is barely touching the rim of the skeleton opening and the rest is on the outer edge. The mouth is sometimes gaping and sometimes closed. The head itself never puffs up.
It looks like there's a pineapple sponge growing below the sad head. There's also a vermitid snail tube, but I glued that up a couple of weeks ago. The glue was taken off yesterday by my urchin, which it's now using as a hat!
I'm fairly new to this so I just wanted to make sure there's nothing I should be doing for it and if the head ends up dying, whether I need to do anything so that the rest of the coral will have a chance to survive.
Parameters:
29 gallon reef. Running carbon but no other additives. Other LPS and softies look happy. IO purple bucket salt.
Calcium: 412 (Hanna)
Alk: rock steady at 9.9
Salinity: 1.025
pH: 8.2-ish (Salifert, hard to read the colors)
Nitrate: 15-ish (Salifert)
Phosphate: 0.18-ish (Nyos, have a Hanna in the mail)
Thanks!