sps pests

[Gary LeCompte]

I think I have sps & montipora pests. How can I get rid of pests in my display?

 

[Travis Stewart]

Why do you think you have pests? Have you identified them? Have any pictures of the coral or pests?

 

[Reefer40b]

Why do you think you have pests? Have you identified them? Have any pictures of the coral or pests?

+1 lets see what your talking about?

 

[Gary LeCompte]

I had some montipora eating nudibrachs. I was trying to deal with by dipping.
I installed an algae scrubber.
I had dropped Phosphates from .1 to .07
Started getting this brown algae or something.
I was fixing to have to leave to go out of town for 2 weeks.
Things were not looking too good. I had problems with cheap doser.
I got 2 dos before I left and hooked them up. Guessed the best I could at the dose rates because the cheaper dose was not working all that good.
Water was before I left Water was when I came back
Phosphate .08 .09
Alkalinity 8.34 8.51
Calcium 405 465
Magnesium 1200 1410
I knew the brown algae was going to get worse while I was gone, but I could do nothing about it. I came home the brown alga was a little worse but not as bad as I thought it would have been.When i checked the water things were actually closer that I thought they would be also.
almost all my frags sps have suffered and most are completely dead.
I just don't know what to do from here. Very discouraging.

 

[Travis Stewart]

What’s your nitrates at? Are you doing water changes? Tell us about your setup.

have you dipped any of those in bayer to see if you have any pests come off?

 

[Reefer40b]

Looks like you may have striped your tank of nutrients and dinos are showing up....

 

[Gary LeCompte]

What’s your nitrates at? Are you doing water changes? Tell us about your setup.

have you dipped any of those in bayer to see if you have any pests come off?

nitrates are at 10
I was having 3tds coming out my RO. I couldn't get new beads before I left for out of town but I have changed them all since.
I haven't done any water changes since I have been home.
Changed the beads in RO. Still filling new water to do water change.

My system
180 gal.
Core 20 for return pump
4 mp 40's for flow
Algae scrubber
protein skimmer
running GFO & Carbon in reactor
lights are 3 Kessel AP-800's running at 95%
Dosing Kalkwasser, Magnesium, Alk, & very little Acro power.

I was dipping with bayer the moniporas after I saw the nudibrachs about every 3 days for a while. I thought I had gotten rid of them when I saw some not too long before I went out of town. I thought I saw some red stuff on the acros, thought it was red bugs.
I got DR. G's SPS & LPS coral dip solution and dipped everything I could about a week before I left. But things didn't look like they were improving.
And thats about where I am now.

 

[stephj03]

The Coralline on your back wall indicates that you're closer to things being awesome than it feels while going through this.

Get on to some regular water changes now that you have good source water, and go back to basics. Maybe dial back your scrubber to only run at night.

Do easy things that will gradually improve the algae situation and don't think about pests yet.IMO
Figure out if the algae is from bottomed out nutrients or excess nutrients and gradually treat accordingly.

You may have pests, but it will be hard to treat them and water chemistry at the same time.

Don't be afraid to take a break from looking into you're tank except on WC day when it's time to suck algae off the rocks.

Determine what pests you have and decide if it's worth trying to save what you have vs chucking everything and reloading with a $300 battlebox after running fallow during algae treatment.

Remind yourself regularly of that corraline on the back wall and that it means you're closer than you think to a higher level of reefing than some ppl ever get to and keep plugging.

Good Luck,

 

[Travis Stewart]

In the future don’t do a water change at all with anything other than 0 tds ro. I know ppl have successs with other options, but I think in your case it would have been better to wait for new di resin than use dirty water for a WC.