STN on Brain coral

[rick_farr]

Dear All,

I've had a mixed reef for 6 years now and have never had to deal with STN. Sadly I have a brain coral, which seems to be slowly withering away before my eyes. Over the week I have seen increasing areas of skeleton.

I run a 220l reef, KH 7.4, ph 8.1, Nitrates 1ppm, Ammonia 0ppm, Phosphate 0.5ppm, Algae refugium and running Carbon and GFO and this has been stable for 6 years. I switched to Triton about a month ago and I agree there was a drop in KH initially, but I managed to stabilise it over 10 days.

All my other corals from Lobo's, Goni's, Acans + all the SPS have good polyp extension and reasonable growth - however the brain coral is suffering. I thought it may have been the switch in the system (Triton) but everything else is doing really well. I have dipped the coral twice but tissue recession continues.

Any advice of what to do next - it is a really nice specimen and I have to admit (stupidly) it was one of my first corals and I would be mortified to see it go.

I have added some pictures.

Many thanks

Rick.

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Did you recently do something with the lighting? I looks like the STN is occurring in the most shaded areas of the colony. The goniopora to the right of it in the last picture as well as the caulastrea look happy so it's not because you're at a low enough nutrient level to hurt LPS corals. Would you say that your tank parameters are stable?

I'm sort of in the same boat right now with my Blastomussa, everything in my tank but it looks fine.

 

[rick_farr]

Did you recently do something with the lighting? I looks like the STN is occurring in the most shaded areas of the colony. The goniopora to the right of it in the last picture as well as the caulastrea look happy so it's not because you're at a low enough nutrient level to hurt LPS corals. Would you say that your tank parameters are stable?

I'm sort of in the same boat right now with my Blastomussa, everything in my tank but it looks fine.

My lighting has not changed in 6 years and apart from a minor 'blip' in the KH over 10 days when changing to Triton everything else has been stable. As you can probably imagine - this is very frustrating when everything else seems to be thriving.
I really don't know whether to dip again or even try any increase flow in order to let its tissue easily remove any waste.
A perplexing an infuriating problem.