How long do these corals live, and are you blasting the hell out of them with flow? A few of those aren't exactly beginner friendly. But candy canes dying means something is up.
It depends, the hammers have been alive for a while, though I lost a few heads. The others vary, sometimes I notice STN issues right after putting them in the tank, like with the candy canes. So I am thinking I might have something in my water the carbon is not taking care of.
Do you have any big leather corals?
I use Hanna checkers for my alk, phos and nitrate, Red Sea for calcium and aqua forest for magnesium and test weekly. The levels were good and the hammers have been doing well for a while now. I keep the tank at 78 with a one degree fluctuation.
Me too...All,
I can't keep any lps in my tank to save my life. I am not sure what the issue is as my softies do just fine. I currently have a 180 gallon aquarium with an icecap 36XL sump and the tank has been set up well over a year with plenty of coraline algae growth in the tank. I fight green hair algae, but it has been minimal for a little while now.
I have 3 mp 40s, two on one end of the tank, one on the other (run in lps mode maxing out around 48%). I also struggle to grow any algae in my refugium (chaeto, caulerpa, etc.). I have switched between the innovative marine 9 watt grow light and a simple 29 watt fluorescent light without much luck. As needed, I run carbon and gfo and test my water weekly. I have 4 ai hydra 32 lights over the tank and run them from 7am to 5 pm. I run filter socks in the aquarium and a reef octopus protein skimmer, which pulls out a lot of junk. These are the numbers I get based on the apogee par meter.
My last test showed phosphates at around .02, but it can get as high as .1. My nitrates were right around 15 but have been as high as 19. I keep my alk between 8.4 and 9 and calcium is 420 and magnesium is 1330. The salinity is 1.025 and tank temp is kept at 78 degrees. I also sent in an icp test a couple of days ago to see if there are issues there, but a previous icp test showed nothing out of the ordinary. I use BRS for alk, calcium and magnesium.
I do a water change every two weeks with ro/di water. I have around 15 or so fish and a decent clean up crew. I stupidly had an air freshener in the room, one of the glade plug ins that I recently removed, not sure if that was creating this issue or how much effect it may have had.
I welcome all questions and suggestions on what I might be doing wrong, so I can reverse this lps trend and how I can also fix my refugium issue.
Thanks in advance!
I'm not noticing anything out of the blue
Salinity quite low
Its always possible, your iodine and manganese are low too. Seems more like a lighting issue possibly. I started dosing PNS probio 3 months back which is a natural bacteria supplement for the tank and have seen a very noticeable overall improvement in my tanks environment. Corals are bright and healthy. I dose red sea AB once a week too and PNS yellow sno once a week. I have had bacteria infections previously and lost heads on hammers and torches. Single dose of ciprofloaxin stopped the infection.
I looked at your pics again. I'm not familiar with Hydra lights but if you trust your par readings the numbers are ok for LPS maybe slightly more intensity and run a program spectrum similar to radion AB plus. One thing I did notice was your MP40s are mounted very low in the tank. I keep mine 3 inches below the water line. I realize you have a large tank and are trying to eliminate dead spots but LPS really don't need much flow from those. I run mine at 38% in lagoon mode during the day and 28 overnight.
careful with roids as they Can raise phosphates quickly.
Those Hydra numbers could be incredibly useless for his setup or way too powerful.
