Moonwrassler
Community Member
Newbie ISO diagnosis help:
Came home from work tonight to discover that my prized bright red favites had suddenly developed a bare/white spot about 1cm diameter on top surface. Photo attached below.
It looks like bleaching, or maybe necrosis, or… I don't know what. but it all happened in the space of 12 hours. Only injury was to single coral; 10 or so other frags seem happy or even happier than before water change. One Leptastrea seems to have retracted polyps a bit, but nothing alarming.
Tank has been up for about 3 months, corals have been happy, polyps extending at night, fish population has been stable for a month.
The only things that have changed in the last day are as follows:
1. I did a 15 gallon water change yesterday (tank is nominally 60g AIO, but it felt like this was a 45% of the display tank capacity), So that meant the water depth above this coral was down to a couple inches for about 10 or 15 minutes yesterday afternoon while the lights were on.)
2. After going for elevated phosphate and nitrate levels for the past month in order to crowd out Dino's, we added GFO to the carbon reactor to start lowering nutrient levels.
Water parameters Was-Is are below, showing day before water change and this evening:
Salinity: stable at 1.025
pH: 8.2 ; 8.6
Alk: 9.8 ; 10.1
Ammonia: stable at 0
NO3: 10 ; 10 (this one surprised me, expected it to drop significantly, so either I mismeasured before or there was a spike before water change?)
PO4: 0.5 ; 0.3
CA and Mg fairly stable week on week: 430 Ca, 1400 - 1340 Mg
The thing that jumps out to me is the pH, but I don't know what could have been the cause. I also noticed the skimmer was much frothier/fuller than in the past, maybe because water level was up? Would running GFO do this?
A. is it possible that a pH swing of this amount could cause this much injury to a single coral?
B. Would 10 minutes under the lights with 6 inches less water depth burn a coral that badly?
After seeing the pH number tonight I dosed 3g of sodium bisulfate to lower pH a bit. Will see how everything looks in the morning, but I'm concerned about the damage, realize it will take a while to recover, and hope I can prevent it from getting worse.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated,
Came home from work tonight to discover that my prized bright red favites had suddenly developed a bare/white spot about 1cm diameter on top surface. Photo attached below.
It looks like bleaching, or maybe necrosis, or… I don't know what. but it all happened in the space of 12 hours. Only injury was to single coral; 10 or so other frags seem happy or even happier than before water change. One Leptastrea seems to have retracted polyps a bit, but nothing alarming.
Tank has been up for about 3 months, corals have been happy, polyps extending at night, fish population has been stable for a month.
The only things that have changed in the last day are as follows:
1. I did a 15 gallon water change yesterday (tank is nominally 60g AIO, but it felt like this was a 45% of the display tank capacity), So that meant the water depth above this coral was down to a couple inches for about 10 or 15 minutes yesterday afternoon while the lights were on.)
2. After going for elevated phosphate and nitrate levels for the past month in order to crowd out Dino's, we added GFO to the carbon reactor to start lowering nutrient levels.
Water parameters Was-Is are below, showing day before water change and this evening:
Salinity: stable at 1.025
pH: 8.2 ; 8.6
Alk: 9.8 ; 10.1
Ammonia: stable at 0
NO3: 10 ; 10 (this one surprised me, expected it to drop significantly, so either I mismeasured before or there was a spike before water change?)
PO4: 0.5 ; 0.3
CA and Mg fairly stable week on week: 430 Ca, 1400 - 1340 Mg
The thing that jumps out to me is the pH, but I don't know what could have been the cause. I also noticed the skimmer was much frothier/fuller than in the past, maybe because water level was up? Would running GFO do this?
A. is it possible that a pH swing of this amount could cause this much injury to a single coral?
B. Would 10 minutes under the lights with 6 inches less water depth burn a coral that badly?
After seeing the pH number tonight I dosed 3g of sodium bisulfate to lower pH a bit. Will see how everything looks in the morning, but I'm concerned about the damage, realize it will take a while to recover, and hope I can prevent it from getting worse.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated,
