The ‘merry go round’ of problem solving..

Heisenberg 78 · Jan 18, 2021

What’s the best way of troubleshooting Chemistry issues (Or dying coral...) ?

I might be over thinking things at the moment.. but the tank for the last 8 months or so has been happy with little / no interference..just the usual routine checks and top ups..
ive not done anything in haste at the moment, i have just slowly observed if it’s a singular coral that’s a problem, or if it’s a reoccurring one..

my question is a two part one ..I seem to have hit a bump in the road when it comes down to trying to work out what’s going wrong.

My tank was looking great and growth was good in the early months of last 2020; but somethings happened between the autumn time and now and I can’t work out for the life of me what’s happening !

The start of it was a massive aiptasia issue, (which to cut a long story short caused lost of stinging and tissue recession and sulking coral.
I drafted in a kliens butterfly fish to eradicate my aiptasia problem.
In order to prevent the corals getting eaten too by the kliens, i dismounted them ( frags/ small colonies) and placed them in a segregated zone partitioning the right half of the tank..
Even before moving them around, I have stated to see corals shrink, lose colour, lose heads etc...

ive not changed much in terms of chemistry, the light levels remain the same.. flow the same.. supplements the same...
feeding admittedly went down a bit because it was encouraging aiptasia to breed and I was trying to avoid their spread.
(so nutrients may have sloped a bit..)

so far observations and current casualties:-

euphillyia circa 25 heads heads shrunken and deteriorating lost about 6-8 heads at the moment
war coral stripping but very slow
acans shrunken (in & some died)
blastoMussa-some shrunk but some no ok and no change..
sps dull no polyps and tissue recession
Zoas - some are bright and unaffected, others limp and colours have gone..
montis -seem ok
chalices- shrunken skeleton showing and some stripping.

tank testing

cal 445 -500
mag 1290 -1350
dkh 8.6
po4 0.045-0.09
no3 normally 50ppm now 25ppm
k potassium 400ppm

recently added a Clarisea roller filter.. done some 5 -10% water changes
added some carbon vertex rox 0.8 (50ml to the sump)

in the sump I seem to be getting cyano, used to be black, now maroon/green..

hoping someone can give me a few thoughts to consider.. I’m stood thinking at a million miles an hour.. but going nowhere..!

thanks. Guys, girls..

schuby · Jan 18, 2021

My observation from what you've written is that you've made several large changes since the aiptasia invasion: moved your coral, changed flow (segregated zone partition), lowered feeding, added roller filter, and started running GAC.

For my tank, I try to always keep my PO4 >= 0.1ppm and <=0.2 ppm. I've seen rapid changes in PO4 cause issues for my SPS. Keeping PO4 and NO3 stable usually result in better growth of my SPS (many) and LPS (just a few).

For cyano in my refugium/sump, I added a small powerhead. This helped with cyano and aided the growth of my chaeto.

Dkmoo · Jan 18, 2021

Where have your PH been?

Timfish · Jan 18, 2021

I would also would suspect the changes without letting things stabilize would in part be part of the problem. You also have a lot of different corals from different genus and families so there "might" be some basic incompatibilities. My suspicion is some of the bacteria in the corals' holobionts have been disrupted. If it was my tank I would just leave it alone for 6 months or so, stay on top of the basic chemistry, do small frequent water changes and let things settle down.

(For an excellent introduction to the coral holobiont read Forest Rohwer's "Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas")

Heisenberg 78 · Jan 19, 2021

Dkmoo said:
Where have your PH been?

Its an unfortunate part of my reefing that I don’t have any ph measuring kits or probes..
I wanted an apex so I can see these changes, but the funds need to be organised for it..

Heisenberg 78 · Jan 19, 2021

I was trying to recall the first instance where I noticed things slip.

An elegance coral shrunk and stayed like that for months.. then eventually gave up, my acans which were normally big and puffy shrunk shortly after( to 50%) ,then I got a tiny bit of stn on a war coral.

I suspected brown jelly on my euphillia as they started shrinking ..and since then things have gradually got worse..I’m down to the last 4 heads now out of 20+ or so..

weirdly i have a colony of salted agave Zoas which were growing and nice and colourful... I had to separate the colony becuase the ails were inside stinging them.
since curing the aip issue these have lost all their orange centres and look grey.. the heads are mainly closed too..some have algae and bits of peeling skin growing off them..

Dkmoo · Jan 19, 2021

Livingjewels said:
Its an unfortunate part of my reefing that I don’t have any ph measuring kits or probes..
I wanted an apex so I can see these changes, but the funds need to be organised for it..

Ok np - whenever i hear issues of "everything's good for X months, then corals started dying for no reason" i want to first rule out PH as an issue. A lot of reefers tend to overlook PH because when everyone first started, all the conversation is around "get your Alk stable and ph will take care of itself" but as the collective knowledge of this hobby evolved, you realize that PH is at least just as important as Alk. I've posted this a few times in various threads with similar issues that you can search, but basically, a stable alk, of say 8.5dkh, can have PH anywhere from 7.7 - 8.3. This is attributed to a few factors such as the type of Alk you use (sodium carbonate vs sodium bicarbonate) or your CO2 concentration. This is important for a couple reason:

1) Coral calcification uses carbonate to form Calcium Carbonate. Most Alk in the water is in the form of a Bicarbonate and a small % of carbonate. The carbonate concentration increases with PH. Since the PH scale is exponential, the difference in carbonate concentration between a ph of 7.8 and a ph of 8.3 is about 4x.
2) calcium carbonate is more soluble in lower PH than in higher. and in very low Ph, it actually dissolves (melting the bone)

what this means corals is that, in low PH environments, they have a hard time time calcifying, resulting in weak bone structure, and although they can take BIcarbonates instead of carbonates to grow bones, it takes a lot more energy to strip out the extra H+ ion to turn bicarbonate into carbonate. This also means that inside the coral tissue, the ph is likely even lower due to the extra H+ ions that the corals is trying to pump out from the calcification process. This results generally in overall weaker coral health, reduced life span and more sensitivity to changes in conditions even as their outer appearance show very little sign of trouble for a long time while the inside paints very different picture. The coral may look healthy and happy for a long time (even years) then suddenly crash b/c it has reached a tipping point, or it has experienced some other stressors that a healthy coral grown in higher PH would have been able to overcome. The analogy is like a chain smoker dying from pneumonia, pneumonia probably caused the death, but the pack-a-day in the last 20 years is the true culprit.

If LPS, or more "bony" corals are the ones that goes first while softies are ok, that to me points more as PH being the underlying culprit since the more "bone" a corals made up of, the more low PH could impact them long term

look up "ocean acidification" if you are interested and its role on coral bleaching and reef disappearance. This is a 0.1 change in PH from 8.25 to 8.14

you don't need a fancy apex to constantly monitor it. a simple test kit can give you an idea of where you tank is at. measure it once at noon, once at night, will give you an idea of range, and do it over a few weeks will give you a trend to determine if its stable.

Here's Randy's article on this matter where i got a lot of my info. It's a bit of an old article but what's in there is based on a proven scientific fact on the chemistry of calcium carbonate formation and ph.

http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-09/rhf/

BRSTV also did a recent video on the matter here:

This may not help your immediate issue, but hopefully will help you prevent future issues.