What’s Up with My Duncan?

[DocRose]

What the heck happened to my Duncan?! It’s been doing just fine in QT for the past 50 days (doing the 76 day QT). Only issue I had was some bryopsis that was growing at the base. Pulled it off the plug. Boiled and scraped the plug. Manually removed as much as I could from the stalk. Lightly rubbed the base with a toothbrush dipped in peroxide. Glued it back to the plug a couple of days later. I noticed some of the algae was still on the stalk (where the dark spot is in the picture) so I moved the plug from the rack down into the sand where the mithrax crabs in the QT could get to the algae. They did right away and cleaned it good. The polyp was completely opened when I moved it down there. It spent two days in the sand and never opened back up. I moved it back up to the rack and now it looks like the tentacles are gone entirely, not just closed. Parameters below:

Salinity - 1.025
Temperature - 77 F
pH - 8.6
dKH - 8.8
Calcium - 420
Magnesium - 1280
Nitrate - 0.7 ppm
Phosphate - 0.65 ppm

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

it sounds like everything was just fine until the bryopsis issue, then it seems to be touch touch touch.

Might have been handled too much, or maybe something went wrong when removing the bryopsis that you were not aware of. Thats my guess.

 

[DocRose]

it sounds like everything was just fine until the bryopsis issue, then it seems to be touch touch touch.

Might have been handled too much, or maybe something went wrong when removing the bryopsis that you were not aware of. Thats my guess.

I would agree with you, but at least a whole week went by after the peroxide brushing where I didn't touch it, and it was fully open every day. Then I just moved it down into the sand. and the next day it was just closed (you could see the tentacles bunched up). Then two days later (today), it looks like the photo.