What is happening to my brain coral?!

[Reeferdood]

For real?! Interesting. I looked up some pictures of reef tanks with black sand vs white sand and liked the look of the black. I also read posts by people with black sand and it was fine. I never particularly searched for bad news with black sand but didn't stumble upon any, either. What kind of heavy metals should I look for? And I suppose I would need additional test kits for them? Also, my other two corals seem to be doing fine.

I don’t know of anyone that has a long term successful system with black sand...
If there are any, please prove me wrong..

 

[Christopher Davis]

+1 to polyfilter, in my shop out experience with it was...
high in heavy metals iron.
Algae exploded , diatoms hair you name it.
Corals didn’t extent not much PE
Tissue degeneration...

As mentioned earlier I would love to be proved wrong but I haven’t come across any long term black sand reefs. After all it’s highly volcanic anf rich with heavy metals. A place that you don’t find corals thriving or reproducing. Natural reefs are composed of sand and crushed coral and lime stone and don’t forget the parrot fish’s these environments so to speak are way different form geological time scales.

I know I removed it and it was like flipping a switch back on as the environment self corrected with large water changes and polyfilters.

 

[Uncle99]

I see a young tank which usually has unstable parameters.
How long have your parameters been stable and what frequency do you check?
What is your level of phosphate?

 

[vetteguy53081]

looks like lighting. I keep mine also in low flow area of tank and they look like puffed up footballs.

 

[Cali Reef Life]

I would get some poly filters for the tank. They work really well to see if you have a toxin in the tank.

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Alright, so I read thru until I got the the part about black sand and heavy metals. I have about 6 months of pulling my hair out trying to figure out why I could not keep any but the absolute most bullet proof corals alive.... Solution, black sand.

It's lava rock, and if that lava happened to pass thru a metal vein and it's way to the surface then bam. You have metallic sand in your reef. I had a Triton test done and I had crazy high vanadium, molybdenum, nickel and tin. Had a forum friend offer to place a sample of my sand under an electron microscope and check for any metal inclusions. Sure enough, there was large nickel deposits within the grains, and the vanadium was harder to pick up, but very present.

That tank was shut down because of all the troubles, and I was ready to upgrade to the tank I've always wanted. I'm running pure aragonite sand now and I have absolutely no problem keeping SPS alive now in a 3 week old tank.

My suggestion to you, buy a Triton or API ICP test and send it off. If it comes back with any of the metals I mentioned above. Remove your sand and replace it with aragonite. I would also prepare enough water for an almost complete water change.