What kind of weird disease is this???

[Dule T&T]

So, I noticed this white sponge-like weird ring around base of 2 of my lobos!
I have those lobos for about 5 years and they are huge!
When I took them out I was able to remove that thing easily with tweezers - it peeled off like a long string...
But the tissue where that white string was is dead and skeleton is exposed.
I've never seen something like this before!

I tried googling it, but absolutely nothing similar came up.

I took those 2 lobos out, removed that white string and dipped them in CoralRx and moved them to another system.
Going to dip them again next few days in a row and see what happens...

I know people hate sentence like "water parameters are fine", so I will say - water parameters are perfect!
Everything is in perfect order. Only NO3 might be a bit too low at 2.5 ppm.
I didn't add anything in the tank since January.

It's a 10 feet long, 8 years old tank with hundreds of very expensive corals... so I am bit terrified what the heck is this thing!

 

[blaxsun]

Was it like a sponge?

 

[Hairyteeth]

I hate when weird **** pops up

 

[Dule T&T]

Was it like a sponge?

Yeah... kind of.
Hard to tell, it's soft definitely.

 

[Dule T&T]

Hmmm seems like this question is going to remain unanswered.....
Maybe I am the first in this hobby who got this weird ****! Yaaaaaay lucky me haha!

 

[Hairyteeth]

I’m tagging along to hopefully learn with you

 

[Dule T&T]

OK, so I will keep updating this post about what is going on - you know, just in case that someone get similar problem in the future or someone else sees this and recognize the issue.

So, I will try to describe it the best I can.
After very close inspection I noticed the same thin sponge-like white band around the base on few more lobophyllias - mostly around the heads which are deeper inside the colonies.
I physically removed that thing....
I noticed traces of probably very slow tissue recession where that white band was, and it appears that it was slowly progressing from the base line higher up.... but seems like It didn't aggravate lobos too much because they look puffy and happy during the day and feeding tentacles are wide open at night...
Probably that's why I never noticed it before.
Tissue bellow that white band is always missing.... and skeleton looks clean white. It's a relatively narrow line. (like in the pic above)

So far I only noticed this on Lobophyllias.
Trachyphyllias, Scolymias, Symphyllias, Acans.... Euphyllias, Gonioporas and all other LPS and SPS don't seems affected for now.

2 lobos that I took out of the tank yesterday and moved to another system are doing fine.
I dipped them again today. I don't see signs of that white thing - for now.


I was wondering - could this be some kind of fungus?
Or, it's just some weird bacterial infection?

 

[Cell]

You sure it wasn't dead tissue sloughing off?

 

[jtone_philthy_aquatics]

dealing with this myself. im pretty sure this was introduced to my system after bringing home some lps from the last frag swap i went to because within a short period of time a brand new single headed torch frag began to recede and it was showing the same signs. white fuzz/ sponge looking stuff around the flesh on the stalk. over time it kills off the tissue until it finally reaches the head. in my case once its reached the heads ive then seen brown jelly. this def spreads throughout the tank to other lps corals because now im doing damage control on multiple beautiful torches. im very upset and this is exactly why im not very trusting of smaller vendors these days. after i had a tank crash due to black bugs that came in on a torch a few years back i just developed some serious trust issues with vendors that im not very familiar with. im 100% going back to my old way of only buying from a select few online vendors that ive had great success with because these torches cost way too much and im to the point where id rather pay more and know that its clean. my bad for the rant but im finding more and more of this stuff as the days pass...... how did your situation turn out?