Xenia will not survive in my tank

[BSej]

Folowing. They do not survive in my tank. My last Xenia frag was "contaminated" with a small acropora. The Xenia died after 2 weeks and the acropora grew very fast.
Your alkalinity is very high and I am not sure I would trust a strip for parameters. My guess is that some tanks have the "wrong" bacterial population or a missing bacterial species.

I thought higher alk allows for faster coral growth. I just got my Salifert nitrate test and it shows the same ~20.

 

[BSej]

Some of these comments are hilarious

 

[fish farmer]

Could your light be too bright? Xenia is a low light soft coral.

I was under the impression that Xenia could handle strong light. When I had my halide on my first tank, Xenia was at the top, literally 4 inches away from a 175 watt halide, lower down in mushroom land it could grow, but aways grew upwards toward the halide.

For me it also seemed to pulse better with high calcium and alkalinity.

I tried Xenia on my current setup which at that time only had PCs and I wasn't dosing kalk, all the other softies and easy LPS did fine.... Xenia just didn't take hold.

 

[Dan_P]

I was under the impression that Xenia could handle strong light. When I had my halide on my first tank, Xenia was at the top, literally 4 inches away from a 175 watt halide, lower down in mushroom land it could grow, but aways grew upwards toward the halide.

For me it also seemed to pulse better with high calcium and alkalinity.

I tried Xenia on my current setup which at that time only had PCs and I wasn't dosing kalk, all the other softies and easy LPS did fine.... Xenia just didn't take hold.

My Xenia grew just about over the entire tank with a couple strips of cheap grow lights. Maybe with the right conditions they can tolerate a high light level, but they don’t need it.

Alkalinity and calcium should not make any difference. What made a difference in my case was adding trace elements. A small colony started to grow very quickly after I started dosing CheatoGro for my macro algae and it now covers just about every surface. Maybe just a coincidence.

This is an old picture and represents growth about 1.5 years after buying a small colony. The Chromis sleep in the Xenia thicket at night.

 

[Damien Buckley]

Hi,

I have all different kinds of coral, but Xenia just doesn't want to survive in my tank. My initial piece melted away within a few days, after getting covered in some purple slimy stringy stuff. The second piece kinda just melted as well but no slimy stuff this time. I got another tiny piece to try again and it just looks sadder every day. All of my other corals are doing fine/great.

The only other corals that have died were a GSP, I got another one and it's doing well so far (few days in). And a clove polyp that hardly opened from the moment it entered until it died. I've got like 35 other pieces doing well.

Fish
4 x Clown fish	1 x Blue damsal	1 x One-spot foxface
1 x Sailfin tang	1 x Chocolate tang	1 x Red dragonnette goby
1 x firefish	1 x Formosa wrasse	2 x Anthias
	1 x striped fang Blenny	1 x Bluejaw trigger
	1 x pixie hawk
1 x Scopas tang	1 x neon dottyback

I haven't seen the one-spot fox face pick at anything except briefly on one SPS, but seems to be done with that. I don't see any of the other fish picking at any corals.

I did just lose a firefish for reasons I'm not sure of.

Calcium - 450
Alkalinity - 10.4
Phosphate - .2-.5 (color strip test)
Nitrate - 20 (color strip test, I ordered Salifert it's on the way)
Salinity - 35.5

Bit of a mystery there. Xenia seems to do better in my main display with nitrate around 10ppm and phosphate at 0.06 compared to my smaller clown/nem tank where both nitrate and phosphate are WAY higher. But yeah, grows like weeds for me. I love it - large flowing mass. I just have to prune it from time to time.