About Had IT With Corals

[Vin's Reef]

Looking back at this thread, there has been a lot of information thrown around very quickly. I think there are questions that haven't been answered though.

You stated your parameters, but how stable have these parameters been? Have you had any appreciable swings?
How have the LPS you kept died? Slow tissue recession or quick polyp bailout?
Do you target feed your corals?
How often do you feed the tank, what do you feed, how much?
What methods do you use for nutrient control; water changes, algae refugium, phosphate medium, skimmer, etc?
How long has this tank been running?

I see you are addressing your lighting schedule. That may be one item to address. But don't make too many changes too quickly. My method is to make a change, then wait a couple days, maybe a week. Move slowly and take your time. The worst thing we can do is become impatient. I can't tell you how many hundreds of dollars I've lost from being impatient with coral.

Here here!!

 

[Vspetersen]

Hi
I can tell you what possible is wrong in your water, it is to clean.
I hat it my selv so i had to start putting in some reef roids and other food, more than my fish could eat,.
So now i have NO3 around 10-20 and very little PO4 and everything growing so fast instead of dying fast..
So in my opinion you should start messing up your water

 

[Cujo#31]

My guess, as it is something I have personally experienced a couple times now, is the age of the tank. Reefing is a fickle mistress. I've seen guys start up tanks and be SPS ready and thriving in 3 months. I'm 13 months in and FINALLY SPS ready. Of course I'm lazy, and as such I have not read your tank build thread but when perams are spot on, with solid flow and good lighting then the demise of corals is generally attributed to things most common reefers cant test for. Tank maturity, as well one might consider and ICP test to check for heavy metals, as well another condition that can affect corals more than other livestock would be stray voltage.

 

[cjd]

Skimming through the post (sorry). So you are running a 150 watt fixture at 80 % . Personally I think you're blasting with too much light. How high off the tank are you running the fixture ? The corals you mentioned are a lower light variety . LEDs are like laser beams (think of a magnifying glass burning ants) . The focus points create hot spots just nuking corals with light. I would raise the fixture high off the tank for better spread and turn them down.

 

[stevieduk]

i quite agree with you mate , my water is fine do water changes as you did but i have a coral and it lives for a month and then slowly dies. Even the ones that the info sheets say are easy and hardy . Soft corals grow fine but hard corals , i give up

 

[JCTReefer]

I think the lighting could possibly be an issue. I run a 130 watt Led fixture (Photon V2) at a max intensity of 30%. .. I won't go into details about the programming of it, but these HO Leds are really powerful. My water level is at about 21 inches deep and my light sets 8 inches above that. So, it's about 29 inches to the sand bed from the bottom of the light fixture. I took Par readings with an Apogee Mq-510 par meter. I would definitely suggest turning the lights down also. The tall pillar is roughly 17 inches high. Maybe this will give you an idea of general Par levels at 30%

 

[ether]

I haven't seen pics to see what happened to the corals, but I recently had to remove a couple peppermints as they were eating my lps.

 

[oceanrider]

Sorry I did not read complete thread :

Somebody already asked about stability

Too much light ?
Maybe need to check your hands and clean them with no soap before putting them in


When we took chemistry analytical class. In lab we would spend about 1 hour just washing the lab glassware. I would start with water. Then toluene. Then acetone and finally alcohol. Often I was last one cleaning in whole class. But on final exam I still missed my titration by 0.001 And got 10 pats knocked off becasue if that. Argh.

So if parameters stable.
If light is not to bright for too long. But not too short either


Then check your utensils near tank. Make sure nothing is washed with soap or none of that funk under finger nails gets into water

I recall going into ICU st hospital and was yelled at becasue I only scrubbed for 3 min. Not the 5 minimum. And the iodophors cleaning pack has a small plastic for cleaning under finger nails

Double check and make sure your hair gel. Moisturizers. Soap. Other medications other lotions. Etc. Are not getting into tank. Or buy some long armed gloves when putting in your hands


My tank has no fancy equipment. Just a cheap skimmer. One used filter sock. And two types of macro algae. They are small in number.

Two handfuls of algae


I am growing large polyp as well as small polyp.

I got the nitrates down. So no nuisance algae. But my acro is growing slower. So I target feed all the corals now. Just a few fish