Acropora colors melting?

[ab-774819]

So I have several acro frags attached to rocks throughout my tank at different levels but recently (past 2-3 days) a couple of my acro frags look like the color is literally melting. Could anyone tell me what could cause this, or if it's even necessarily bad? I kinda think it looks cool lol 2 of the frags were sold to me as Fox Flame, from 2 different sellers, and 1 is supposed to be Red shortcake.

Perams are;
Alk: 9.2
Po4: .03
Mag: waiting on reagent to come in the mail, can't test
Calcium: 530
No3: 5ppm

It's a 60 gallon breeder and I have 2 maxspect Jump 65w and 1 vivarspectra 165w in the middle

 

[Pod_01]

I have not seen acros colour shift like that, interesting…
How long do you have them for?

Based on the pictures the base of the acros seem to have grown so it must be something that has been shifting slowly over time or some event that happen 2-4 weeks ago.

Looking at your parameters you do have higher Alk (I run 6.5-7.5) and low PO4 (I prefer 0.05-0.15) and from my experience higher Alk and low PO4 leads to unhappy acros.

Also Calcium is elevated (I run 400-440) and on its own it might not be an issue but this might suggest that your water parameters might be off from ideal range. I would try to shift the water parameters back with partial water changes.

Hopefully someone who seen something like this can provide advice.

Good luck,

 

[ab-774819]

I have not seen acros colour shift like that, interesting…
How long do you have them for?

Based on the pictures the base of the acros seem to have grown so it must be something that has been shifting slowly over time or some event that happen 2-4 weeks ago.

Looking at your parameters you do have higher Alk (I run 6.5-7.5) and low PO4 (I prefer 0.05-0.15) and from my experience higher Alk and low PO4 leads to unhappy acros.

Also Calcium is elevated (I run 400-440) and on its own it might not be an issue but this might suggest that your water parameters might be off from ideal range. I would try to shift the water parameters back with partial water changes.

Hopefully someone who seen something like this can provide advice.

Good luck,

1 of them I got in March 23' and the other 2 I got in May 23'. I have approx 20 other acro frags in this tank that aren't showing any kind of color change. I've been slowly lowering my ALK due to a spike of 12.3 about a month ago due to manually dosing alk instead of magnesium, accidentally, so it is still on the higher side. I try to keep my po4 above 0 and below .7 and I've tried 10x over to lower my Calcium and it just won't go below 500 for some reason. I observe my tank DAILY and these changes just started over the past couple days but of course could have been underlying for a while. The only big change has been my lights. I was running 2 kessil a360w that were pre-owned and burnt out within a week of eachother. I replaced them about 2 1/2 weeks ago. As long as it's not harmful I don't really mind the color change, just curious if anyone has seen it before.

 

[Pod_01]

1 of them I got in March 23' and the other 2 I got in May 23'. I have approx 20 other acro frags in this tank that aren't showing any kind of color change. I've been slowly lowering my ALK due to a spike of 12.3 about a month ago due to manually dosing alk instead of magnesium, accidentally, so it is still on the higher side. I try to keep my po4 above 0 and below .7 and I've tried 10x over to lower my Calcium and it just won't go below 500 for some reason. I observe my tank DAILY and these changes just started over the past couple days but of course could have been underlying for a while. The only big change has been my lights. I was running 2 kessil a360w that were pre-owned and burnt out within a week of eachother. I replaced them about 2 1/2 weeks ago. As long as it's not harmful I don't really mind the color change, just curious if anyone has seen it before.

Do you have pictures from before the colour morphing?

As an example I had acro that almost died due to lack of nutrients and went brown:

As I made corrections and it recovered first it had lot of green:

And later it got the colour back:

So not sure if this is the same or similar. I’m this case the green was a good sign.
I never seen the green as pronounced as what your picture shows.

 

[ab-774819]

Do you have pictures from before the colour morphing?

As an example I had acro that almost died due to lack of nutrients and went brown:

As I made corrections and it recovered first it had lot of green:

And later it got the colour back:

So not sure if this is the same or similar. I’m this case the green was a good sign.
I never seen the green as pronounced as what your picture shows.

For some reason most of my acros turn green in my tank before then getting better/other colors. Since changing my lights some of my acros are getting colors I've never seen before on them which is great to me, I'm so sick of seeing green lol


These are the only pictures I could find from before the color change but some of these aren't accurate to what they looked like directly before the change started. The "chunky" frag had more yellow on the tips. The red shortcake looked almost the same besides the encrusting portion and the "branch" Fox flame had yellow tips also with a ton of green on the encrusting portion and green polyps.

 

[ab-774819]

These are the other acros that are changing colors but these look like very normal processes. Most of these were very drab looking until I changed the lights.