Advice on coral death.

Jblunkall · Apr 19, 2016

So I have 2 tanks running separately. I have recently had a torch head die in one and a torch head and 2 heads of frogspawn die in the other. I do water changes about every 3 weeks. All testing checks out but my alk is at about 9.5 after the water changes and about 6 before the water change. Would this alk swing cause death? (I have dosers and 2 part just haven't hooked them up). Also the frogspawn heads just kind of popped off. The tentacles with the mouth is still in the tank just laying on the bare bottom of the tank. The torch ended up brown jelly. Thanks for the input. I have a good amount of euphyllia and don't want this to be a epidemic and lose more. I tried searching the forums but still trying to figure the site out.

Jblunkall · Apr 19, 2016

Jblunkall · Apr 19, 2016

It also looks like another head on the torch is retracting

bknapp · Apr 19, 2016

Yeah, that's quite the swing. I would look into getting those dosers going. Euphalia will perform a "polyp bailout" when stressed in hopes of staying alive. This recently happened to @schooleyosis with one of his torches.

Brown jelly can spread and needs to be rectified if possible. I lost about ten heads of torch in less than a week due to BJD.

fishdoc11 · Apr 19, 2016

Might want to search for brown Jelly disease and see if that's what it looks like.

Jblunkall · Apr 19, 2016

Ok it doesn't look like brown jelly. It looks more like polyp bailout. Not sure what is going on

Jimbo · Apr 19, 2016

Alkalinity of 6 dkh can definitely be the cause. Swinging up to 9.5 probably doesn't help matters. I'd definitely get the doser going asap. Good luck

bknapp · Apr 19, 2016

Big swings of any parameter in a good or bad direction are rarely if ever good. Consistency and stability are of utmost importance.

Reefrookie220 · Apr 19, 2016

To reiterate the above, my torches absolutely hate alk swings and I've seen polyp bail out from this issue. With a stable alk(and other params) you'll be surprised how well the euphyillas respond!

fishdoc11 · Apr 20, 2016

Never had polyp bailout myself but I guess I should be thankful for that. You will want to keep the alk up like others have said with the dosing AND maybe see what the alk of your salt mix is. Some can be very high. In that case you might try a different mix as well. Just another thought FWIW.

schooleyosis · Apr 20, 2016

Not sure what happened to mine but it looked like someone took a 1/4" drill bit and drilled right down the center of them. Noticed that after they brown jellied...

Reefer4Ever · Apr 22, 2016

Goal for happy corals is to have your parameters remain stable. Manually dose your tank daily, weekly whatever you need to do to stop the swings. If you can't do that then at least bump your water changes to weekly.

Jblunkall · May 4, 2016

So I started water changes weekly. Think I have stopped the bleeding.
Ok so I wanted to see out of the people that have seen polyp bailout, has anyone had the polyps live for an extended period of time? Going on 2 weeks and I have 2 heads of hammer still living. I put them in a bowl in the tank so they wouldn't just fly all over the tank and they are doing well. I didn't expect them to live and maybe they are dying and I'm just hoping. Anyone else had experience with this? And what are the chances of the polyps living away from the skeleton?

Jblunkall · May 4, 2016

Pic of the 2 heads for reference

Jimbo · May 4, 2016

Euphyllia will propagate by dropping polyps like that. I had a Frogspawn years ago that popped off the main colony and eventually grew into a colony itself . Maybe this is what happened here?