Corals Closing

Davisc1293 · Jul 13, 2022

My PO4 has been inconsistent lately. last night tested .06 so i pulled the GFO and tonight was .16. I looked in the sand for a dead snail but didn't find anything like that i only feed one small cube of frozen to a 30 gal with 5 fish and a bunch of snails and peppermint shrimp. Needless to say i put the GFO back in but was wondering what other sources i could be looking for i cant feed much less. My corals have started to show some stress. Believe it or not my pulsing xenia was first and has been closed for over a week then my hammers been closed and now my rasta zoas. Other corals and even a recovering SPS frag i got from my lfs is healing nicely and gaining color daily.

EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal · Jul 13, 2022

What are your other parameters? This may not be a phosphate issue

Davisc1293 · Jul 13, 2022

34.8 ppt salinity
8.9 DKH Alk
420ppm Cal
NO3 5ppm
PO4 .16 but has been all over the place over the last few weeks.
8.2-8.4 PH and 78.5-79 degrees.
Iron was high on my last ICP test

Davisc1293 · Jul 13, 2022

It may not be nutrient related at all and i should have looked more into it when the xenia was closed for over a week but i took it as a miracle because it needed a haircut anyway and everything else looked great. But now more coral are starting to show signs of stress by the day it seems. A couple months back I started dosing silicates to promote diatoms to outcompete dinos. I stopped dosing anything but MB7 and eco balance. My hannah checker was giving me a lot of false readings as high as .5 so i just stopped paying attention to them as i figured they were false readings caused by the silicates or something especially because the sample itself was barley tinted any color. I sent an ICP test I ordered a nyos kit and have also been using a syinge filter for the hanna as suggested by someone else and have been getting much more (what i beleive to be) accurate readings.