Elegance Coral shrinking Not much luck in general

USMA36 · Jan 7, 2019

I picked up a beautiful Australian elegance Coral about 2 months ago. In the last two weeks it has started to shrink. Can anyone give me any advice? It seems to have lost about 1/3 to half its original size. 90 gallon tank 2 years old. No new livestock since adding. Temp 78 Po4 007-.1 No3 10-12 alk 7.4 calcium 440 mag 1290 salinity 1.025. I am Very frustrated with coral in general. Fish and anemone are awesome haven’t had a loss since I started feeding live food 6 months ago. Stony corals either don’t grow or die off within 6 months. Last ICP test was 8 months ago and was normal. This has been a problem in my tank since day one. Zoas and softies do well.

RobZilla04 · Jan 7, 2019

Tough to tell from the short video, but is the left side being shaded by the rock? You can try and bring Alk up above 8.0 as well. I recently added an Elegance coral and it has been doing fabulous. About a three year old tank, but I do have the lighting (LED & T5 combo) turned up pretty high. Medium flow and relatively similar parameters, only my Alk is 8.1. I'm going to slowly try and bump to 9.0 to try and increase stony coral growth.

ca1ore · Jan 7, 2019

Elegance does well in my lagoon tank where it can be buried in the sand, gets daylight spectrum light, not much flow and no nibblers; but it does not do well at all in the main display

USMA36 · Jan 7, 2019

I run triton and they recommend all between 7 and 8. It’s only about a half inch off the sand in a rock where it was happy for a while. It gets some flow but nothing crazy or At least I don’t think so