Frogspawn problem

[Velodog2]

I've had this coral for about six months in my 18 gallon nano. It used to have three heads. One is now dead and you can see the second is on its way. The third is still reasonably healthy. However it has never thrived in my tank which is set up for sps, but should be able to accommodate lps lower down which is where I have this. It always expanded reasonably well until this began a few weeks ago. There is also a small hammer at about the same level which is not expanding as much as it used to either, but is not completely deflated. My beloved acros and montis are growing about as well as ever so I'm tempted to just forget about the lps and take the loss, but it concerns me that something may be wrong with the tank which could get worse, ie that these lps corals are my canaries.

Perhaps too much light over the long run? Is that why the one in back and more shaded is happier? I have enough led light to maintain any acro I have tried with decent color down to about half way to the bottom. These lps are two thirds of the way down. My tank has been slowly getting cleaner due to very strict water changes and detritus removal after several years of benign neglect as a low maintenance random polyp tank, and algae has been slowly disappearing. I don't test for nitrate. Is the tank possibly too clean? I've been bringing alk and calcium up also over the past few months, but only to reasonable levels of about 9.5 and 390 respectively. I run GFO in small quantities and have for at least six months. The frogspawn has never accepted food that I could see, the hammer is fed occasionally with pellets.

I have an 8 gal IM nano with stock lighting (less than what they get now) that I may transfer them to before they get much worse.

Any thoughts based on your experiences?

 

[Reefing Madness]

390 to me is a bit on the low side, especially if your keeping Acros, but may or may not be the problem. Some people have trouble with LPS when they have extremely clean tanks, I know, I have to control mine well, if I get it to clean I can see my Hammer and Octospawn get ticked off, so I try to keep it up around 10-15.

 

[Dendro Dude]

LPS & Softies are like my ex they like it dirty. I've met people with SPS that even have trouble growing GSP and those are the weeds of LPS :-D

 

[Velodog2]

LPS & Softies are like my ex they like it dirty. I've met people with SPS that even have trouble growing GSP and those are the weeds of LPS :-D

Roflmbo!

There is still some algae growth, but it is vastly reduced and my skimmer output has decreased. So perhaps this is it. They began deteriorating about the time I added blowing detritus off the rocks with a power head to my water change routine in order to be even more aggro about cleanliness. Trying to run the 8 gallon dirtier, so they and your ex may be happier there. However I'm also beginning to experiment with generally feeding the tank more. Maybe that will help. Oh yeah, the tank is also bare bottom.

RM I agree Ca at 390 is a little low still. Trying to bring it up w two part but is slow. A lot of calcium hogs perhaps (there is also a clam in there). But it is higher than it has been and the lps are less happy. What do you keep at 10-15?

 

[TriggerThis]

I have a tank packed with everything and I can't grow GSP or green polyps to save my life.

And yeah you can have happy corals in a super clean tank if you feed them regularly

 

[Velodog2]

Update. Problem continues to progress. The sick polyp in initial pic is gone and healthier one above it is retracting more. The hammer is also retracting now.

A new development is that my blue clove polyps (yeah I know - I keep them under control) that had been growing and spreading very well are now spontaneously melting away to nothing in many locations. What could cause this?

I'm going to move the remaining frogspawn and hammer to my nuvo 8 this weekend to see if they do any better there.

 

[TriggerThis]

Are you dosing magnesium currently?

And I had a similar problem a couple months ago. All my frogspawn died one after the other from one side of my tank to the other.

All hammers were perfect.
Then last month one of my hammers melted in a day.

The final massive hammer colony I have is unaffected and my Duncan's and plate corals look fine also. And wells brains.

I was mag dosing heavy at the time. That's the only reason I could come up with. Moving them to another tank was the only way I could save any

 

[Velodog2]

So your Mg was high? Do you know how high?

 

[TriggerThis]

No the mag wasn't high, I can never get it high enough in my tank.
i was just dumping a bunch in every day once or twice. And my a bunch I mean a couple ounces

But yeah all mine went one at a time, one head at a time in slow motion. I even took two to a friends tank and they died too.
Saved one. Then the one hammer went a month later for no identifiable reason.
i read a little about euphillia diseases going through tanks and there no stopping it before also.
But yeah it was one head at a time one colony at a time. And I had 4 different multi head ones in all different places in the tank.
I'm picking up 4 more heads Saturday so we shall see if they just kick over the same

 

[Velodog2]

Another update fwiw. Things have improved for the remainder of the frogspawn and the hammer. Expansion is back to normal. I haven't changed anything other than increasing my night time coral feedings to once every 2-3 days. No direct evidence that they are eating any of it however.

The blue clove polyps have continued to waste away and my tank is almost free of them at this point. They had not become a nuisance for me yet but I know many people would love to have this spontaneously happen in their tank. Can't help cuz I haven't a clue as to why.

Edit: One "out there" possibility occurred to me. I have mounted a sustained assault on my population of texas trash palys in the past month by injecting a few polyps with Aiptasia X each day. This causes a small release of palytoxin into the tank. If I inject more than a few polyps per day my montis are adversely affected (I know from experience that aggressively attacking these palys will outright kill my montis and many other corals). Perhaps this has been slowly poisoning the clove polyps.

 

[Jimbo662]

What's your salinity at? In my first tank I had similar issues with a frogspawn and eventually lost it because I didn't realize my salinity had increase due to evaporation.

 

[TriggerThis]

Update on this.

I lost three heads of hammer the other day. Started dying the same way again, one at a time closing and melting.
Fragged the colony in half and it did not spread to the remaining three heads.
The 5 new heads of frogspawn have been in for a few days and are looking normal still.
Fingers crossed as my tank has stabilized much better now after parameter swings from various factors.
I also just got this

So hopefully that helps

 

[TriggerThis]

Update:
Dosing pumps doing great
New frogspawns are doing great

Last two heads of hammer started melting and were pulled a few days ago...
So the rest of that colony is gone now.