Hammer melting help?

BBreef · Mar 2, 2019

I’ve had these hammers for 4 years and some of the frags started to do really bad and are melting. White film on them, any tips on how to save them? I was working on selling a bunch of frags so they were in sand bed for a while. The tank is 20 gallons and currently being upgraded to a 90 gal. Which is cycling. Water parameters look great. I did 2-5 gallon wc’s 12 hours apart.
I also broke the good heads away from the melting ones to try and isolate the problem. The last pic is before the problem.

Tuan’s Reef · Mar 2, 2019

Nice wall of hammers! I sure hope it’s not the dreaded brown jelly disease . Lost one of my hammer 4 weeks ago to something like this. Everyday it would recede. I dip in seachem reef dip but it didn’t help.

BBreef · Mar 2, 2019

Tuan’s Reef said:
Nice wall of hammers! I sure hope it’s not the dreaded brown jelly disease . Lost one of my hammer 4 weeks ago to something like this. Everyday it would recede. I dip in seachem reef dip but it didn’t help.

Thanks! It was a nice wall, my Hollywood stunner chalice and hammers have completely taken over. That’s why I upgraded to the 9@ and before I could transfer my hammers just started crashing. Lost about 15 heads so far a couple colonies seem uneffected. I’m not sure if I should trash the bad ones to keep from spreading or just keep them separated. I tried to frag off the bad, separate and save the rest.

vetteguy53081 · Mar 2, 2019

Looks like RTN and one contributor is water flow. have you changed or increased the water flow recently?
What is Alk level??

BBreef · Mar 2, 2019

vetteguy53081 said:
Looks like RTN and one contributor is water flow. have you changed or increased the water flow recently?
What is Alk level??

dang, I think your right. My flow has dramatically decreased, I was getting rdy to move everything over to my 90 gallon and the return pump for the 20 started dying and for the last week I noticed it was very low flow. I had been planning to change out the pump but got a 90 gallon a month ago and decided to just upgrade. I thought everything would be fine for another week until I was rdy to do the transfer. Is there any cure or am I out of luck? Sucks to see a couple hundred in hammers just disappear.

vetteguy53081 · Mar 3, 2019

BBreef said:
dang, I think your right. My flow has dramatically decreased, I was getting rdy to move everything over to my 90 gallon and the return pump for the 20 started dying and for the last week I noticed it was very low flow. I had been planning to change out the pump but got a 90 gallon a month ago and decided to just upgrade. I thought everything would be fine for another week until I was rdy to do the transfer. Is there any cure or am I out of luck? Sucks to see a couple hundred in hammers just disappear.

I would take a look at your impeller magnet in your pump which could be restricted with build up of slime, snails shell, etc and give a good clean inside hole and impeller assembly and see how it performs when you plug it back in