Monti issues while acro's growing strong

[rkpetersen]

Any idea what the PAR levels are at in those areas? Since you mentioned SPS, I'm guessing your lighting is fairly strong; my monti caps start to die off (in the same manner) right around 250 PAR but are fine at just about anything below that (double digits low even). Something to investigate if everything looks good.

Can't say for OP, but I'm seeing regression of a few cap monti's and also a spongodes, despite everything else looking great, and I think you may have hit the nail on the head. I am in the midst of slowly increasing time on T5s I recently added to LEDs. PAR toward the top of the tank is well over 300 with the T5s on. The acros absolutely love it; I was wondering if excess light might be the issue for some of those monti's.

 

[rkpetersen]

Yeah the bta moved down by that monti a few months ago but honestly it hasn't been bugging it other than a bit of sting at the base right close to the bta.

That single sting could lead to the whole plate just dying off. I've seen it. Cap monti's seem really tough to some things (you can snap off chunks and they don't care), but very delicate in other ways.

 

[madweazl]

Can't say for OP, but I'm seeing regression of a few cap monti's and also a spongodes, despite everything else looking great, and I think you may have hit the nail on the head. I am in the midst of slowly increasing time on T5s I recently added to LEDs. PAR toward the top of the tank is well over 300 with the T5s on. The acros absolutely love it; I was wondering if excess light might be the issue for some of those monti's.

I ended up moving mine to the bottom front corner of the tank to limit lighting and it has done great in that location.

 

[goober]

Figured id post an update. A month and a half has gone by since the incident. Things got worse before they got better. My acro's remained unaffected, however my monti's really bleached out. The green cap had no visible signs of green left.

Around the end of april my nutrients stabalized and I had slowly lowered my ALK to 7.5

monti's started to show signs of recovery and as of today are looking much much better. The red cap is beginning to regrow over the areas that died and the green cap has had some decent growth!

 

[vanpire]

This is just my observations but my monti's and some bird's nest did very badly when my ALK was higher than 9. Lowering ALK really helped with Monti recovering and starting to grow again.