Montipora frag bleaching

bellasdad0911 · Oct 10, 2017

Just went you think your back on track, so after the slight crash a month ago I purchased a small frag of montipora cap just as a test to see if things were well or not as my digitata and montipora suffered from my extreme phosphate reduction issue. The frag looked great for a week, and now today I noticed algae on the a few peaks and it looks pretty starved.

Stats:

Salinity 1.025
Alk 10.5
Calcium 480
Mag 1350
Nitrates close to zero on api
Ammonia zero on api
Temp 80
Phosphate .03 on Hanna

The tank is a 120 gallon oceanic with a 30 gallon sump. Fish are as follows, large hippo tang, yellow tang, royal gramma, diamond goby, six line, 3 chromis, flame angel and blue jaw trigger 3 clowns. I feed twice a day and dose microbacter 7 15ml daily. I have two anemones ( it split ) and that is doing great.

My skimmer is not ripping much, plenty of foam but I can go a whole week without emptying the cup. So could this be starvation? Algae is minimal. Any help would be great!

EriksOasis · Oct 10, 2017

What lights are you using?

bellasdad0911 · Oct 10, 2017

Hydra 52 hd running at 50% acclimation

EriksOasis · Oct 10, 2017

Depending on how high in the tank it is placed could be too much light leds are very powerful. What lighting did the frag come from? And what’s the flow like?

bellasdad0911 · Oct 10, 2017

Medium to high flow, half way up. It came from a frag tank with what looked like those Chinese brick leds. The tank it was in was very dark. I now moved it to a lower flow lower light area just to see.

Flippers4pups · Oct 10, 2017

Most likely light acclimation issue. Doing right thing lowering it for now. Caps can be finicky acclimating to light and different water pramameters than what they were use to before.

EriksOasis · Oct 10, 2017

Alright good idea can’t hurt anymore if it already bleached. Aqua illumination leds are very powerful I bleached a couple frags running my aqua illumination prime hd at 50% so speaking from experience not enough light is better than too much light.

bellasdad0911 · Oct 10, 2017

Ok next question, dual 52hds over a 48x48x24 10-11 inches above the water line, what should my total output be? My blues were set to 99 percent running at 50 percent reduction. Should I lower it further? Greens and red around 10 uv at 35 cool white at 26 and violet at 84

EriksOasis · Oct 10, 2017

I have had my aqua illumination prime hd for a few months now and just got up to 60% finally. I started at 10% and slowly ramped up over the course of a couple months. Might sound crazy I know but at first even at the lower setting mushrooms melted away.

bellasdad0911 · Oct 11, 2017

I am going to turn it down some more today and see how things respond over a week.

EriksOasis · Oct 11, 2017

As far as a Monti goes with bleaching it takes time to regain that color. Maybe get another inexpensive frag with around the same requirements and see how it responds to the light. Up to you tho. Seems like you’re doing the right thing by lowering it in the tank and adjusting lighting intensity.

bellasdad0911 · Oct 11, 2017

I am trying an easy setting on these lights tonight and want to see how things respond. I set it to 18k on the basic scale then copied the setting to a preset. Pretty interesting how uv blue royal blue and violet are all the same with red green and white the same also. I love how the app and light itself makes it easy to customize but I also believe it leave way to much room for error. I set it at 50 percent max with ramp up and down. Going to try this for a few weeks and see how algae growth and corals respond.

EriksOasis · Oct 11, 2017

Yes very easy to use lighting and very powerful. I even see people reviewing the radions and they only run theirs at a max of 50%

bellasdad0911 · Oct 12, 2017

Very interesting. I added 25 percent reduction at 50 percent and things look fine still. Could definitely been an issue.

bellasdad0911 · Oct 12, 2017

I also removed my carbon and shut down my skimmer for the night added some reef roids and micro after 7 to marinate. As you can tell my first fire is smoked. However what did that was my red fire urchin. I didn’t know they could strip a coral down to nothing. Thoughts?