My Zoa base rock smells like rotten eggs.

[Pitcom]

Hey guys, I was just talking about this other day with the cultured sps. take a look at these pictures. I bought a frag of Stardust Pe's about 5 months ago and they have been doing fine, until yesterday. I noticed 3 of the polyps were pinched real tight at the base. Today when the lights came on, they were covered in a white cocoon. I pulled the rock out of the water and had to cut off 6 polyps. The rock under the polyps crumbled to dust and it smells worse than raw sewage. Its one of the worst smells ever. You can see the crevice in the rock, the entire rock smells like it even on the udnerside. I'm going to trey and use a razor to scrape the zoas off but am worried about getting this contaminated rock out of my system. You can see what looks like original glue. This frag came from FishHeads.

 

[surfn]

i've never had a problem with discs like that over a number of years.....they are solid and almost harder to cut than real live rock. not sure why you are having so many problems with them...must be whatever supplier your LFS is getting them from trying to cut corners and save money on rock materials...

 

[Pitcom]

i've never had a problem with discs like that over a number of years.....they are solid and almost harder to cut than real live rock. not sure why you are having so many problems with them...must be whatever supplier your LFS is getting them from trying to cut corners and save money on rock materials...

This is the first time I have ever had a problem.

 

[ficklefins]

Did the stinky area look slimy with a dark grey/green color?

 

[Pitcom]

Did the stinky area look slimy with a dark grey/green color?

Can't really tell bud. The fungus type stuff on the zoas was white. But it was definately slimy. I blasted it off with some airline tubing and it disperesed into the water fairly easily. I know a spagehtti worm used to live in the crack cause i'd see its tentacles at night. Do you think it brought in some detritus that rotted inside the rock?

 

[dc_909]

It happened to me also, and all those zoas died. You need to frag them off that rock

 

[Pitcom]

It happened to me also, and all those zoas died. You need to frag them off that rock

Did you figure out what the cause was?

 

[raider77]

This happened to me also. I had the same exact palys and disc you have and they started to look bad. So I pulled them out the tank and they stunk like death. I just discarded the frag disc and reglued them to a piece of rock. Now they are fine and grow like weeds.

 

[Pitcom]

Update

Well i wanted to give an update. I lost every polyp save 3. I took the rock out the next day after posting about this and it smelled like sewage all the way through. I broke the rock up and there was this nasty red slime about 1/2 down into the rock, it smelled putrid. I sucessfully fragges every polyp but 3 days later they were coated in this brown/white substance which resembled decaying tissue. I dipped the the frag and cut off all the polyps except 3 that looked ok. So far so good but its ashame, they were nice and i've had them growing in my tank since the summer. As i mentioned they were one of the very first corals i put in my tank.

 

[berns]

ive experienced this many times where a patch of zoas start to decay in some way on what seems a tidy clean rock, removing the rock and smelling of rotten eggs is regulary the case. on removing the dieing zoas is often found what is probably decaying sponges of sorts.

my theory here is whilst in the ocean the spreading zoas over the sponge patches on the rocks do not actually kill them, but its the removal of these corals from the ocean reef and with all the stress and times out of the water and stored in very low water circulation in the collecting stations right through to transit to the wholesalers that sees the sponges slowly die which in turn kill the zoas on them. only solution is as previously mentioned to remove the zoas from the rock and keep your fingers crossed the whole colony is not poisoned and in demise because of it.

 

[Weetabix7]

I had this happen once with a new colony that I got in.
It was pretty bad.
I tried a few different things, but what finally ended up working was painting Kent Marine's Tech-D on the nasty areas of the rock and leaving it out of water with the Tech-D sitting on it for about 5 mins.
Then I rinsed it and returned to the quarantine tank in high flow, and that got rid of it.