Please Help! LPS not doing well.

[lpsouth1978]

I need some help with this one. I upgraded tanks about a month ago, and moved my livestock from the 75 to my Waterbox 230.6. Everything went very well and things have been happy and open. That is until 2 days ago. Before going to work I noticed that one of my torches was receding and some skeleton was showing. When I got home, the torch was GONE.

Now all but one of the torches is closed up and most starting to show skeleton, including my gold torch. Along with the torches, my frog spawn, hammer, and acans are all closed up as well with the frogspawn receding on a couple heads. I can't figure out what is going on. No sign of brown jelly, no changes to the system, lighting, flow, feeding, etc. My current params are below. Please let me know if you have any thoughts!

Temp - 79.4
pH - 8.0
Alk - 6.9 (slowly working on raising to 7.5)
Ca - 460
Mag - 1360
P04 - 0.12
N03 - 10
SG - 1.026

 

[JCTReefer]

Have you always kept your alk on the low side?
Were these the same parameters you kept in the old tank? Any think else changed? Lighting, dosing, etc. Could anything have gotten in the tank? Sprays or chemicals. Do your fish look good? Assuming you have fish. Your parameters look good to me. Alk is a little low for my taste, but if that’s were you usually keep it, I’m not sure that would be a problem. Last time I had issues with my torches receding, it was because my nutrients had bottomed out. 0 Po4 and No3.
But that doesn’t seem to be your case. That sucks about the torch.

 

[ADAM]

I need some help with this one. I upgraded tanks about a month ago, and moved my livestock from the 75 to my Waterbox 230.6. Everything went very well and things have been happy and open. That is until 2 days ago. Before going to work I noticed that one of my torches was receding and some skeleton was showing. When I got home, the torch was GONE.

Now all but one of the torches is closed up and most starting to show skeleton, including my gold torch. Along with the torches, my frog spawn, hammer, and acans are all closed up as well with the frogspawn receding on a couple heads. I can't figure out what is going on. No sign of brown jelly, no changes to the system, lighting, flow, feeding, etc. My current params are below. Please let me know if you have any thoughts!

Temp - 79.4
pH - 8.0
Alk - 6.9 (slowly working on raising to 7.5)
Ca - 460
Mag - 1360
P04 - 0.12
N03 - 10
SG - 1.026

Any of the corals still on frag plugs? If so check the bottom. I had the same issue today, lunch everything looked happy and healthy..... came in this evening and all my NY Knicks torches looked like they’d been tore apart from the skeleton and the other euphyllia were noticeably upset. Lost a 4 header, two header, and two single head frags that all have been fine for a month since fragging. On the frags with a plug there were egg sacks and some of them were empty. Looked like the pic on both of the torches with a frag plug. You can see some look clear and some have a brown appearance. I’m guessing the clear are remains of where the larvae hatched and the brown were still developing. I believe this was my problem, the larvae crawled inside the torch “heads” for a snack and the heads had nothing to hold them in/together. The only torch I found them on were the “NY Knicks” strain though and feel that’s kind of odd. The other corals, including similar Indo gold, hellfire, holy moly, and 21 tails all looked highly agitated but after a quick dip, flatworm exit (just in case), and a 20% water change the others have perked up.

 

[lpsouth1978]

Have you always kept your alk on the low side?
Were these the same parameters you kept in the old tank? Any think else changed? Lighting, dosing, etc. Could anything have gotten in the tank? Sprays or chemicals. Do your fish look good? Assuming you have fish. Your parameters look good to me. Alk is a little low for my taste, but if that’s were you usually keep it, I’m not sure that would be a problem. Last time I had issues with my torches receding, it was because my nutrients had bottomed out. 0 Po4 and No3.
But that doesn’t seem to be your case. That sucks about the torch.

I had Alk up at 9.5 in the 75g. I started the 230.6 at 9.5, but it has consumed more than I expected. I finally have my doser dialed in to maintain consumption, but haven't finished raising it. I will continue to raise the Alk manually over the next week or so.

I actually may have a bit of dino's in my tank, which has me a bit confused since my P04 and N03 are not too low. I have had some brown algae in the tank the last week or so. It is definitely not cyano or diatoms and is kind of stringy. It is plugging my filter sock and filter floss VERY fast. I am thinking I may try raising the temp a few degrees to see if it helps. I recently read an article from Jake Adams stating that higher temps may aid in eliminating dinos.

I will check params again tomorrow using 2 different methods for P04 (Hanna and Salifert) to verify results. If I do indeed have dinos, i may need to up my feeding, and start daily testing for a while. I will try to get some pics tomorrow so you all can verify if I have dinos.

Any of the corals still on frag plugs? If so check the bottom. I had the same issue today, lunch everything looked happy and healthy..... came in this evening and all my NY Knicks torches looked like they’d been tore apart from the skeleton and the other euphyllia were noticeably upset. Lost a 4 header, two header, and two single head frags that all have been fine for a month since fragging. On the frags with a plug there were egg sacks and some of them were empty. Looked like the pic on both of the torches with a frag plug. You can see some look clear and some have a brown appearance. I’m guessing the clear are remains of where the larvae hatched and the brown were still developing. I believe this was my problem, the larvae crawled inside the torch “heads” for a snack and the heads had nothing to hold them in/together. The only torch I found them on were the “NY Knicks” strain though and feel that’s kind of odd. The other corals, including similar Indo gold, hellfire, holy moly, and 21 tails all looked highly agitated but after a quick dip, flatworm exit (just in case), and a 20% water change the others have perked up.

Some of the corals are on plugs, others are not, but I have not found any evidence of any pests.

 

[lpsouth1978]

Here are some pics. You can see the flesh of the frog spawn coming off and the acan is closed up and rather angry. Hopefully the other 2 pics are good enough to determine whether it is dinos or not. Please let me know what you think.

 

[lpsouth1978]

Alright, things are still not improving. I went ahead and ran a full round of tests. Still nothing that sticks out. I did a 30g water change Friday and have another 30g ready to do another tonight. Any help is appreciated!

SG = 1.026
Temp = 79.5
PH = 7.92
Alk = 7.0
Ca = 420
Mag = 1460
P04 = 0.09
N03 = 20