Possible to keep a truly mixed reef?

[legrunt]

So I have 2 colonies of Zoas, 2 Hammers, 1 Duncan, 1 Montipora and 1 Poccilopora. And 2 BTAs.

At the start, the zoas were doing ok. Then as time went by, I started to monitor my parameters more stringently and decided to take control of my nutrients. After a battle with GHA and Bryopsis, I am now maintaining my tank at 0.1 Phosphates and 1 Nitrates. This, together with an alk of 10 has seen my stony corals really do well, but one of my zoa colonies have over the course of a week, seem more and more closed up. At the start, they would all open in the day, and all close at night. Then it was 1 or 2 heads that would not open in the day, and then 4, 5 and so on, till now, they are mostly closed.

I have heard that zoas prefer more nutrient rich waters, but if I let it go and raise the nutrients again, wouldn't my stonies do less well?


This pic is from when they were doing well.

Here they are today.

Any advice how to keep the softies happy together with the stonies?

 

[Tamberav]

I have a mixed reef with 0.06 PO4 and 1 Nitrate so I can't imagine your numbers would be too low for softies.

It looks like they might be stretching for light in the first pic?

 

[legrunt]

So... More light?
In this case, should I increase blues or whites?

 

[pdxmonkeyboy]

Seems to me that with that little nitrogen you could be asking for trouble. Most sps tanks are running N around 10, phos .1

 

[Tamberav]

So... More light?
In this case, should I increase blues or whites?

What light is it? Blues but I would be careful. with any change if other corals are happy and go slow.

When I pick up sickly zoas I dip them in tank water with a drop of two of lugals iodine for 5-10 min then wash in more tank water before returning. Really seems to help struggling zoas.

 

[legrunt]

Thanks. I'll up the blues slowly.

Whats the reason for the dipping though. I have not introduced anything to the tank for over 2 months, so not sure if there are any pests that would be affected by the dip.

Also, the frag is glued down and hard to remove...

 

[Dilan Patel]

i run a mixed reef with 5ppm of nitrate and .1ppm of po4

 

[legrunt]

I'll stop dosing nopox for a week to see what happens with my nitrates.
I have PO4 xport cubes in my filter, so that should continue to take care of phosphates. If they start to get overwhelmed, I could dose phosbuster...

 

[legrunt]

Right, so i found out today that my hanna salinity checker was slightly off and after calibration, found my tank water at 1.028.
Would this have anything to do with my zoas closing up?

I've taken out a few cups of water and let the ato kick in a few times. It's down to 1.027 now. I'll continue tomorrow till it's 1.026.