Purple Stylo Turning White... Suggestions? *PIC*

[tdileo]

Bingo! I called it as soon as I saw the bite marks on the stylo. Thought it was your shrimps, but had no idea you had an emerald crab in there. They will definitely kill certain corals and Tridacna clams. I had a large emerald destroy a black and white zebra maxima and a large squamosa over the span of 3 days before I could capture it out of the tank. Needless to say I never add emerald crabs to coral tanks any longer. There are too many better invertebrate herbivores to control algae to risk an emerald IMO.

That’s very interesting, are you sure it was an emerald crab? Mine didn’t try and eat anything except algae and fallen food. Didn’t munch a single polyp that I noticed and I pay very close attention to my tank. So sorry to hear about the clams especially though, beautiful creatures.

 

[rockskimmerflow]

That’s very interesting, are you sure it was an emerald crab? Mine didn’t try and eat anything except algae and fallen food. Didn’t munch a single polyp that I noticed and I pay very close attention to my tank. So sorry to hear about the clams especially though, beautiful creatures.

I have kept enough tanks to know sometimes you get lucky and you have a model citizen and sometimes you get the rotten apple of the bunch. I happened to get an emerald crab with a taste for clams and have personally seen them mowing down zoa carpets and snipping polyps off sps in other tanks. I physically witnessed the emerald crab ripping chunks out of my clams' mantles the day before he finished them off. And the clams were definitely not dying. They had strong growth margins and were putting on size incredibly faster under a pair of 250w metal halides. Adding that emerald crab was a huge mistake cause it killed both clams I'd had for over a year after only being in the tank for a week. And the emerald wasn't starving either as the tank was heavily fed with pellets, mysis, nori , etc. I am not at all surprised the stylo in the OP was getting nipped at by the crab.

Sounds like you got lucky with yours. I've had about 50/50 luck with them behaving when added to tanks. I don't add them at all anymore as a matter of best practice for avoiding risks of coral predation. It's for the same reason I don't add certain angelfish and butterflyfish to tanks any longer. Not worth the risk and hassle if you get the unlucky one that starts destroying things. It's much better for a reef's stability to not add it in the first place than to tear a tank apart to get a problem animal out.

 

[Doostur]

We run a BRS mini reactor with their high capacity GFO.

There it is, you are swinging PO4 in a newer clean tank, it will do it every time I'm afraid. Been there, done that too many times.

What do you mean swinging? Tank is 10 months old (still relatively new I know). Run GFO in order to keep phosphates under control. Checked again at .03. Ranges from .02 to .04. I thought it was pretty consistent. Is there something I'm missing? When we didn't run a reactor, and feeding frozen food more frequently, Phosphates would rise to .07/.08. Especially if we did reef roids mixed with aquavitro reef fuel.

I woke up at 3 am again, to find the emerald crab munching away and did a bit more damage. I removed and gave him to LFS. He has been ejected from the big brother house.

 

[markalot]

What do you mean swinging? Tank is 10 months old (still relatively new I know). Run GFO in order to keep phosphates under control. Checked again at .03. Ranges from .02 to .04. I thought it was pretty consistent. Is there something I'm missing? When we didn't run a reactor, and feeding frozen food more frequently, Phosphates would rise to .07/.08. Especially if we did reef roids mixed with aquavitro reef fuel.

I woke up at 3 am again, to find the emerald crab munching away and did a bit more damage. I removed and gave him to LFS. He has been ejected from the big brother house.

It will be interesting to see if the crab was the primary problem. You may find that while tissue loss slows it still continues, the crab was just speeding it up (or making it worse, preventing it from healing). Either way, good decision IMO.

PO4 swings can do as much damage as Alk swings, especially if you top out at .04 and then swing to near 0. High capacity GFO is some mean stuff and needs to be used in small quantities. Every param that swings can stress the corals, we measure just a few. Once a tank matures you will stop having a lot of these issues, probably due to the fact there are less unmeasured changes in the water stressing out the corals. When I was worried about PO4 I would react to a number, not the health of the tank, and do things to control it. I lost corals. Now I have a consistent method and I rarely test PO4 unless I see something wrong.

I remember commenting in a thread on another forum how KH swings can kill acros and a veteran reefer with a 5+ year old tank commented that they had Alk swings that didn't cause any damage and KH stability was overrated. I don't think they were lying, it's just that their tank was stable and corals were healthy so when Alk swung the corals could tolerate it.

I'm sure it's the same with PO4 in an older tank as well, it all depends on the overall health of the coral. There's always that last nail in the coffin and it's really hard to tell how healthy an SPS coral is, especially if color and polyp extension seems fine. In my opinion this is why you can get so much conflicting advice depending on the person giving it and their experience. I think it also explains why some seasoned reefers who have to start over end up having all kinds of issues doing it the same way they always have. I never had a problem using ________.

 

[Doostur]

Well it's been 5 days since the eviction of Mr emerald crab. Stylo is recovering nicely.

I do have another emerald crab who doesn't appear to bother anything... for now.

 

[markalot]

That is awesome. A good lesson for those of us, like me, who think these crabs get a bad rap.

 

[Doostur]

Update: Our Stylo has made nearly a full recovery and doing very well. We still have one emerald crab who has been behaving.

 

[Pescador]

1 possibly good solution in my experience:
Do nothing.

I had similar issues going on with 2 purple Stylo frags. Not knowing the cause & reading some of the threads on this, I was considering an iodine dip. But by the time I got a hold of some searched dip, it had stopped progressing.

So... I just left them alone. I didn't want to destroy the microbiome. They bleached in a ~1cm ring all the way around in a couple places, and then that tissue died, grew algae, and the rest of the coral was fine.

The dead spots gave me a really convenient place to frag them again. Now I have 5 instead of 2. 3 of them are growing into really nice colonies under moderately high light, and the 2 still on the plugs are surviving just fine in a low light, but not growing much.

No problem since. The best I can figure is that some stress left them vulnerable to bacterial infection, but allowing them to conquer it on their own strengthened their immunity.