Yellow sps completely faded.

[markalot]

@phixman well i do have a mixed tank. I only have a few sps lol. its just theyre not doing well thats all. everything else is doing fine though. and its weird because i saw a video of a guy doing a par test on some hydras and his hit around 450-500 at 9.5" above water level. so i dont know ):

That's out of water though. Spectrum might be the issue. It's not unusual at all for acros to not do well when other corals are doing well. Acros are extremely picky and can't tolerate what other corals don't even notice. In addition the color of the acro might be different base don the spectrum of lighting. Many of us add a couple of T5's to bring out better color, others use numerous LED fixtures and are able to dial in what the acros need. You'll find a lot of threads here about stability, water quality, nutrients, and lighting for best acro color. It's fun if you really want to grow them and are up for some frustration.

 

[Shooter6]

@Shooter6 okay i dont care what colour it is. The point is is that its stressed out now and it has lost its other colour and its not as vibrant as when i first got it.

Have you considered dipping it. Possibly an iodine dip if nothing else.

 

[Charlie’s Frags]

@Chaswood79 sadly no i dont have a par meter :/ which is why i wanted to know how to read the par graphs that ai has given to give a rough idea. I had my lights at about 20cm above water line.. is that probabaly why it lost color?

But anyway i just changed my lighting scheduele to the ab+ from BRS video. Hopefully that fixes things..

Hold up a sec.
I’d like to know more details about your system. How many gallons, what’s the footprint, how many hydra 26’s do you have, alk, cal, mag? Do you carbon dose, do you use gfo? What all are you dosing? What settings are your hydras at now?
These are all important parameters to know. If the corals are already stressed, which it looks like they are, and you just switch to an entirely different spectrum, you’ll be committing coralicide.

 

[Charlie’s Frags]

Hold up a sec.
I’d like to know more details about your system. How many gallons, what’s the footprint, how many hydra 26’s do you have, alk, cal, mag? Do you carbon dose, do you use gfo? What all are you dosing? What settings are your hydras at now?
These are all important parameters to know. If the corals are already stressed, which it looks like they are, and you just switch to an entirely different spectrum, you’ll be committing coralicide.

I forgot the most important question
How old is your system?

 

[Shooter6]

That is where i believe part of the problem may lay.
My current 270gal total volume
Is only just hitting 8months old with mostly sps and lps. I managed this in part because ive been in the hobby since 1988. Without that i believe id have failed to maintain sps and lps in a system this young. Mine was started with dry rock and sand and only ghost fed to cycle it.

 

[Charlie’s Frags]

That is where i believe part of the problem may lay.
My current 270gal total volume
Is only just hitting 8months old with mostly sps and lps. I managed this in part because ive been in the hobby since 1988. Without that i believe id have failed to maintain sps and lps in a system this young. Mine was started with dry rock and sand and only ghost fed to cycle it.

I’m confused. I thought I was asking Angela223 with shortcake acro issues. What’s wrong with your system shooter?

 

[Shooter6]

I’m confused. I thought I was asking Angela223 with shortcake acro issues. What’s wrong with your system shooter?

Nothing wrong with mine, other than stocking it $$$$ and witing for the full grow out from frags. I was seconding your questionbon age of her tank and giving my experience as an example to show why her system may not be prepared for sps.

 

[Shooter6]

mine.

 

[Charlie’s Frags]

Go

Nothing wrong with mine, other than stocking it $$$$ and witing for the full grow out from frags. I was seconding your questionbon age of her tank and giving my experience as an example to show why her system may not be prepared for sps.

Gotcha
Nice tank. Makes me wish I had a bigger house so I could have a bigger tank. I’d probably have to get a didferent wife though. Oh well. Maybe one day. What led panel is that?

 

[Shooter6]

Plans to go up to a 500+gallon display sometime in 2019. My wife was not the happiest camper about the expense of this one ( a used tank that i reaced the front panel myself) as she saw it as an expense. Then i got a colorado sunburst nem and had 20 people try to buy it off me in the first day. Sold some cheap frags, and she realized that its more of a potential investment that is also turning into living art. She started pricing the bigfer tank before i did lol

 

[Graffiti Spot]

Have you considered dipping it. Possibly an iodine dip if nothing else.

Iodine dips for acropora are not a good thing if your trying to clean a coral. A few drops in a dip bucket can be useful after fragging or if treating an infection in an acropora though.

Angella, what exactly is it that is making you think something is wrong with the coral besides the yellow color loss? The picture didn't look that bad to me. A picture from the top down would help us if you think its suffering from something.

 

[Charlie’s Frags]

These look normal to you pedoconfuego??

 

[Shooter6]

Iodine dips for acropora are not a good thing if your trying to clean a coral. A few drops in a dip bucket can be useful after fragging or if treating an infection in an acropora though.

Angella, what exactly is it that is making you think something is wrong with the coral besides the yellow color loss? The picture didn't look that bad to me. A picture from the top down would help us if you think its suffering from something.

That is not her pic that is one of mine. I recommended an iodine dip as a tratment, i know ot is like a vitamin dip for corals, reviving them sometimes, and helps them to recover. That was why i made the suggestion. Ive dipped a few corals that looked the worse for wear in providone iodine and they recovered to a very healthy coral within a week.

 

[Shooter6]

Here is a better pic of that same frag

 

[phixman]

Probably towards the center , my frag rack is on the glass

 

[angela223]

okay guys so i know for sure that there is something wrong with all my acroporas. Because when i first got all of them they all looked STUNNING. I get them from a store out of state so i get them freighted to my house. Now this store is verrrryyyy popular. Everyone in our country(australia) knows that this place is one of the best fish stores around. They post photos online on their facebook page and the photos are not photoshopped, they are very representative of the corals and i know this because i bought pretty much all my corals from there as well and thousands of people who buy from there have also no complaints about the photos. So these are the photos of the acros i bought.

When i first got them i was actually in the middle of aquascaping and i sorta just chucked them on the floor for a few days and so i think they were super stressed from not getting enough light etc. They were all super brown/white. As you can see from the photos i screenshotted from a video since i dont have any photos of what they looked like when they were brown. They stayed like that for about a month. At this time i didn't get the strawberry shortcake yet, it was just these 4 corals.

 

[angela223]

After a month i actually finally started seeing some of their color coming back. As you can see this acro i posted in this reply is the exact same one as the one in the previous reply (the one behind my blue tang). It got back all of its green again. I noticed only the greens have come back though. So i know for sure that something is stopping the other colors from coming back.

If you also compare my top left acropora from my previous photos, it was all brown before but now its green.

 

[angela223]

i managed to find a photo of my strawberry shortcake of when i first got it (which i got a few weeks after my first 4 acros). But look at how it looks like now..

As you can see it lost all of the yellow color and the pink is all dull.

My tank is fairly new and i know that its too young to have sps but i only found that out after i got my sps. It's probably only a few months old, less than 6 months lol. I have a 38 gallon and yes i know it's too small for a blue tang but this blue tang is literally like 2-3cm, its freakin tiny and i have a bigger tank for it when it grows up.

Salinity: 1.025
ph: 8.2-8.4
Calcium: 450
Mg: 1375
Nitrate: 2
phos: 0.04-0.08
1 hydra26 HD at around 20cm above surface of water
my tank height is 47cm

I have been using nopox and it does keep my phosphate down, it goes down to 0.02 when i use it but i have stopped since im not sure if phosphate is even the problem for my acros losing color. So i'll hold off using it for now.
The other corals i have are: 1 leather, 3 elegances, 9-10 hammer corals, 4 torches, 3 brain corals, 2 duncan corals, 8 gonis/alveoporas, 2-3 mushroom corals, 1 cup coral, 2 montiporas (1 encrusting and 1 scrolling), 1 carpet anemone.

I KNOW i have heaps of corals. Pls dont tell me to get rid of them cos i wont. i just want to know what i can do for my acroporas. All my other corals are doing perfectly fine. theyre all happy and open and very vibrant in color.

Here is a picture of my tank. the corals are everywhere now because my carpet nem keeps moving so im moving everything aside until it finds the right spot and settles. as you can see all my other corals are super happy, my elegances look beautiful. Some corals in that photo are closed cos i moved it, like my green folded trachy on the right

 

[angela223]

@markalot also, he did the test inside water. ill send you the link of the hydra26 HD PAR test.
@Chaswood79 @Pedoconfuego tagging you guys here cos i forgot to tag you in my previous replies

 

[markalot]

Stopping the NOPOX is good, keeping everything stable is good, and since it's a new tank I would feed some coral food every now and then. The best success I've ever seen in a new tank with acros was from a woman in NY who would feed so heavily the tank was a cloud of food. This kept the acros healthy. It can be done, it's just a lot of work and you have to stay on top of your parameters. Also check polyp extension at night with a flashlight. If it's good then odds are they are healthy enough, just not happy.

I don't think anyone can say for sure why acros hate new tanks. My theory, and it's just that, a theory, is that older tanks have a lot more food/detritus in the water column which helps acros stay healthy, that and a lot of what we don't measure is more stable in an older tank. IMO the trick at this stage is to keep what we do measure as stable as possible. Keep some amount of food in the water, as much as possible without wrecking parameters, and hope for the best.

I want to add, PO4 changes can hurt acros as well, be very careful dropping PO4 too fast. If feeding raises PO4 you might still use a little NOPOX but I would not react unless PO4 gets above .1 or so. There's a lot of great tanks with higher PO4 and you can worry more about it once the tank is older.