Your opinion on why my corals struggle

[shermoen]

Good day friends, as the title states my corals are struggling and I have come up with a few thoughts as to why, but I would like you to chime in with your experiences please.
So my tank is 1 year old as of today!



It is an aio with a skimmer and some filter floss for filtration. It was started with maybe 25-30 lbs of dry Carib sea base rock and 2 20lb bags of live sand. I used turbo start I the beginning and added some pods a couple times.

Livestock consists of
1x tomini tang
1x sunrise dottyback
1x lubocks fairy wrasse
1x bicolor blenny
2x firefish just added a few days ago
1x conch
Handful of snails and hermits

Parameters are pretty consistent with phosphates being a concern at undetectable most of the time and nitrates normally at 20. No major fluctuations in alk either.


Interestingly my alk or calcium have not needed to be dosed once. I have started growing coraline and then all of a sudden it will stop and what's grown will start to turn white and dissappear. I have noticed also that sometime my alk will actually rise by itself about .5 and I have done nothing.

Anyway, I have added quite a few corals and have had only a few successes. Most anything that is sps will pretty much slowly wither away. A couple cases like this hollywood stunner seems to be hanging on but has paled out.

This montipora frag almost died but is still hanging on.

And this chalice is slowly receding like most.

I have a couple candycanes that seem to be doing well.

This green one at one point was popping heads for some reason but finally stopped.


This is not my first reef tank and I have successfully started and grown corals in tanks younger than this.

I have submitted an icp before and it came back clean. I do weekly 5 gallon water changes and also change out 1 gallon of water 5-3 times through out the week as well.

I have checked for stray voltage and that came up clear.

I got a par meter and verified that I'm not blasting corals with to much light. And running light cycle 8hrs full blast with 4 hour ramp up/down.

I used this rock on a previous build and it had the same problem, but I did start that tank with dry sand too.

Also I have pretty much no bio diversity when It comes to worms or stuff in the sand bed, so have recently tried adding some.

My thoughts a
1. The rock is maybe leaching something that is not being picked up in the icp I did.
2. There is a lack of biodiversity or biome.
3. Phosphates need raised.
4. Or I'm just being impatient and need to chill!

Please let me know what you think, and if you have had any similar experiences that could shed some light on this for me.

 

[fishguy242]

Hi, low Po4, low nitrates, cal at 420 would try to run alk closer to 9
corals are using phos and nitrates faster than available ,
poss back off water changes and monitor

 

[jay1985]

Hi there,

My thoughts keep coming back to the undetectable phos.... I'd start feeding reefroids every 3rd day, maybe start with half of recommended and monitor what it does to phos. I like to target with a pipette. Don't expect a feeding response from ailing corals but the raise in phos in the water column could help the corals rebound over coming weeks.

Only other thought would be how you are testing salinity.... make sure your device is calibrated properly and I think it's always a good idea to take a sample to a lfs or fellow hobbyist for a redundancy check. Many devices test faulty.

Good luck; I feel your pain!

 

[ectoaesthetics]

I would increase phosphates and biodiversity. I would also try to get the pH up. Do you have a skimmer on the tank? Might help with air exchange if you could run the line outside.

favorite way of increasing phosphates is either a ton of reef chili + phyto. Will also help boost your micro fauna.

As you described coralline starting then fading it sounds like either pH or phosphates is the issue. Whenever I’ve had coralline decline pH was nearly always the culprit. The only time it was not was when I got dinos.

 

[fodsod]

I agree with earlier posts on that your PH is a little low and you would probably see better results with Phosphates up around .03-.12 and maybe higher if you're going to raise the Alk into the 9+ ranges. I don't see anything else that seems way out of range. Good luck.

 

[Troylee]

Tank looks starved to me…

 

[Dburr1014]

Some good insight already;

Raise PO4, rock still up taking? How long used in "other" system?

20 no3 is good, not low as someone said.

Biodiversity is always good, wouldn't hurt to increase it.

Airline to outside will help ph.

Check your sg meter. How is it calibrated? I'm surprised at how many people calibrate it to rodi. This is not the way.

Alk at 8.7 is close enough to 9 as someone pointed out. I'm not sure why raise it closer. Lots of people run it at 7 or 8dkh with lots of sps.

One thing not addressed;
The fact that you said sometimes all raises by itself, you don't add any, and coralline dies off.
This tells me alk is not stable.
Coraline will grow and use up alk, alk drifts down, coraline stops growing and In fact dies off, alk raises cuz nothing is using it(assuming water changes here).

Possible?

 

[shermoen]

Really great thoughts so far!

For my ph I have a hard time getting it up above 8. I have in the past tried running airline outside to skimmer but it never really seemed to work. Ph does get up to 8.2 at the end of the day normally but most of the time it is under 8. My fix for ph was to start dosing kalk but cannot do so until alk and cal start getting consumed....

My last test I did calibrate my refractometer and it was dead.
And for salt mix I use two little fishies accurasea prematurely packs. Never had a single pack read higher or lower than what it always measures out to be. And I only make 5 gallons at a time, well actually it's about 4.5 gallons.

Also my rock was in the other system for just over a year and then was broken down. Rock sat around for about another year dry.