Zoas and Palys not opening but growing, help?

[Nicholas41]

I have set up a 40B that is going to be my growout/frag tank. I have about 20 different types of zoas and palys in it. Some polpys open, some dont. Sometimes only a few polyps on a frag will open up. The strange thing is that some of them are growing relatively fast. I had 6 frags of blue and red hornets that people didn't want to buy locally, and the have gone from two polyp frags to just about growing off of the plugs (7 polyps~). I am very worried about this as I have quite a bit of money put into this, and I'd hate for it to be a simple fix.

To name some- Red, blue and purple hornets, Blue agaves, space monsters, utter chaos, rastas, captain americas, VDMs, Darth mauls, golden mauls, Purple deaths and nuke greens, LA lakers, vivid rainbows, PZ dark phoenix, cinnamon grandis, green grandis, gobstoppers, and several un-named ones (In my opinion look better than some of the named ones!)

The interesting thing is that I have some Miami orchid and birdsnest, both of which seem fine. I did a furan 2 dip on the majority of the palys and zoas about 6 weeks ago. I also was hoping to pick some stuff up at Macna, so I'd like to get this figured out.

 

[Nicholas41]

Typically more polyps are opened up, I recently moved the frags to larger plugs as seen below







Palys when they were in my 90G

 

[duke4130]

Are you dosing anything and what are your parameters????

 

[Nicholas41]

I did a waterchange not too long ago, so I'm going to run the tests in a short bit. The only thing I add to the water column is Korallen-Zucht Zeovit Coral Vitalizer, which works wonders on my 90. Besides that I run carbon in a reactor and change it every 2 weeks~[h=1][/h]

 

[duke4130]

I was just running into a similar problem.... Some things looked great and other were bad. It turns out that the vitamin C and vitamin M I was using were causing issues in my system....I believe it had something to do with an overload of bacteria that my skimmer wasn't able to keep up with. Just did a couple of water changes and brought the alk, cal, mag up to spec and everything is doing great with out using any additives.

 

[Nicholas41]

PH is 8
Nitrate, Nitrites, and ammonia- 0ppm~
Phosphates- 0.04
and salinity 1.024

I honestly was nervous to check the parameters, but I expected them to be high. The Zoas loved my other tank and the Phosphates were ridiculously high around .84+.

I was trying to keep this setup as low maintenance as possible so it has no fish, but maybe adding a small damsel and pellet feeder would help?

I'm not too worried about the Calcium and Alk, plus I'd have to borrow my sisters testers for those parameters lol

 

[duke4130]

The Alk, Cal, Mag are the most important parameters in the reef aquarium for coral health and growth. If those are not in line with each other then it will have ill effects on the corals in the system.....

 

[Nicholas41]

I guess in the past I had only worried about those parameters for my SPS and LPS growth which is why I was brushing them to the side...

Just read through a thread on another site. Apparently low alk is a common reason for melting zoas... I'll go get the testers now. Thanks.

 

[Nicholas41]

What are recommended Magnesium, calcium, and Alk for Zoa growth and health? I can't seem to fine a thread outlining it.

 

[LOVETHISHOBBY]

I normally keep my Mag around 1250-1350 ppm, Calcium around 400-450 ppm, and Alk around 8-11 dKH.

 

[Nicholas41]

Thanks, My Calcium is 380ppm, and Alk is at 8.5dkh. Apparently we need a new magnesium test kit, and my sister finished hers up.

 

[Nicholas41]

No one has any ideas?...

 

[LOVETHISHOBBY]

If all your parameters test out well, you may have an unwanted pest irritating them. Try dipping them. I've used Coral Rx and it works great.