coral dying-calling all experts

[Thebetterhalf]

My husband has told me I dont have enough info to post here but Im going to try it before there is any more carnage in my tank. We have a 24 g Aquapod with the standard lighting that comes with it. We do change the bulbs... We are in the process of upgrading to a 150g cube. Anyway we have our current tank in the kitchen and it winter and pretty cold where we live. The tank sometimes fluctuates 1-3 degrees a day but is always in the 79 -80degree range. Lately we have had coral dying like crazy!!! Testing appears ok...no major other problems or issues with our fish snails etc.... We've had coral die before but this strange .... it starts to get more and more sparce and then eventually looks sick and dies? I know this is very lacking in technical info but any general idea what might be up??? We dont have a super great schedule for the lights but it has generally been the same as before and the coral usually did well..... Sorry for the ignorance and thanks for any help... I want some coral left for our new tank!!!! :thumbdown

[Zebodog]

When you say corals, what corals specifically?

[petemattersen]

Are your lights on a timer? Also, could you post your results from your water tests?

[TomDe]

Any possibility of contamination?

[reefrookie5150]

1 what kind of corals...

[ludnix]

Here's some information that would help us better diagnose your problem:

What corals are showing distress? Are any corals unaffected? Any other invertebrates or fish affected?

What are you parameters, we need actual numbers, and can you get a second opinion on the tests (Your LFS might test your water for you to double check your results)?

Did you make any changes around the time the issue happened? What was the last thing you did to the tank before things started showing signs of distress?

When was your last waterchange and was is your water source? (RO/DI, Natural Seawater, LFS?)

[drparker]

Kitchen is not the best place to keep a tank. Lots of things in the air.

Even though not in the kitchen If I spray Windex in the same room but nowhere near my tank I see a reaction in about 5 minutes.

[Thebetterhalf]

Ok well
1. The corals are soft corals we had a few different button types a daisy polyps and star polyps and a Xenia we also have these really cool looking green palm tree looking things pic below that dont pulse ( no idea what they are) The Xenia shriveled up the buttons are are also shrinking and losing a little color... and getting way sparcer. The daisy (my FAV sniff sniff) literally began to disappear it was big and bushy and then literally BARELY THERE. Like 1/100th of the original only little tiny pieces left. The only thing that is thriving (my husband calls it trailer trash) are the ugly coral below (not the green)

2.water source is RO we have a RO system here

3. Phosphate .0, , alk 107.4 , ca 420 salin 1.025 nitrate 0

4. we use live rock carbon pellets/GFO

5. We havent really added any new fish etc We added some snails and two emerald crabs a while back but all was fine until just recently. I actually made my husband take one of the emeralds out because I thought he was eating the daisy --kept finding him on it.... but the coral did worse when he left......

6. Our lights we are bad with we plan on a timer with our bigger tank. Like I said we have a stock aqua pod and run both (dual actinic and 10k/6.7 k ) for about 7 hours... Again the coral was doing pretty well before on this same lighting schedule



Today, 07:41 PM

[drparker]

Have you test your RO water's TDS? When was the last time you changed the filters?

[Thebetterhalf]

Lfs tested our RO about 6 months ago when we bought the system it's less than a year old (may) and and we have a small tank.

[Rich D]

well if your worms, snails and crabs are doing fine then its probably not copper.

normally if it were just your xenia receding then i would say the tank is too low on nutrients (xenia seems to like moderate phosphate and nitrate levels). Im not really sure what daisy corals are so I wouldnt be able to tell you if they like high nutrient tanks.

perhaps you have used too much GFO and stripped your water of nutrients?
what are you feeding and how often?

My tank is mostly SPS but there is a hammer coral and a plate coral on the bottom. When the tank was first set up I would feed a lot and almost every day. The LPS would do amazingly with quite a bit of feeding but when I introduced more SPS and lowered the amount of feeding they stopped growing as rapidly and dont extend polyps or inflate nearly as much as they used to.

I dont know if thats your problem though... just my two cents

[Guy(ReefSmart)]

there is also the possability of pests I had a problem similer to yours long ago finally one night I caught an 8" euchnid worm eating my finger leather.

[pitako8]

Your alkalinity is quite low at 107 ppm = 6 dkh. You need to bring this up to 125-142 ppm (7-8 dkh). You can achieve this by slowly adding baking soda if ph OK or baked baking soda (aka soda ash) if ph low.

Mix baking soda or soda ash in RO and drip in high flow area.

HTH