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View Full Version : Fungia problem. Semi-long read.


Ghstwolf
01/20/2013, 11:09 PM
Woke up this morning and my 4 in diameter purple fungia was 1/2 dead, skeleton fully exposed and no tissue left on about half the body. This was my first piece of coral and has been in my tank 2 months now, it was in an open spot on the sand bed, had been growing fine until today. Nothing has fallen on it and no other corals are closer than 6 inches to it.

The other corals in my tank don't seem to show any signs of tissue damage, loss in color or any visual signs on distress. None of my fish are missing, so no death in the tank, my pistol shrimp and cleaner shrimp are both accounted for. Of course I cannot count my clean up crew.. Most of my snails appear to be present (I have Nassarius snails as well but they are harder to account for) and my 10 hermit crabs are alive..

I did notice a red area on the sand bed next to the fungia, thought it might be cyano, but that usually doesn't eat coral (least I havn't heard of it being this harmfull this fast).

Pulled all of my sandbed corals out of the tank to stir up the sandbed some, everything came up fine but the fungia smelled like pure ROT!!

Water para's are below...
Ph 8.2
Sg 1.025
Nh4 0
No2 0
No3 2ppm (fluxes between 1 and 4ppm, has never read higher than 4ppm)
Po4 .08ppm (has been steady at this for 2 mths even with GFO running)
Temp 77
Mg 1440
DKH 8.4
Ca 450

I did a 5g water change just to be on the safe side. Skimmer isn't pulling out anything excessive. Pulling out medium/dark green liquid and some decent chunks.

Would REALLY like to save this coral as it was the first one I got in this tank and it was going so good.. Any advise or idea of something I overlooked when trying to troubleshoot would be very helpfull.

Thank you...

82ndengineer
01/23/2013, 10:49 PM
If it does die DO NOT remove it. Leave it as they have a tendency to start spawning out baby fungias after a while.

Ghstwolf
01/24/2013, 12:00 AM
It pretty much officially died.. My hermit crabs picked the last bits of flesh off it yesterday.

Still not 100% sure what happened.. Had a reef friend of mine stop by with his test kits and re-ran all the tests I had done plus about 5 more that he runs on his sps tank. Nothing was out of whack but my tank spelled like pure ROT! My skimmer was going crazy, like having the dump the collection cup 4 times a day crazy.

Ended up killing the tank lights for the past 3 days, did a 25G water change, changed out my less than 3 day old filter socks, changed out my 3 day old GFO and carbon and changed the foam pads. Changed the foam block in the bubble trap part of my proflex sump just because I had an extra one.

The tank still has a strong smell to it, but it doesn't smell like 3 day old skunk anymore.