Mushroom corals no longer opening?
 

Hello - I need some help with this because I'm stumped on what might be going on in my aquarium. I currently have a 35 gallon tank that only contains different varieties of discosoma mushroom corals.

Three days ago I did a water change like I normally do once every two weeks...same amount of water, same salt mix, same BRS rodi water supply.

After the water change, I looked everything over and noticed that one of my biggest mushrooms had whiteish/milky looking strands coming off of it...it was shriveling up and looking sickly. This has never happened before and I've had this particular mushroom for almost six months now. I figured maybe it was irritated and would snap out of it within a day or two.

The next day the mushroom would not fully open up and every time I would check on it throughout the day it would be in various stages of inflation. First it would look like it would be starting to open and the next time I would check it would be deflating...then the next time inflating, then deflating, etc...this went on all day.

Today the mushroom will not open up at all. It looks really bad and another mushroom (that was a baby of the big one) that was sitting right beside it has started to do the same exact thing. Closed up and looking sickly whereas the past three days it looked like normal. Any ideas on what might be going on? All of my other 20+ mushrooms are fully open and look healthy.

A couple side notes:

- This water change was the first one that I had done AFTER changing out my filter media in the BRS rodi unit. I did let the unit run for an hour as per the instructions and then filled up my mixing container after that.

- I recently replaced the heater in my mixing bucket with a new one and the new one didn't warm the water up as high as the old one when I did the water change. Could the 2 degrees difference in temperature have adversely affected the mushrooms?

What are your parameters?

Also, it sounds like the mushroom might be melting, do you have images? Typically when one mushroom begins to melt it can affect nearby mushrooms to do the same.

This morning I found both of the affected mushrooms had popped off and were floating around the bottom of the tank. They weren't melting (I've seen that many a time with anemones and other corals) but I went ahead and threw them away before they ended up in one of the power heads.

After that, I did a large water change...we'll see how things go from here.

A loose mushroom can be rubberbanded to a rock and saved. Check your full list of water parameters. Alkalinity might be off. A list is at the top of the forum under 'cycling isn't the end of it.'

I ended up doing a massive water change and now everything is looking good again. My mushrooms are all fully open and bigger than I've ever seen them. I think what happened with the two that I tossed were them being exposed to air since they were out of the water as I was changing the water that day...so I moved all of my remaining mushrooms lower in the tank so hopefully this won't happen again.