RBTA Recovery Question
 

I have a couple of questions about my RBTA.

The background on my RBTA is this: I bought it from an LFS. It had nice green tenticles with bright rose colored tips. I got it just after it had arrived at the LFS and it was clear after I brought it home it had a rough time in transit to the LFS. It spent the first four weeks in my reef tank deep in a cave completely shaded from anything and at an angle that made it impossible for me to feed it. Eventually, it settled in a position at the bottom of my rock stack where it could get some light and where I could feed it. However, it spent a lot of time ranging from partially inflated to completely deflated. Here is a picture where you can still see the green color somewhat, although at this point there was a lot of translucence:

http://i1079.photobucket.com/albums/...vietor/006.jpg


Shortly after the photo above, all the color disappeared and I thought the neme was going to die. However, I fed it a couple of brine shrimp or mysis shrimp daily so it was getting some nutrition given the absence of any zooanthellae.

I now have the rose color on the tips back and, generally speaking, things appear to be headed the right direction. The neme is smaller than when I got it and still spends some time only partially inflated. I attribute that more to my maroon clowns than any water quality issues (although I have wondered at times if vodka dosing is not helping) Phosphates are immeasurable (I have a Hanna checker arriving this week so I can get a more accurate reading), nitrates range from immeasurable to 1 ppm. dKH generally ranges from 8.0-9.5. Mg ranges from 1250 to 1500, Ca from 425-450. My acros and lps corals are all doing fine and exhibiting excellent growth and coloration.

My questions really are these:

1. How long should I expect it to take for full color to return (assuming somewhere there is a little bit of the original zooanthellae)?

2. Is vodka dosing potentially an issue here?

3. Any other water parameter I should be looking at? I'm not a ZERO nutrient SPS guy. I feed my tank (including my corals) well each week and let carbon dosing, and GFO help me remove excess nitrates and phosphate.

Thanks in advance.