Cali Kid Corals

plate coral loosing tissue

SoulFish

SoulFish

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Had a encrusting coral that was doing fine, then started to develop whitining on the tops and loosing small amounts of tissue fairly evenly across the piece. Then today I noticed a plate coral starting to do the same thing. my of the SPS & LPS seem ok. I just did a 5 gallon water change as a preventative. Do you guys think this is RTL or something in the water is stressing them?
 
RTN (rapid tissue necropsy) is what your searching for. IMO sounds like low ALK>
 
It could be... I keep dosing and dosing and dosing ALK. It's around 7.0-7.5 now but still has daily swings to 6.5. I'm at a loss that to do on that other than keep dumping "Eight.Four" in??? I tested my bank salt container.. it reads 8.0. Can anything in the tank be dropping the Alk or using it up?
 
What's your MG level? You may want to look at all three, CA, ALK & MG.
 
Depends on your system volume.

Take the alk up to 10-11 dkh.

Ca to 375-425 ppm.

You can bring your Mg up to 1350 ppm if you like.

Swings to 6.5 dkh are too low.
 
been adding alk daily to keep it higher than 7.5kh. And since then the plate coral is doing great again, all the light colored tissue that was starting to come off has stopped and is starting to go back to a normal color. I did have a random birdsnest branch die in one day so I cut the piece back beyond the effected tissue and fingers crossed that seemed to stop it from spreading. I took the pieces that I cut and made a frag and put them in a different tank and seems like that effected area would have just kept spreading, but the main thing was to save that colony and get that dying tissue of of the main tank.

So fingers crossed everything seems ok now.
 
Great news :D

Yah on the birdnest, it'll do that with low alk. The fastest growing stuff often shows low alk effects first.

A very general tip for alk is that high alk causes tip damage, and low alk causes base damage. I've seen pocillopora and stylophora go very quickly though. A whole branch, like you said.
 
When you say base damage what does that mean. I run my system at 9 but it drops a point+ on my week long trips and I see about 1/8" (what I think is) recession on a base or two that pretty quickly skins back over once I get home. Am i running too low to start with?
 
Sounds like it Dave. You may want to look into getting some dosing pumps or a CA Reactor.
 
Since stuff is growing I need to adjust my recipe I reckon. I've been guilty of having the lady refill the kalk 5 gallon with just di to keep it simple when I'm on the road but I could definitely do better. So alk drops a touch there at the end. I have the parts to build the solution and take care of the problem ain't nothing to it but to do it they say.
 
My turbinaria started something similar a couple months ago. My nitrates tested around 20ppm and alk test was a little yellowish after 7 drops (API).

I made sure there was medium flow around it and did a 20% water change. I just left it alone but got religious about water change. I dosed with reef builder from sea chem too to try and raise alkalinity.
 
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