Jestersix

These are frustrating times for me and my tank...

DurTBear

DurTBear

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Came back from spending a few days in Vancouver to find my small colony of Pink Jade totally dead, another unknown mini-colony acro dead and part of my ORA German dead. Also mysteriously had my Devils Armor palys die last week for no known reason. The strange thing is that another Devils Armor colony in my plumbed frag tank also perished. And for some reason I've lost a few of my ricordeas over the last week. They seem to slime over and have like a brown cloud over them before totally melting away. Been battling bryopsis and am debating raising my mag like people have suggested but maybe I should wait until things stabilize in my tank.
 
That sucks Durwin, sounds like you've had a bad stretch of luck lately with your corals. Hopefully you'll get everything straightened out soon, it can get depressing dealing with problems all of the time.
 
Wow, sorry to hear about the string of losses Durwin, hopefully things get corrected soon.
Is it possible allelopathy is the cause of coral losses?
 
Yeah...everything was moving along smoothly until about 2 months ago. Then it seems like it was one thing after another. Woke up this morning and I lost my Pink Lemonade and the ORA German is almost completely dead.

Ant, is alleopathy corals battling each other for space? I suppose that's always a possibility in my tank since it's gotten so heavily stocked. But the strange thing is that the ricordeas weren't really touching anything else. The same is true for the most recent sps losses.
 
Allelopathy is chemical warfare amongst the corals, which in a sense is a way for them to regulate and compete for space. With regards to your Ricordea spp., corals do not need to be touching in order for them to participate in allopathic warfare; our tanks are closed systems, and corals are able to detect the presence of one another through the water column -in the ocean these chemical are diluted much easier. Your skimmer pulls some of the chemicals out, but not all of them. Just like you, this came to my mind because you're tank is quite packed (but beautiful!) :) Do you run carbon Durwin?
 
I haven't been routinely running carbon but since things started dying, I had some left over carbon from my aquaclear power filter (that I use as a mini-refugium and for flow) that I started running at night. I also wonder if that anemone dying could have caused some of this...
 
IME rics hate heat, anything above 81-82 and you're flirting with a meltdown.

You could possibly be dealing with separate issues. Like Ant would I'd be running a ton of carbon and a little piece of Poly-Filter wouldn't hurt at all either. Also, you may want to try a different brand of salt, you may have a bad batch.
 
DurTBear said:
I also wonder if that anemone dying could have caused some of this...
Click to expand...

You had an anemone in your tank? What kind, and where was it? IIRC, I remember E. Borneman making mention of anemones possibly being able to launch there nematocysts into the water column (problematic in our aquaria due to the whole closed system thing), rather than having them only trigger upon touch.
 
Ant - Yeah, I got a small one from Robin but it was in the bottom of the frag tank where there is no coral. I bought a pair of baby black and white misbar clowns from him and got a small anemone for them as well. The anemone only lasted a couple days though. Don't know what happened to it. It was fine until I tried feeding it a piece of raw shrimp. The day after, it was deflated and then it started to melt away.

Bryan - Thanks man. I really need to figure out what is going on with my tank. Once I do that, I might take you up on that offer! The crappy thing is I was just getting ready to trim a few frags of the Pink Jade for DBTC and the upcoming swap.
 
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