Elegance.....Not so elegant.... :(

[reeferchief]

Well my fiance decided to purchase a beautiful elegance about 3-4 weeks ago and it's been doing fine until 3 days ago. I noticed the end lowest in the sand and closest to the glass starting to get a white cover over it. Yesterday was a little more and today there was about 1/2" closed up.
I moved it thinking somethign was not making it happy. There are no stinging corals nearby, super low flow and moderate T5 lighting. I moved up closer to the light and it's looking a lot better and opened.
I decided to research today and classic rookie mistake, no research prior to buying and going off impulse. This elegance has a bright bright neon green like I've never seen and pink tips. After reading these are apparently one of the hardest corals to keep alive in a captive clean system. They prefer muddy mucky high nutrient water which is not nearly equal to the quality of most of our systems and the quality that most other corals need to thrive.
Is it going to continually and slowly close up? To me it only sounds like a matter of time. I wish I could bring it out to a reef near me and place it in the sand and hopefully it thrives but this is most likely wishful thinking...

 

[btldreef]

They usually don't survive :-/
You say it had a coating of white going over it. This could be brown jelly disease which can spread to other corals in the same group such as torch, Frogspawn and hammer corals.

 

[meowzer]

I always thought Brown jelly disease was...brown

Can you post a picture.....I am betting it is receding tissue, and you are starting to see skeleton

 

[reeferchief]

Yes it is receding tissue. I blew off all the dying matter and it's bare skeleton. The fish were eating the dead tissue, also..

 

[wartooth1]

Sorry to hear that... I have one of these same kinds of elegances and it was a tough cookie to make happy in the first couple of months. For some reason its just now starting to get happy (it opens up all day but its tentacles aren't as long as I know they should be). I think if you can get it to survive in your tank for a few months, it could adapt to your tank's chemistry.