Is my coral dying?

[fireykat04]

I bought an Atlantic anemone at LFS for like $7 couldn't pass it up cuz I wanted an anemone. I came home from work and it had moved by my coral. It has moved on but since it was near (very near) my coral. Part of the coral is like sliming away. Is it dying? I have attached the pics so you can see what I mean. What can I do if anything? :help:

 

[fireykat04]

Here's another shot of the coral from a diiferent angle. AND the culprit that was touching it.

 

[speg]

It sure looks like that.. though what type of coral are we looking at here?

 

[fireykat04]

I was told it was a clove polyp. There are 3 different bunches of it on one rock. Will just the large one die off or all 3?

 

[it's_fishy]

your "culprit" looks a helluva lot like aptasia, which i've read is a "nuisance" anenome because it spreads rapidly and will kill corals. there are many different ways to try and kill them and you should search the posts on aptasia for more opinions than mine, but i'd highly recommend peppermint shrimp as a nice natural way to get rid of them thoroughly.
personally, i select LR that has aptasia on it because i like watching them try to spread and my peppermint shrimp cleaning them up. figure since they are natural predators it must be a nice snack for them. And it really is amazing to me at how fast the aptasia try to colonize.
but research, research, research.....great first step IMO was posting here.
hope your corals make thru

 

[slock]

There's no atapsia in any photo.

 

[trainfever]

Thats not Aipstasia, it's a condylactic anemone. Chances are that it just stung your coral and then moved on. If it had stayed by it for a lenghty period of time your coral may have died but I think it has just been stung. Only time will tell, have to wait and see.

 

[fireykat04]

Well the slime has spread to both little rocks now. I'd post a pic but the lights are off for the night. The big rock is totally white now, no signs of life and the two little ones are in the progress of being slimed. Will they grow back? Is it dead?
Should I just take it out or leave it in? I've never had coral before, just fish and anemones. So I'm clueless on what to do with it.

I'll post a pic tomorrow so you all can see what I mean and tell me whether it will come back or it's dead and will never return. I know dead is dead, I mean; do corals ever rejuvenate?
As for the anemone I was told it was an Atlantic. Matter fact he got sucked into the intake of the Fluval which is powerful and I thought he was going to die but, he popped back to life, torn tentecles and all. He looks like nothing ever happened to him!!!!

 

[fireykat04]

I'm not sure how long the anemone was by the coral. It could have been all day. I came home from work and found that he had moved there.
Lesson learned " Don't buy coral until the anemones have decided where they want to be!"

 

[fireykat04]

Here's the coral after the sliming. It did go to both the little ones.

 

[fmelindy]

that looked a lot like a brwon jelly infection to me...

 

[fmelindy]

sorry, "brown" jelly infection...

 

[fmelindy]

oh, sorry, to answer your question, unfortunately I would say it's dead and it certainly looks that way. I have rarely seen corals recover from a brown jelly infection that extensive.

 

[fmelindy]

sorry for som any posts. No way that was a clove polyp either. It looks suspiciously like a closed goniopora or alveopora. Definitely difficult to keep and prone to crashing in a massive brown jelly infection when they start to go. Just speaking from experience

 

[fireykat04]

Originally Posted by fmelindy
sorry for som any posts. No way that was a clove polyp either. It looks suspiciously like a closed goniopora or alveopora. Definitely difficult to keep and prone to crashing in a massive brown jelly infection when they start to go. Just speaking from experience

Thank you soooo much for clearing that up. It did look like brown jelly. I will definitely look up those two corals and see if they looked like it. It was a beautiful purple. What causes the brown jelly infection? I just thought my anemone stung it. Is that something that will spread in the tank? I only have some Xenia and little orange looking polyps. Will it harm any fish? I noticed my Tang picking at it :scared: Let me know if I need to do something to save the rest of the tank.. :notsure: I have started out very bad with this tank. I wish I had found this place BEFORE I bought all the stuff. All the reading I did hasn't seemed to help until I found SWF. Should I take the dead coral out?

 

[ophiura]

Originally Posted by fmelindy
sorry for som any posts. No way that was a clove polyp either. It looks suspiciously like a closed goniopora or alveopora. Definitely difficult to keep and prone to crashing in a massive brown jelly infection when they start to go. Just speaking from experience

I was thinking Alveopora as well but I'm not the best with that sort of thing...

 

[fmelindy]

Brown jelly infections theoretically can spread to other corals (it is a protozoan infection) but in general it only affects weak/stressed/injured corals.
It won't harm your fish, except in cases of bad water quality due to the deaths of several susceptible corals all at once.
I would have taken it out (and quarantined it) when I first saw the brown jelly if I were you but the way it is now it's probably too late to make any difference. If you don't mind having that big dead coral skeleton in your tank, it should be OK to leave it there at this point.
Brown jelly infections are opportunistic pathogens that generally will affect weak/stressed/injured corals - I guess it's conceivable that the anenome sting could have injured the coral and then the brown jelly just took over, but it's probably more likely that your goniopora/alveopora was already weak or injured (they have a reputation for that) or that it actually had a tissue tear.
Sometimes if you catch it early enough you can quarantine it, siphon off the affected tissue and/or dissect the tissue slightly ahead of the infection and sometimes they will recover. In the case of goniopora/alveopora, recovery is unlikely, though.

 

[fmelindy]

Oh, if you want a good introductory book that covers coral diseases and reef-keeping in general, I'd recommend "Aquarium Corals" by Eric Borneman and "The Conscientious Marine Aquarist" by Bob Fenner. I also found "Natural Reef Auqariums" by John Tullock to be a great resource. It goes over much of the same ground covered by "The Conscientious Marine Aquarist", though, so one or the other would probably be OK. I'd recommend that no one attempt to keep a reef without a lot of reading first and at least two of these books would be an excellent start.

 

[fireykat04]

You are a mind reader, that was going to be my next question. Do you know any good books.
Bang guy had this link posted in an informational thread http://whelk.aims.gov.au/coralsearch/coralsearch.php has lots of corals listed. It's a coral look up site but, you have to know what you're looking for. Thank you for the information, guess I'll take the dead coral out. No sense in keeping the dead rock. Any other thoughts you want to share about corals. I'm all ears or in this case all eyes.

 

[fmelindy]

When I bought "Aquarium Corals" by Borneman, I just could not put it down. I must have read that book at least 50 times by now. It still goes in the nightstand every night and to the LFS with me every time I go. Most LFS are notorious for mis-identifying their corals. This case is classic. Clove polyps are very easy to care for whereas goniopora/alveopora are nearly impossible for a normal user to care for. A very important mis-identification by your LFS. In this case the mis-identification is obvious - close polyps don't secrete a calcareous skeleton, the arise from a soft mat or "runners". If you had that book you never would have made that mistake - it's a great investment! Your money would have been saved and the coral may have gone to someone who actually had a decent chance of taking care of it (though I've yet to see/hear of one making it past 18 months in anybody's tank which makes it a poor all-around choice.). That is all true if that was actually goniopora/alveopora which, admittedly, it's now very difficult to tell, though the skeleton does look identical to it.