mushrooms shrinking please help!

[hobbes]

I can not figure out what I am doing wrong. My mushroom coral keeps shrinking and eventual it is gone. I have two different types of mushroom coral in my tank. The first type (I can not remember the name of it. It is brown and kinda fuzzy) started shrinking and eventually disappearing about 3 months ago. I hardly have anymore of them in my tank anymore. The second type are my striped mushrooms. They had been doing great for a good while. They were spreading all over the place. But now they too are starting to shrink.
I have checked my water and everything seems fine.
55 gallon tank:
260 watts pc lighting
5 gallon water changes (RO water) every week with oceanic salt
temp.-79 degrees
salinity- 1.022-23
No ammonia, nitrites, just a trace of nitrates
additives: coral-vite, iodine, and calcium(1 capful a wk of each)
I also have other coral in my tank that seem fine. (Frogspawn, polyps and colt coral)
Please help me before all my mushrooms disappear

 

[sprang]

do you have any fish that could be picking at them?

 

[unleashed]

you def need to lower your nitrates if they are on the high side .try lowering your temp I have been told by my fish guy ( he is accually a marine biolagist) that corals and mushrooms do better and prefer cooler temps set at 76F i dont know if that 2 degrees will make that big of an impact.as far as suppliments you are adding you stated 1 capful of each weekly.i dont know if its the brand your using but mine states 1 drop per 25 gal kent logal's is what i use.maybe your using more supliments than they can handle.I dont know for sure just ideas. one more thing what about trace eliments you didnt list those.hairy mushrooms live on iodine and trace eliments.im not sure if all striped mushrooms are the same but this is what i founmd for suppliments for the blue striped mushrooms:Calcium, Iodine, Trace Elements, Strontium .looks to me you maybe have too much of one and not any or the others they need.hope this helps

 

[hobbes]

I will lower my temp. over the next couple of days. I hope that helps. I have stopped putting in the additives in hopes that might help.
Thanks for the help

 

[sweetreef]

well imo doing small little five gallon water changes ever week dont do much try doing a ten gallon every two weeks as far as nitrates they are ok even at 10 ppm you pretty much have small traces of nitrates in your tank...In my tank i do one big water change every month about 30% of my water i change once a month and it work great for me... the more water you remove the more bad you take out...thats just my 2 cents..

 

[hobbes]

My nitrates have been really low. Just a very small trace. I dont think my nitrates are the problem. I thought maybe I was testing wrong at one point so I checked with the lfs and they got the same reading.

 

[locopride]

I'm having the same problem, one day i looked at my shrooms and saw that my big one was shrivling up, so i was thinking and measuring and i couldn't find anything wrong. So i started going through my additives and saw my buffer for dKH. So i added some and the next day he was back to normal. So i made sure i was doing that when needed. Now it is happening again. They are shrivling up. But the funny thing is that my other mushrooms are not, just that group. So to make sure my dKH was where it was suppose to be i order a test kit. I might have to agree with sweetreef, i have a 30 gallon cube and i change 5 gallons once a week and i think that might be too much. So this week i'm going to go 2 weeks without a water change and see if that helps. But now that i have a test kit i can monitor any changes. Thats just a thought.

 

[hobbes]

I too am thinking that maybe I should not do the water changes as often.

 

[sweetreef]

thats what i would do try just doing ten gallons every two weeks and as are your tank goes on then just do a 20 gallon once a month..I have done that for five years are more with a few of my set ups!!