What are the reasons for a SPS to bleach and lose tissue

krazekajin

Active Member
Can I do anything to save a coral from RTN? I have heard of fragging the part that is good? Should I do that or is it gone. I could frag a piece about 1 1/2 in tal with over 10 1/4 branches?
 

volcom69

Member
Not really when it goes through rtn its going to go through it pretty fast hours maybe a day. If it has rtn than the whole frag has it, i at least never heard of one saved.
 

murph145

Active Member
work on your nitrates get them down to around 0-5....
sps are picky and need very stable and good water conditions any lil change can shock them
 

krazekajin

Active Member
I am not too sure.
I have a fluval 304, aquac remora protein skimmer with maxijet 1200, two powerheads (aquatic gardens 600), one HOB filter with live rock rubble in it.
 

kpk

Active Member
The Fluval and HOB with rubble could be the supplier of most of the Nitrates, speaking form experienc on the hob with rubble. It just collects alot of detritus and rots. The fluval I have just heard alot of stories of them being nitrate factories. If I where you I would either keep the fluval sparkling clean, and get a hob fuge instead of the hob filter. The hob fuge will allow you to grow chaeto, have sand, and rock for nitrate export. Also you may outta try some better flow with a couple maxi jet 1200 mods or some seio pumps unless you have the money for tunze? I think they are way overpriced, but that's my opinion...
 

krazekajin

Active Member
I am curious. Can I run a fluval empty just to have water movement?
ALso, I have a maxi 1200 that I have the kit to mod it. I am going to try and get it modded by early next week.
 

cmonikao

New Member
KrazeKajin said:
I am curious. Can I run a fluval empty just to have water movement?
Yes, I have a glass 150 with no overflows that I recently switched from fresh to salt, so I'm using the two Fluval 404's I had with pads only and some carbon bags. Several people told me to do this. And I was told that if I wanted I could use crushed live rock as media in them, but so far I only run them empty with pads and carbon. I also run 4 802 powerheads and a Ehiem empty as well. My water is grooving, maybe too much so.
 

krazekajin

Active Member
Originally Posted by Catawaba
Do you do freshwater dips on your corals before you place in your DT?

I did not do any freshwater dips.
How exactly do you do that and what does that mean? What would have that possibly prevented?
 

volcom69

Member
Depends what size is your tank and what gph do u have in it now u need alot of water movent for them or they will get RTN.
 

candycane

Active Member
Please. I have a frag tank that has 30 (that's thirty) GALLONS PER HOUR turn over and the tank is 75 gallons. Fact is that there is nothing you can do to prevent bleaching. It is going to happen sometimes, and sometimes it won't.
Awhile back I used to use freshwater dips to remove acrocrabs from acroporas when they thought they were bad. Yeah that about burns them to death even in under 30 seconds. Kraze, if you want to - send me your email and I will send you some frags for free, two of them only. We can work out the details of shipping. But I will dry ship them to try to avoid any problems like this.
 

volcom69

Member
Its not always how much as to where the flow is going if the flow is good at the top part of the coral but not as much or none on the base of the coral it will start to RTN on the bottom and work its way up. You will have good chances if u have the right amount of light and flow in ur tank.
 

candycane

Active Member
I have a tank with NO flow in the tank and I have never had anything bleach out of that one.
Like I said though Krazi, I have some acro frags that you can have for free if you want them, only two though. I am thinking the two I posted pics of earlier. The purple one with green polyps and the slimer, which is a staghorn. So let me know
 

krazekajin

Active Member
Originally Posted by candycane
Please. I have a frag tank that has 30 (that's thirty) GALLONS PER HOUR turn over and the tank is 75 gallons. Fact is that there is nothing you can do to prevent bleaching. It is going to happen sometimes, and sometimes it won't.
Awhile back I used to use freshwater dips to remove acrocrabs from acroporas when they thought they were bad. Yeah that about burns them to death even in under 30 seconds. Kraze, if you want to - send me your email and I will send you some frags for free, two of them only. We can work out the details of shipping. But I will dry ship them to try to avoid any problems like this.
Candycane, Thanks for helping me out so much in all of my posts. Email me at KrazeKajin@aol.com
I would be interested.
By the way, my digita is still looking good, so at least I am doing something right. I still will take all of the help I can get and advice too.
 

yosemite sam

Active Member
I would guess that impropper aclimation was probably a big reason the first two frags RTN'd over night. I've had new frags get knocked around by snails and they've always been fine. Unless you had terrible water conditions, which it doesn't appear that you do, frags don't often die that quickly. I'm not a big fan of the 'let 'em slime up' aclimation method. There are just too many variables for that to work well. Sps corals are not all the same, and will not all react the same with sudden changes. Different Acropora species, for example, while all relatively delicate, still have a wide range in tolerances. I think the drip method is still the safest way to aclimate new corals to our tanks.
How long were the other two frags in your tank before you noticed the tissue recession? Has it been a few days, or a longer period? If it's only been a few days, the tenius may now be finally succumbing to shock. If it's been a lot longer, there are a lot of possiblies for their decline in health. Are other corals near the frag? What sorts of softies do you have? Did you use anything like putty to attach them to the live rock?
 

sonnyg

Member
that conversation should be printed ( Im serious ) in its entirety. just by reading one gets an incredible insight as to what can go wrong with sps corals. although i havent had that issue in was very enlightening. thank you. oh yea and by the way candy cane if your looking to give away any other frags my email is adg426@aol.com. thanx
 

grumpygils

Active Member
Originally Posted by SonnyG
that conversation should be printed ( Im serious ) in its entirety. just by reading one gets an incredible insight as to what can go wrong with sps corals. although i havent had that issue in was very enlightening. thank you. oh yea and by the way candy cane if your looking to give away any other frags my email is adg426@aol.com. thanx

Helpful but not encouraging though! I am in the middle of a melt down on my green montis. Red monti seem ok. I attributed it to low alk and CA. DKH 7.5 and CA fell to 350. ALl fixed now but the damage is done. LFS is a strong believer in Oyster eggs for SPS. Any thoughts? Also, can you have too much flow? I am medium now but wouldn't want to push it?
Mc
 

krazekajin

Active Member
As to my other corals dieing. I bought these four corals on October 19. They were purchased in St. Louis. The LFS boxed them up very good in a styrofoam box and I drove them home to Toledo, OH. They were boxed for about 10 hours or so well with in range of shipping.
The first millepora RTNed in about less than a week. This was highly tossed about by my clownfish and dropped many times. The birdnest went next in about two and a half weeks. I believe now that these corals were abused by myself. My protein skimmer had died and I had to take most of my corals out in order to get to it. It hangs on the back so I had to rearrange my rock work in order to get it out. I put all my corals in containers with my tanks water and then fixed the skimmer, put all corals back and then added new water that had been mixed for about a day. Then my acropora tenus began to RTN.
After all of the people who have helped me with this issue, I am now 95% certain that my three corals succumbed due to three varibles.
1. I did not acclimate them properly. I believe that they were possibly in shock.
2. The abuse from clown and my handling them excerbated their demise due to thier being in shock.
3. The acropora tenus might not be getting enough flow. This could possibly been the final straw in this long saga.
Lessons learned.
Aclimate properly.
Handle with care
Make sure I have enough flow (I have powerheads ready to go into the tank tomorrow)
watch my water paremeters (I have bought multiple test kits just for that reason. The only one I don't have now is Mag.)
Thanks again to all who read. I hope these converstations might help another newbie to not have the same problems this SPS newbie had. God bless.
 
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