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Need Coral Help possible Disease?


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Bear with me as I have been at a total loss and am curious if I am missing anything. I am just going to brain dump all my observations. I have a mixed reef. I wouldn't say its stuffed with corals everything has plenty of room to grow out but its diverse. Recently my corals have just started kind of dying... some of them. I have the full list of stuff below. Started with an acan. Got knocked off a rock onto the sand. No big deal lightly blew it off uprighted it and let it stay there. Within a day or two tissue almost entirely gone 10 heads. One of my hollywood stunner chalices started losing tissue from the bottom overnight. So i moved it to a lower light and flow area inside of a little plastic container suspecting something got hungry. Was wrong. Within 2 days its totally RTN it looks like. Rhodactis mushroom. Started looking awful. Real shriveled up. No problem moved it into lower flow (already was in low flow). Now day later its almost melted away. Was about 2 inches diameter. One of blasto frags is almost all skeleton to after being totally great 2 days ago. Everything else is happy as can be. The only change was that I changed my lighting on my LED's from 65% at full peak to 75% blues only for 4 hours though. The only known pest I have is acro eating flatworms(am fairly certain). No idea how they got through but they are only on a torch that is quite isolated and I get them as I can there are only a few and on nothing else. Last guess is brown jelly. I am just now noticing as a write this my rhodactis does appear to be turning into a brown mush as it melts. Havent noticed that anywhere else though on any of the other dead corals cant get a good picture of it though.

 

Params nothing has spiked

Nitrates 10ppm (have kept it steady here for a while)

Phosphates .05ppm (a little is bound up by GHA guessing its really closer to .10) only slowly been dropping this through more water changes from like .08.

Alk 9.5 Doesnt swing more than a tenth of a point or so it seems.

Ammonia - 0

Ca 420

Mg (going to be honest been a few weeks but was about 1300 then)

Lighting Orion Lt 120

was steady for months at

Ramps up over an hour to 10%w 50% blue

After 2 hours goes to 15%w 65% blue

After 4 to 15% w and 75% blue

Stays there for about 3 and a half hours then ramps down to zero in an hour and a half.

 

(Jbj 45) has been up for about 5 months. Most livestock came from previous 29g had been up for a year or so. Not heavily stocked. Feed about 5 or 6 times a week

Flame Hawkfish

Starry Blenny

Clown Pair

Ornate Leopard wrasse

Few scarlet reef hermits and halloween hermit

Strawberry crab

Fighting conch

Blue tuxedo Urchin

Red brittle starfish

 

Corals

Couple acros- doing well

Couple monti digis - doing well

Monti cap - growing like a weed

About a dozen zoa frags/colonies all but 1 are fine. That one fell victim to a sea urchin going for the coralline around it still alive but mad

Ricordeas lots - thriving

Scoly - great

Platygyra - great

Frogspawn - great

Duncans - great

Softies(at least i may never lose these)

Xenia - xenia things

Toadstool - great

Kenya tree - trying to make a forest

 

Sure I am missing some. Anyone whose made it this far I greatly appreciate the time. Not sure if anyone has ever experienced anything like this. Am curious on some other thoughts.

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Yes its RO/DI. As of writing this I am 99% sure it is brown jelly as I have watched it basically spread to two other corals before my eyes. Tomorrow I am going to remove all of the affected corals and go from there. Mods if you would like you can close this thread.

Matt, I'm going to leave the thread open. I'd appreciate it if you would follow up on your story later to tell us what you learned or how this turned out. If you're able to post pictures, even better. This may help somebody later on. Thanks!

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Sure thing didn't think about it from that angle let me add some more details,
RO/DI water.
Reef crystals salt.
Temp is at 78.
I drip some kalk in the top off but i dont have to use alot doesnt drop that fast. My alk never really swings more than like 9.5 to 9.8 over a few day span and that could be testing deviation using the Hanna.
I only add things from Wamas members or Divers Den on LA. I dont QT (yet) I know bad bad. But I also only dip if I feel the need to which is rare. So my next question is, is there a way to tell if its brown jelly or if its the corals natural defense both seem similar corals? I cant get any good picture all thats left of the few affected is some coral skeletons and a frag plug :/.

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Are you running carbon, just in case some chemical got into the tank? I had similar experience, but I think it was because my tank was too young. How far from the lights where those corals?

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You mentioned a poor reaction after changing light settings, that would be the first place I looked (though 10% usually isn't enough to cause a drastic reaction). Unrelated but you mentioned AEFW; do you have any acropora? If not, they're likely another species of flatworm (there are many and of those, many that cause no harm to corals). 

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Brown jelly normally affects lps and you can tell by taking the coral out of water and smelling it. If it's rancid and funky it's brown jelly. If it smells like healthy coral it's not.

 

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Also madweazl is right about the flatworms. Acro eating flatworms will only be found on acropora. Tell us a little more about the worms and maybe someone can help. Some worms can cover corals to the point where they will start to die, and the worms are sometimes hard to see unless you have experience with them before or have read about them.

 

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So I have an update. What I thought was brown jelly doesnt seem to be. It seems my guess as to brown jelly was what occurs when a mushroom melts away. I have never actually lost a coral so I didnt have anything to base on. There also wasnt really any strands or brown jelly coming off of any of the corals. The flesh just sort of melted away in the days after the light change. Nothing else has gotten worse after setting the lights back. I am a little leery to think that a 10% increase would have shocked them. Even though all that have been damaged are "low light". I am in the middle of a series of a couple large water changes of 20% every other day because whatever it is dilution could be a solution.

 

As far ad the acro flatworms thats my best guess. I do have acros but they arent on them. Only on my torch. They arent eating it but theh crawl around and it is mad. I am going to try to get a picture uploaded of the worms.

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This is the best I could get a few days ago. Looks sort of like the acro flatworms. Maybe something else. Knock on wood I havent had many problems until now so I only have google to go off of. They are a little more opaque/white than that picture. 0ee1d9e481a6ebfe278ca03be1594ada.jpg

 

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The thing is your picture is way too big to be an AEFW. They don't get much larger than 0.25 in, and are usually smaller.

 

There is such a thing as euphyllia-eating flatworms. There was a WAMAS thread a couple years ago with some good pictures of what they look like. I think that's what you've got on your euphyllia.

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Awesome thanks! I never even new that was a thing... I am not surprised there are a billion creatures in the ocean that have to eat something. Time to dip it I suppose.

 

 

As of today I have changed probably 50% of the water over a couple day span. Still nothing new is showing any new signs of anything negative. I plan to just do one final 15% today. I have one final what if because I am still skeptical that lighting change of 10% caused tissue necrosis even in some of the lowest of light corals.

 

All of them were on the sandbed. I stayed up late just to see if anything came out weird. Only thing I noticed was the conch crawling all over the skeleton of one. (Dipped and put back in hoping for a miracle). I have never heard of a conch "eating" a coral. Maybe its foot pierced them and some type of infection set in?

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I only add things from Wamas members or Divers Den on LA. I dont QT (yet) I know bad bad.

 

WAMAS is a great community, with people who are better-informed and have good intentions. Diver's Den and LiveAquaria are reputable online livestock dealers.

 

However, buying something from a WAMAS member or LA/DD does not mean you're getting critters that are pest free. I've inherited almost every pest, parasite, and pathogen known to the reef hobby through WAMAS members or LA/DD.

 

It's fine if you've decided that quarantining and dipping isn't for you. But don't deceive yourself into thinking that it's safe because you're buying from WAMAS members.

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I shouldve added I feel safer* because usually I get to see the tank it comes out of. I prefer to add things I can see before hand to reduce some risk since I dont QT currently. But you were spot on about them being euphyllia flatworms. I have never heard of or seen them before.

 

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As an update to this. Dipped the torch in CoralRX. All the flatworms I could see are off of it. Its rebounding surprisingly well. Nothing new is showing negative signs. My blasto that began to lose flesh appears to not have lost anymore in the past couple days. I am going to resist dipping it in the hopes it comes back. I am going to do another couple 15% water changes this week and hope for the best. Hopefully it was just the lighting and the corals shock response.

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Good to hear! Keep in mind that dips won't kill the flatworms' eggs. You'll need to follow up with additional dips to kill any hatchlings before they mature enough to lay eggs of their own.

 

I haven't seen information on how long it takes the eggs to hatch. If you find eggs, you could watch them carefully and see how long they take to hatch!

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