Did you dip the frag before you added it? perhaps this did some damage although it doesnt explain the rest of the corals. I doubt chloramine is the problem or else you would have sick fish too, although mabey you levels are still low. Try an ammonia test. Do you have a TDS reading from your RODI, mabey your membrane is shot? Try running a different salt and definately run Carbon 24/7. Another thing you should try is routing your skimmer air intake outside the house. It could be related to new/old house syndrome, cooking,do you smoke? almost anything but you did state it all started when you moved so most likely its either the air or the water at the new house.

Symptoms of the bad strain of vibrio would be Tissue Necrosis (Rapid or non-rapid). The presence of the bacteria alone doesn't mean all acros are going to get sick. Like in humans, not everyone that comes into contact with vibrio vulnificus will exhibit flesh eating disease and die.

http://www.epi.state.nc.us/epi/gcdc/vibfacts.html

"On very rare occasions, people may get sick when they come into contact with Vibrio vulnificus. People infected with V. vulnificus are often hospitalized, and some die."

In a small closed system like our tanks though, it is probably easier for vibrio to takeover a weaker coral. A coral can be weakened by poor water quality of the owner's tank or from being recently transported in a bag by plane or from poor water quality in the holding tank of the retailer. Once a coral is infected, you might have an outbreak and it might make it easier to infect the next weakest coral, and so on.

http://www.reefs.org/library/talklog...an_040697.html

"It has recently become apparent that most of the losses of Acropora and other small-polyped stony corals in captivity are due to bacterial diseases. "

"How do I know if my corals have a problem?
The brief answer is that they die. There are a number of ways that can happen, however.

• Rapid Tissue Necrosis
• Bacterial-Induced Tissue Necrosis

Both of these describe syndromes where acropora and other SPS corals rapidly (or not so rapidly) slough tissue from thier skeletons. "

"I've had it cultured, others have as well. I'm in the process of fulfilling Koch's postulate with the organism, and showing that it causes disease in corals by placing clean corals in contact with the organism.Vibrio vulnificus is a tough customer. It secretes powerful proteases into its environment. It can liquefy wounds in humans. In corals, it seems to break the bonds between cells and between the coral and the skeleton, which leads to sloughing of tissue. "


I wanted to suggest this earlier. I would agree with this idea. It wouldn't hurt.

Do you have an empty tank in the vicinity. It may be sending out some sort of curse.:wink: (Just trying to lighten your mood :mrgreen:)
I'm with the water issue. After some new carbon and phosban(how long since changed-sorry if I missed that somewhere) the frag idea sounds reasonable step. My last house I had a horrible time with all kinds of issues/losses. Now I'm have much better luck and on well water to boot.

I would love to see you take several gallons of your existing water, an SPS frag, and relocate it all to a quarantined test tank in someone else's home. At least that would rule out something in the air/walls/etc.

As I said offline Tony, every time I put my hand in the tank, I'd get heavy infections in any open wound. I spoke with my doctor who agreed it could be a strain of vibrio (not flesh eating disease :)) and that the broad spectrum antibiotic could help. Being the idiot I often am, I used all th emeds on my tank instead of me, and the tank did clear up after treatment. I also stopped getting infections from scratches on the rockwork. Vibrio?? Who knows, but the antibiotic did resolve whatever was sloughing my acros. No science here, just experience...:)

This is another look from the bacteria angle and is being applied to all corals, not just Acropora. I'm of the opinion that Acropora are more fragile than other SPS and are more easily infected by bacterial disease. I think the last sentence is interesting.

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2002-03/eb/index.php

"Several years ago, an article appeared that described the bacteria, Vibrio shiloi, as causing bleaching in the Mediterranean coral, Oculina patagonica (Kushmaro 1996). At the time, most people were of the opinion that the conditions of this were unusual. It seemed to occur in a single species in a non-coral reef area. Most researchers were relatively unconcerned. Julian Sprung spoke vocally about this event in a discussion on NOAA's coral-list, and it was similarly met with some skepticism that it could be much of an issue for corals, in general. To be sure, I was one of them. "

"However, one could have heard a pin drop during the elegant and outstanding presentation by Dr. Eugene Rosenberg of Tel Aviv University (Rosenberg 2002). This man single handedly threw the proverbial monkey wrench into the coral world that morning. In the years since the original articles have been published, Rosenberg's team has not only fulfilled Koch's postulates for this pathogen in a textbook-like fashion, but has proceeded to describe the etiology in an extremely impressive manner. "

Sam ,that might be a good answer in that thread from a week or so ago on the benefits of UV. I'm not sure it was brought up there.

This is funny.

You know, that actually makes sense. I have pretty bad excema on my hands, but in the past couple couple months I have found that my hands seem to be getting worse. My doctor prescribed me a cream that is actually for jock itch becuase he figured I have some kind of fungal infection. The cream does not seem to be helping that much and maybe it is becuase I have open cuts from the cracked skin and I keep infecting myself in the tank water...... hmm very interesting.

I've been fighting a problem like this for over a year now.....I had a tank full of sweet acros along with an anemone, cabbage leather, toadstool leather, some zoos, and a bunch of GSP.
One day I noticed that the cross piece on my trim up top had completely broken free and now the tank was bowing out alot. So I clamped the tank, all was ok.
I got the replacement part and set a side a day to drain the tank and replace the top trim.
At the same time I made the decission to change my lighting set up( I didnt like the cheap reflector I was using) and I also changed my salt from kent to tropic marin.
The work went fine, all was well. Then just a few days later I began to notice that the acros were beginning to lose tissue on the tips...I just assumed this was from air exposure for the hour it took to do the work. But as the days went on things got worse.....panic set in.
My fish were fine, softies were fine but the zoos started to suffer as well, then the anemone moved into a shaded area........what was going on?
I couldnt figure it out. Needless to say all the sps died...it sucked....so I left everything else in there for several months....all the fish looked good.
Then I tried another couple of frags of sps...they died in 3 days.
So I stripped down the tank, removed all the sand and sifted through it, someone had told me to check for a penny. Nothing was found......so I rebuilt the tank added some new sand and a few new rocks and let the tank cycle again.
Then I added some more sps....guess what? They were doing ok.....until 3 days ago......I removed some glass pieces I had on top of the tank for cleaning(about 30 minutes) and not even an hour later some of the sps were dumping tissue again....now I have several frags that are suffering. I attribute this to too much light....I'm probably wrong but what else do I have to blame?
I moved my lights way up and shortened the time the lights are on....we'll see what happens.

Um, not really. Maybe I just don't get the funny part.....

I think he was implying to the fact you used the medication on your fish tank instead of yourself. :biggrin:

The "I used all the meds on the tank" part.

reply
 

Such a selfless act.:wink:

Tony, what is your light power output and cycle on that tank anyway? I think there might be something to Canuckgod420's suggestion that there is too much light. The only reason I might think this is valid is because I say a local reefer's tank that blew my mind, and he was running his lights for only 8 hours a day. I always thought that a reef needed minimum 10-12 hours to thrive, but I thought I'd try reducing my photo period and see what happens. Bam, within a week my SPS gained more color. So I increased my photo period to 10 hours from 8 recently just to see what would happen, and my SPS lost color. Go figure!

Of course, I have 400 watts over my tank which might play a huge roll in my experience. Anyway, free advice is worth what you pay for it. Lots of good theories in this thread anyway.

Well now that is very interesting. I run my halides for 10 hours over my 75g and the tank this coral was put in is run 12 hours (because there is no dawn/dusk cycle). The light is a single 250W halide. That is a really interesting observation...

Ok :) I thought it was stupid, not funny, I could have been in trouble, medically speaking. Would I do it again? Oh yea! :) I'm seein' the funny part now....

I know this is not on topic but I can attest to the halide theory. I am down to 8 hours a day. Color is ok.

So Brad did you notice any sort of cycle after treating the tank? I curious what effect the antibiotic would have on the bacteria in the rock.

UV sounds like a good idea,it would clear up any free floating bacteria or viruses,maybe stop it from spreading.

No, can't say that I "noticed" one, but I never tested anything. Everything was doing much better than before treatment, so that was good enough.

Buh ,, ... so, just in case anyone was wondering ... Zeovit wasn't the saviour I hoped it would be. 5 frags down the tubes this week, same thing, starts with a loss of colour, then recession from the tips. Seen this before so I know what's next.

I've changed my signature to include a nice little Haiku-ish poem for now.

Ugh,.. this has been going on for far too long. I hate that I can't grow SPS anymore.

Maybe it's the reef gods telling you...and catherine. Stop focusing on anything but the big tank, then i will let you have sps again :)

I quit using the Reefresh system about ten days ago, and started dosing some potassium suppliment to my tank. Thus far, all my sps are looking much better and the glass is not turning opaque green in eight hours like it had been. I can actuall go three days between glass cleanings and even then its not horrible. Some of the SPS frags and colonies that had been receding have shown new growth, and colour is improving on all of them. Polyp extension is also better. Not sure which change is helping, but I don't care, I'm going to maintain this routine at least until I've used up the bottle of K suppliment. I'd like to find a test kit for it, but so far haven't been able to track one down.

I don't know if you can derive any conclusions from this for your tank or not, but htought it may give you something to consider.

Potassium is one of the last frontiers for me. Tell me about your dosing regimen .. I'm a little hesitant to dose anything without testing. I do have a Potassium test kit (this one) but it is inordinately the most difficult test kit to read. Basically, you're guessing the value based on how opaque the liquid is. I thought comparing colours was a subjective guess, this is worse!! Basically if in the end you're just guessing the overall value you can just guess without spending the cash. :lol: However, I think it's more or less the only test kit for K and if you're anything like me, it's just a more comfort zone knowing you can test when you're actively dosing something (because it's generally imperative to know when to stop, IME).

Right now I am cleaning the glass every day. If I don't do it every day, it gets harder to clean with every day that goes by.

I do wonder about the K thing. It's just that I tested it and .. well, I think the end reading was about 400 (top of the scale). So either I guessed wrong, or K isn't really the issue.

Here is another one for you Tony.
http://stonyreef.com/blog/2008/potas...lium-test-kit/

That one does sound better, thanks for the heads-up. Haha, now to find one.. :)

Well oceanaquatics carries the fauna marin ultralith...they should be able to get their test kits as well? :)

Fauna Marin test kit is garbage. Everything reads 400 ppm. EVERYTHING.

Fine be that way! :)

http://www.thomassci.com/product/26126
or
http://www.clarksonlab.com/vLam.htm

My rant with the KZ test kit is that I can't read the results. The instructions say to take the reading from when you can't see the colour strip anymore through the vial, OR when you can only barely see the colour strip. My problem is these are two very different spots. If they were close that would be one thing, but they're not that close. The point where I can't see the colour strip anymore is about 310-320. The point where I can only barely see the colour strip is the darkest point of the strip, ie., top of the scale, which is 400. So which is the reading? 310? or 400? 400 sounds implausible, why would have I have high K when I've never dosed it before. But reading up on zeovit.com it seems that you are supposed to take the reading when you can only barely see the test strip. So that means 400. But reading up on the perils of low K, it sounds like it could be a plausible explanation. So maybe it's 310? But being 310 or 400 is very important to know before I embark upon any kind of dosing.

Sigh. I throw my arms up in the air over this one. The only form of testing that I trust with degree of confidence are titrations or volumetric based test kits. Too bad the chemisty just isn't there for some things. If any point you find yourself saying "I guess this vial matches this colour" or "I guess I can't see the strip anymore through the liquid" - confidence in the value goes right out the window. Or should I say, "I guess" confidence goes out the window. Or I guess it's a window. I guess I can't really be sure. I guess I can't really be sure of anything. I guess.

Tony,

Did you try to modifiy your zeo dosing regiment as suggested by G.Alexander? I have found with new modified dosing schedule and the addition of a vortech my green film algae/cyano is all but gone again.

I agree 100% Tony. I just can't read that test kit. I still try to read it. The crazy thing is your ability to see through the liquid is also determined by ambient light.
Anyway. I did notice huge improvements in coral when using K. But I have stopped because of the inability to test

J

Hi Greg, yes I did and it did indeed kick back the slime. There are still some spots but nowhere near as bad.

This problem with the frags is I think something else. I guess it could be that the weekly water changes caught up to me and the new seawater has params out of whack. I had to buy a huge box of Mg supplement from littlesilvermax and I've already used about about 20% of it just correcting my tanks (and I'm not there yet - I'm only raising the tanks by 50ppm per day, they should be hitting their target values tomorrow or Thursday) and my water change water.

So much for Aquamedic salt! Problem is I'm so stubborn. I paid $90 for this bucket of salt, I can't throw it out. Hopefully it's just the Mg is out but I guess I should double-check the Ca and Alk. At least Ca and Alk don't appear to be deviating in the tanks so I don't really suspect that those params are out. Nevertheless the Mg of 900 is way too low, I won't be using or recommending this brand of salt to anyone. If it's a case of it's a just bad batch, Ok fine, but the thing is, they advertise that the levels are a certain thing, so you expect it to be what it claims it is. A bad batch means there are quality assurance issues, and thus I'm still concluding that I won't use or recommend that brand again.

Anyhow so I have to wonder if the latest casualties are a result of the chemistry of trying to raise Mg over such a profound range. And of course there's the potassium thing too.

Next salt for me is Reefer's Best..

Thanks J :) At least I know I'm not the only person who's looking at that test kit thinking "now what?" .. Maybe the solution is just to switch to RBS and not worry about K since K is supposed to be good, out of the box, with that one.

I was a little hesitant on dosing without testing too. I based my decision to go ahead with it based on anecdotal evidence that I found in several threads on various forums. The symptoms seemed to match the low K experiences of others. Tony, you are not the only one who has indicated uncertainty with the test kits, it seems that most of them are pretty subjective to get results and are therefore somewhat unreliable. Still, I'd like to know what my K levels really are.

I have the Pohl's K Balance Strong. The directions for dosing are 1ml per 25 gallons daily, so based on that, I'd dosing 6ml every morning. From what I've read, you'd really have to go crazy with this stuff to OD it, but yes it is a concern to not go overboard with it just the same.

Just wanted to add to this: I don't have the low Mg issue like you. I have been dosing additional Mg and have had reasonably stable wter parameters for Ca, Kh and Mg, so it is still possible that your situation is from other factors than low K or perhaps in addition to it.

Not sure about your Salt Tony. I've never heard of Aquamedic salt. I'm wonder what buffer they use. I know a lot of salts have been boosting ALK with Boron and it is rally a false buffer.
I'm current;y using RBS and Love it. But Seachem salt is also rated in the 360 -400 for Potassium

J

Yeah I definitely regret having tried this salt. Man, that's worrisome about the Boron giving a false alkalinity reading.

I run both a calcium reactor and a kalk reactor though so hopefully that means my Ca and Alk levels in the tank are solid readings.

I think I have decided though to just simply give up on SPS for now. I thought Zeovit would help me out of this 3 year nightmare but it's maybe a case of too little too late. I was utterly convinced that due to the age of the tank (6 years) that this was a nutrient buildup in the substrate and that running Zeovit would help pull it out. I now think though that this is not the case. I can't get a PO4 reading, and NO3 ranges from 0 to 4 or 5 (and "4 or 5" is not a fatal NO3 reading). So it's something else, and since it's not Ca, it's not Alk, and since it started happening well before I tried this salt it's likely not the Mg, and, well, I can't say for sure if it's potassium or not but honestly at this point it wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that it has nothing to do with potassium. It's not AEFW, it's not red bugs ... if it is an organism it's something invisible, if it is a parameter it's something untrackable. How does one fight an enemy they can't see?

Since it's restricted to SPS, maybe the solution is pull out the pieces that are not yet showing stress and give them a future with potential instead of the inevitable.

The cycle of "I think this tank is on the rebound!" to "oh, no it's not, after all" is just starting to get to me. My fish, my clams, gorgonians and LPS do fine, so maybe it's better just to focus on keeping those happy in the remaining months that it will take me to finish the renos on my basement and get the new tank running. And just hope beyond reckoning that the new tank doesn't inherit this problem .. I hate to say it but I think if it comes to that I may be done. There's this nice X-C bike I've been looking at but I can't afford it right now, but boy oh boy I could buy like 3 of them if I sold off all the tank crap I have lying around. :lol:

Debated starting a new thread or adding to this one. Instead I started a new one but thought I'd link to it here. http://canreef.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=47089