chemical warfare?
 

all of a sudden in the last week or so my mushrooms have been shriveling up and turning white. now they are starting to die. a friend of mine suggested it could be chemical warfare with the ricordia? but they are 3 feet apart and i dont get how only the mushrooms could be affected? any help or suggestions would be awesome. thanks.

our mushrooms and rics are side by side for over a year and no problems....

+1

mine touch.

I've only seen this happen due to lack of light. And X2 for Ric and mush touching with no probs.

well it was a sudden thing ive had them for year no problems. and i have 250 watt halides so i dont think its lack of light. o well i'll just get rid of them before they all die and find the root cause of this i guess thanks guys :)

Do a thorough testing of your tank including checking salinity and temperature. If you're using a hydrometer be sure to calibrate it, to double check as hydrometers are often out by 0.002 or more, which doesn't sound like much, but it sure can be!

do you dose lots of calcium?

I find they dislike that and high alk also a low nutrient tank could make them unhappy and lastly too much light on certain mushrooms are fatal even ricordea. I have melted a few in my day however if you had it for a year and it was fine maybe you dosed something?

i started dosing calcium and alk because im switching to sps and slowly starting to phase out the softies. i heard its much easier to raise sps specifically rather than a mix. so it could be the dosing doing it.

I've had the same thing happen recently with some of my Rics which were under 250W MH. One colony I had for 4 years and then suddenly they all turned white and disappeared. Around the time it started happening I dont recall doing anything different to my tank. If anything things were improving because I was bringing my nitrate down from ~10ppm to <1ppm with a few improvements to my filtration (larger skimmer and filter socks).

Salinity 1.025 (refractometer)
Temp 27ºC
pH 7.8-8.1
Ca 400
Alk 10
Mg 1300
Nitrate <1
Phosphate .1 (was higher back then and has always been higher until now)