Need help. Sick finger leather
 

During my substrate fiasco that I posted in another post "Why not to discuss reefing with a 3 year old" my recently fragged leather lost his "scab" Today, I woke up to it completely limp on the substrate. There was a very bad odour coming from the tank. I picked out the sick leather and it clouded out gel, rotten pieces and some mucus. About 30-40% of his body had rotted away. Figuring him for dead, I took it to the kitchen and run some tap water over it as I wanted to have a look at it'd demise. Once under the running tap water, it perked up a bit. I cleaned off all the gunk and returned it to the tank but in as much flow as I could find. It stayed up for a bit, but is slowly drooping again. My question is, can I do anything to help him and is he a danger to my other tank inhabitants. I am running quite a bit of carbon in the filter for toxins and my skimmer is in over drive. What else should I do???

Here's a pic of the sick coral.

http://www.canreef.com/photopost/dat..._diag.jpg?4636

Personaly, I would just cut off what seems to be the healthier pieces.. stick them in a good flow area and throw the rotting stuff out.. The rotting stuff is definitely not going to help your cause in this matter and can only foul up your water quality.

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks Chad,

That's kinda what I thought might be the safest course of action. At the very least, it gets most of the "mass" that could leach toxins out of the system.

I just finished doing the cutting, going up well out of the rotting area to be a little safer and ended up with 5 frags. If all goes well, it looks like I'll have a bit of trading stock soon. (fingers crossed)

Scavenger, best of luck with that, I hope it heals up nicely for you.

Doug

I had a huge one like that once - me and CanMan cut it into pieces.

None survived... we moved on from softies after that...

:wink:

I hope it all goes well for you.. Best of luck

I had a leather like that once, it developed a small "melted" patch on it. There was just no saving it from that point on. Good luck to you though, maybe you'll have better results than I did.

Christy :)

Ya, I'm not liking the odds on this one. I'll give it to tomorrow and evaluate it then. The rest of the tank mates seem to be recovering from their fowled water after a 50% change today. I'll base my course of action on gerenal tank health. I don't want to stress out everything to try and save low odds of survival frags.

Bummer, but at least it's a learning experience.

It seems I have developed a brand new type of coral!!!
I call it a liquid leather. I'm giving them away for free, just come collect them from my skimmer collection cup. :lol:

mmm I bet they smell great too! :wink: