Acclimation

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by Koleswrath

I just lost a $150 Mad Jelly order by dripping. I'm guessing my house is too cold and I was dripping too slowly to keep the drip bucket temp up.

The irony of this is that I've always just floated the bag, added a cup of tank water, wait, repeat, etc. but I decided to drip this order because it was my largest purchase to date and I wanted to be "extra careful".
Never had a problem with floating the bag.

I'm surprised to see there are more than a few other people who have had bad luck with dripping too as it's recommended everywhere. Makes me feel a bit better about it. But just a bit.

Greg

These two articles are where I got my general 'theory' for how I acclimate corals:

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2005-11/eb/index.php

and

http://reefbuilders.com/2013/12/12/a...orals-wrong-2/

The first one talks about how the author went from having less than 50% survival on shipped corals to 100% survival by shipping them out of water, wrapped in nothing but seawater dampened newspaper. The have some interesting theories as to why that might be.

I've also read other articles, specifically relating to acclimation of fish, that warn against aggressively aerating the water they come shipped in because as the oxygen levels in the bag fall during shipment and CO2 levels rise, ammonia is also being released from normal fish respiration. But as CO2 rises, the water also becomes more acidic, which drives the ammonium/ammonia equilibrium towards higher concentrations of relatively non-toxic ammonium. You get the bag and aerate the crap out of it, and the pH spikes creating potentially lethal concentrations of ammonia.

All three of those things could have potentially occurred to your mad jelly corals: issues with water fouling talked about in the reef keeping article, the temperature issue you identified, and an issue with ammonia once the water became aerated and the pH went back up to 'normal' sea water levels.

It's why as a general rule I try to get my corals out of the water they came in as quickly as possible, especially if they've been shipped. After a long flight they're literally stewing in their own sewage.