SPS Tank O Death

[Jason McK]

C,
I have seen the slime coat lose in my own tank. It has occurred with High SG and again with a fist spike of ALK. Basically the coral starts to look dull and there is no polyp extension. I believe it is a recoverable situation as 4 or 5 of my corals have recovered. But others did not. The next stage tends to be tissue lose and growth of algae on the skeleton.
Unlike RTN or even STN the lack of a slime coat (IMO) indicates a slow progression of a stressed coral with 2 outcomes a return to health or death.
I don't think this helps too much with the diagnosis of what is causing it but instead leave us right where we are.
What can be stressing your corals.
We have ruled out measurable water parameters
We have ruled out chemical or other coral attack (usually kills small sections of coral)
We haven't ruled out silicone leaching
We haven't ruled out unmeasurable water parameters (contamination) but you would think it would effect everything

Light sure is a possibility. your running a 150W DE right? what is the UV is not being stopped? That would do it

J

[michika]

Originally Posted by Jason McK

Light sure is a possibility. your running a 150W DE right? what is the UV is not being stopped? That would do it.

I'm running 1x 175w SE XM 15K MH on an icecap ballast inside a luminarc reflector, and 2x 28w actinic PCs on a PFO ballast. I've got my other reflector, a batwing handy so I'll leave my MHs off today, and this afternoon I'll switch out the reflector and try it for a couple of weeks.

How would I go about testing for other contaminants? I contacted AWT in the states and finally got a response, they can't test Canadian water as they can't ship it back to us, and we may have problems getting it to them.

Does anyone know of similar businesses in Canada?

[fishoholic]

The only other thing I can think of that others haven't really mentioned is to try taking out the frogspawn. I had sps in a tank that had frogspawn (as well as many other corals) and the sps started bleaching and the flesh started to fall off. I moved the sps corals to another tank that only had zoos and gsp in it and the sps made a full recovery. I don't really know for sure if the frogspawn was fighting with the sps or not, but if you have another tank the frogspawn could go into, it would be easy to rule it out.