Frospawn and hammer dieing

H

harial

I can not for the life of me figure out why they are slowly wasting away. nitrates and nitrites are 0, my phosphate are a little high but I am running phosguard and doing water changes and am slowly bringing them down. I have 260 watts pc with new bulbs. I just dont understand they were doing great when my tank for lack of a better word SUCKED. I just upgraded my lighting from 130 to 260, installed a protein skimmer, added an auto topoff, installed an HOB refugium but I am using it instead to run chemi-pure, phosguard, and purigen.

Before there was hair algae and cyno on half my rock and then I decided to do something about is and implemented these changes. I scrubbed my rock, upgraded my lighting and replaced the bulbs, started running chemicals and rather than just dumping a gallon of rodi water in my tank everyday(and when i say dump I mean I upended water out of a bucket into the tank) I built an auto topoff(for which I am extremely proud of myself). But it seemed to positively thrive before; it was about the size of a small watermelon when fully open and I was having to frag off branches every few weeks to keep it under control. could the shock of going form these sub par circumstances to what I have now be a shock?

Sorry if I seem like I am ranting but this is really starting to pi** me off. I am completely at a loss, any help is greatly appreciated.
 
so I had the sme problem with mine.. I so thought it was gone..
I just moved it around the tank until It opened up

I have it on the top of the water now close to the light.. Also I started doesing Phytoplex

i thought it was dead for sure.. now it is large and in charge.. ...
 
Verify your salinity and maybe check the coral heads for a jelly type substance. There's an infection that emits a brown jelly that will kill a frogspawn in no time. (Speaking from expierence)

Report back and let us know...
 
I went to my lfs a few days ago because I ran out of test kits and they told me everything was normal except my phosphates were a bit high but were down from the last time when I started running phosguard and that my alkalinity was low so I added some buffer, did a water change and now it is at 300ppm. ph is at about 7.8
 
I was using a hydrometer but I found it was always off by a lot so i started relying on the refractometer of my lfs until I get one myself. Ryan(the guy at the lfs) did not tell me what it was but since he did not mention it I assume it was ok. But that is the second time someone mentioned salinity, is that a really bid deal when it comes to this issue? hmmm.. I remember my salinity was always really high before because I was really bad about toping off so the salinity would go up. But it should be pretty normal these days.
 
I would focus on what changed. It may be the lighting increase or lack of food. Are you feeding it? or was it pulling stuff out of the water that is now being filtered? Doubling up on lighting can be fatal, you may want to shade it for a bit with some screen or eggcrate and see if that helps.

As for the other parameters, you could have changed something without knowing it. So the other questions around salinity, PH, alk calc etc are all valid. If you don't have test kits, you may want to have your LFS double check the params.
 
I never fed it before because it never ate anything I gave it. it would just let stuff fall out. Though my mom did tell me that she fed it a week ago and it ate. hmmm. with the light, it was in the bottom half of my tank when I had 130 watts and not it is the upper 1/3 of the tank with the now lights. same thing with the hammer, they were both kinda low and now they are really high. Can that really be a big issue?
 
Harial,

You said your alkalinity is at 300ppm, isn't that really really high. Doing the conversion that came out to 16.8 dKH or 6 meq/l. :shock:
 
edited out my alk comment after you corrected in your new post

and yes the issue could certainly be lights. corals can get sunburned, especially if they were use to a lower intensity and now they are in a higher intensity light. Think of it as getting a bad sunburn before you tan. but only much worse for a coral given they are almost all flesh and depend on it for not just protection but also for feeding.
 
When I put halides on my tank the frogs and hammers did not like it at first and I had to move them to the bottom and low flow areas. That did the trick after a week or so. :)
 
Yep...depending on the age of your previous bulbs you probably are looking at more than double the light the corals suddenly received...and that was before moving them higher in the tank.

Cheers,
 
well i just moved the frogspawn and the hammer to the sand bed. Hopefully in a week I can report back with some progress.

I love this forum, I got my answer real quick.
 
@psteeleb wrote:
Think of it as getting a bad sunburn before you tan. . said:
I should have said: Think of it as getting a bad sunburn before you tan, and then having to stay in the sun. :shock: :shock: :shock:
Click to expand...
 
I had thought of doing something like that but I honestly could not think of anything they could do that I could not. My parameters are good and I have good filtration and lighting. If I gave it to someone I would want them to have all of the above as well and the only thing they would do is put it in their sand bed or lower in their own tank which is what I have done.
 
We have kept Frogspawns, Branching Hammers, and Torch corals in our tank for many years now without any problems. First they seem to really like a mild flow, PC or VHO lighting is plenty. As far as the water we keep the SP at 1.025 the Ca at 430ppm, the Alk at 8.0 KH and the PH at 8.2 on average. Make sure that you don?t have brown jelly or any other infection since you say both are dieing and they are in the same general family of corals.

Is it a branching Hammer that you have?
 
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