Purple Coraline killed some zoas

D

Darby

I had a small rock with some Green eye'd purpple zoas on it. There was a little PC on it when I got it, not much. In teh last 2 months, that coraline has spread all across the rock, and eventually spread up the necks of the polyps, choking them! I didn't know PC would do this. I figured that hte Zoas would do some chemical warfare of some kind, or at least the amount they move by expanding and contracting would break up the coraline. Appears I was wrong....

Anyone else have this happen?
 
I'm pretty sure it isn't cyano. It's bright "Grimace" purple, encrusting, and slightly flaky at the edges. If I can ever get my digital camera to work again, I'll take a pic.
 
I don't know about the zoas but coraline was growing over one of my sun coral babies. I moved the whole rock way under a cave and the coraline started dying off, turning white. The baby sun coral is small but coming back. Because of that I now keep all my sun corals out of the light. I thought coraline algae grew around stuff like corals.
 
Darby, did you ever figure out how to stop it on the zoas? I'm noticing that on one of my rocks I'm having the same issue and it's creeping up on two different zoas on the same rock. I hadn't noticed it before. Here's a pic of my pink palys getting covered and I'm not quite sure what to do.
 
That would be a first I have ever heard of this happening, but I must say that picture does look like it is coraline growing on live tissue. Very strange.
 
That is exactly what happened. I lost all of the polyps on that rock, and I jsut noticed some on my GSP this morning. The only thing I think I can do it to pick it off. Tough to do without hurting the polyps though...

Deb, I really don't know of any alternative. I've tested my water, and if anything it's just a little low on calcium, so I have no idea why it's growing so fast. Hope you have better luck, or that someone else has some advice!
 
@Darby wrote:
I've tested my water said:
Now that's a weird coincidence because I tested my tanks yesterday and that is the only tank where the calcium is low... and I had the same issue with my sun corals (the calcium when that happened was also low) but the sun coral I just moved into the dark and killed the coralline no biggy. I could try shading the corals for a couple days... you know stir up the sand and the water, make them think it's rain and storm season :) I don't think a day or two of dark would hurt them... But we'll see.
Click to expand...
 
I had this same thing happen to some baby blastos that popped up. It grew around them then choked them.

Next time I see it start to happen I will just try to chisel the coraline off before it encloses.
 
Alk and light play a bigger role in its growth than calcium from my experience. When I setup my 90G it grew quite a bit before I started to bring the alk and ca levels up. If you cut it back, that actually encourages growth. Unfortunately that is probably your best bet though. You could use kalk paste to kill it, but that would probably damage the polyps too.
 
I had something similar on live rock I purchase from an established tank. I though it was coraline also until it start to cover the rock and a frag I glued on it. It turn out to be a incrusting sponge that cover everything suffucatin the zoas. I end up loosing 9 polyps of yellow skirt eagle eye before I figure what it was. I saw stuff on blue planet that looked identical to the encrusting sponge. With or without light it still grew as fast. I end up leaving the rock out of the tank to kill all of it off in the sun. Just a thought, scrap as much as you can on the zoas bc they are probaly still alive. cut what you can to save. I lose ony a couple of polyps but had to cut a chunk out to save the colony.

-Joseph
 
The coraline that was growing over my pink palys I was able to pull off. I took the rock out to clean off some red bubble algae and took a closer look at the coraline growing over the palys. It was growing but wasn't really sticking to the paly's 'skin'. So I used the tip of a bamboo skewer to 'pop' it off in small pieces. One polyp near the edge was slightly torn near the mat but it's recovered well. Just thought I'd update. Here's the picture from before when it was covered... the previously posted picture isn't showing.
 
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