I have a leather and a zoo that are dying. The leather was rather large and is now almost rotted away to nothing. My water parameters are ph 8.5 Nitrate 2.5 Nitrite 0 Phosphate 0 Calcium 480 Temp 78 and salinity 1.022 I started to see a change in these corals when i began using PhosBan in one of my filters. Also it was about the time that one of my heaters was not working right. It had brought the temp up to around 84 but i caught this within a day or two. The only other thing that I have changed is that i added a powder brown tang. It has me puzzeled bc my candy cane coral and bta are doing great. Any thoughts would be great
i read somewhere last month that adding to much phosban at once can cause a chemical reaction . i am sorry but i cannot remember the details but it was suggested to start with alittle and step it up weekly over the course of a month. depending on how long its been in there it may be to late to do anything about it now. i would just step up your water change frequency and hope for the best.
I wonder how accurate you thermometer is? 84 is pushing the limit and if it was a deg. or two over that, you went to high for some corals. I don't know how heat tolerent leathers and zoo's are but some corals 84 and anything past is deadly. If the others are doing ok I would suspect heat but don't know for sure. I used to run phosban and had no problems with adding alot at once, but thats not to say it won't effect them. I know iron oxide you have to be really careful of. Did the dieing off start about the time you added the phosban? I still vote for temp and 2 days is along time. cheers
The average temperature on the world's coral reefs is 82 degrees. 84-86 will not harm corals especially if there is adequate water movement and gas exchange.
Joe I totally disagree. I have a friend who has a 700 gal reef , well established for many years and this is a fellow who has forgotten more then I well ever know and he lost a full tank of sps when a controller malfunctioned last summer and his tank hit 86 for 2 days. And we are talking huge colonies and thousands of dollars. Shortly there after things started to STN, in a few months most all was lost. I lost a tank of sps 2 yrs ago when my tank hit 87 while on vacation, everything STN'd, Some of the LPS survived like my hammer and frogspawn. That is why I said I didn't know about the leather and zoo's. 84 about the limit for much more then one day. I don't know about the wild, but I would think it would depend alot on how and where the corals have been raised and what they are used to for their envirement, but where we keep our tanks at 78 for the most part year after year, 86 is a big change. JMO, but I have seen sps lost to these temps. cheers
I suppose if your critters are acclimated to 78, a spike to 86 might be detrimental but if you keep the temp closer to nature's 82, spikes like that aren't as likely to hurt anything.
Joe This is just my opinion and you are probably right, but I prefer to leave myself a little more breathing room for fluctuation to where things get critical. cheers
