SPS Light Burn Help

[jumplittlechloe]

I have some sps colonies that have shown tissue recession and I am not totally sure what caused it. However, my guess is carbon. I run my system with gfo and dose AA's and Coral food at night. I run led's and keep lighting fairly intense. I decided to add a bag of carbon and this is where I think things went wrong. Shortly after adding it passively I noticed in about a week that some sps colonies were burnt while others had significant color loss. I have decreased my lighting intensity and duration and removed carbon. Does anyone have any suggestions or experience in helping sps recover after losing tissue or color loss?

[falos]

Is it bleaching? Turning white but still have the polops? If so it can be a few things to high or to low alk or mag to much light or to long of a photoperiod and or watter temp is to high
As far as the tissue loss no one is quite shure what causes stn or rtn I have used melaflex in the past sumtimes it works sumtimes it dusnot but I don't thank it was from carbon unless your water quality was realy bad and the carbon shocked the coral

[Ripped Tide]

What types of sps are showing irritation? Acros? Birdsnests? Montis? All?

What brand carbon? Kent recently had a recall, I think.

IF it is related to the carbon, I would assume that the carbon removed some nutrient that was contributing to the coral's color, or livelihood. Or if it was the recalled carbon, I wouldn't know where to start. I think they recalled it for havin excess heavy metals.

Unfortunately there are a lot of variables, as falos said.

[jumplittlechloe]

Originally Posted by falos

Is it bleaching? Turning white but still have the polops? If so it can be a few things to high or to low alk or mag to much light or to long of a photoperiod and or watter temp is to high
As far as the tissue loss no one is quite shure what causes stn or rtn I have used melaflex in the past sumtimes it works sumtimes it dusnot but I don't thank it was from carbon unless your water quality was realy bad and the carbon shocked the coral

- some corals have lightened but still have polops (blue flashlight shows tissue loss)
- alk is 8.4 dKh
- mag is 1400
- photoperiod has never been a problem and has remained the same for over 5 months
- not sure it was bad water quality but it is a low nutrient system

Edit:

Originally Posted by Ripped Tide

What types of sps are showing irritation? Acros? Birdsnests? Montis? All?

What brand carbon? Kent recently had a recall, I think.

IF it is related to the carbon, I would assume that the carbon removed some nutrient that was contributing to the coral's color, or livelihood. Or if it was the recalled carbon, I wouldn't know where to start. I think they recalled it for havin excess heavy metals.

Unfortunately there are a lot of variables, as falos said.

- birdsnests (lightened) acros (tissue resesed) montis (no issues)
- carbon was chemipure

[Ripped Tide]

Chemipure contains an ion exchange resin. I bet it removed something those corals were relying upon. Then again it could be totally unrelated. If that was the only thing that changed, I would bet that's a good place to start.

Im sure a lot of people will chime in that chemipure never did that for them, but they may not have the ULNS.

I came up with this conclusion because when I first aggressively attacked phosphates and brought them down to .01, I lost a ton of color and had tissue loss. I started dosing AA and let the phos rise to .05-.03 and everything came back within a month or so.

[jumplittlechloe]

I currently am dosing zeovit products. I tried red sea energy a&b with nopox, but had issues with hair algae and high phosphates. I currently use zeovit products for AA's and coral nutrition and run gfo. I have been using this for 5 months. I thought the carbon might help out with some green slime. It did not :( I did consider adding Restor from brightwell to help the tissue loss.

[falos]

Always shake brightwell liquids they have a tendency to harden overtime
Try elemental reef builder you have to dose it at night though
But if your having stn in your acros don't change eny parameter to fast it would not be a good time to stress The corals