Gold torch doesn't look to be doing so good...

It seems to be irritated. Sometimes this will happen from changes in flow (pointing a powerhead directly at it) or rapid changes in water parameters, especially salinity or alkalinity. IME, anything more than a few hundred gph of flow directed at torches is too much and completely unnecessary. For example: I ran a jebao pp-4 (1000 gph) about 12” away from a torch colony. Anything above 30% power would make the heads contract as shown in your pictures. Of course all colonies are different and I’ve had colonies in the same tank that didn’t mind high flow. I also never saw a benefit to pushing more flow past torches either.


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what are everyones tank parameters at?

Back when I ran mainly LPS/softies and was getting really good growth out of my torches, the parameters were:

SG: 1.025
Dkh: 9
Cal: 460
Mg: 1480
No3: 15ppm
Po4: .03
Temp: 79-80



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With that high of a NO3 you don’t have algae issues?

Nope. Po4 was the limiting factor and I had hungry hungry snails that constantly scoured my rockwork anyways.


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nice, anyone else with parameter or light on what is best to aim for?

little update, did an iodine bath for 15 mins and the coral seems to be extending a little better than it did before. This only happens when lights are out tho. I can't be certain that light was an issue nor can I say it was. Hopefully it does better within the next few days. I made an emergency call to a local reef shop in the area and talked to the owner of the shop. Trust worthy shop for sure and they were more then willing to house my torch in a well established Eup. tank they have been running. Worst case scenario if the torch does not improve.

what are your guy's thoughts on this? should I not risk the delay and have them care for it or let it sit in it's current tank with the parameters that it's been used to for the next few days?

Pretty interesting. So the torch is extending a little more at night? What are you running for lights and what are the settings? For perspective, I was running Galaxyhydro 165w black boxes (x3) back then on my 100g @ 40% blue & 15% white, so basically half power per fixture. Run time was 10 hours and the lights were installed 10” above the water surface. I’m wondering now if this might be a light acclimation issue. I can see from your other threads that you can grow sps in your system so I’m not doubting your tank’s stability, but IME I’ve had very good success keeping torches alongside zoas in fairly weak lighting. This was the main reason I got out of the softie and lps game when I started to transition to sps and upgraded my lighting. My torches, frogspawn and zoas just didn’t seem as happy and poofed out under 324 watts of t5ho as they did under the cheapy led black boxes. A good test that won’t harm your tank is to simply dial down your lighting if possible for a week and see what happens. More tentacle extension would mean moving the torch to a shadier part of the tank for a bit and gradually “walking” it out into full tank light over a month or so, noting its reaction. Also, I wouldn’t move that torch out of the tank right now. It would have to be acclimated in the store’s tank and that will put additional stress on the coral.

Recently I have been experimenting with lighting and this could be an issue? I wasn’t sure that was the cause as all my corals SPS included did not show any effects from light change. I had been running the Gieseman Aurora 48” fixture at 100% on LEDs and T5s (no par reading was ever done on them (not a par meter that was really accurate tho) corals seemed to be happy with this fixture. I decided to move this fixture onto a larger frag tank that would be housing higher end corals and bought 2x new Radions XR30 G4 pros with 4 x T5 48” bulbs (Aquactilife hybrid fixture - 2x ATI Blue Plus, 1x ATI True Actinic, 1x Purple Plus) as a replacement fixture for the main DT. The Radion runs on a coral lab setting and the T5s are turned on for only 5 hours in the middle of the day. The tank is 30” deep and fixture are roughly 9-12” above the water line.

Re: light as source of issue. It’s a good guess. The other light factor would be how fast you ramped up to 100 and where you started at. A sudden boost would absolutely affect them; imho-100% on both your t5s & leds seems a little too hot. My experience with euphyllias (especially torches) are that they are the canary in the coal mine & one of the first to show ill effects to changes & can even go south over a water change.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dizzyjay

Re: light as source of issue. It’s a good guess. The other light factor would be how fast you ramped up to 100 and where you started at. A sudden boost would absolutely affect them; imho-100% on both your t5s & leds seems a little too hot. My experience with euphyllias (especially torches) are that they are the canary in the coal mine & one of the first to show ill effects to changes & can even go south over a water change.

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I have moved the coral away from direct light and more in a Simi cave opening where there is some light but nothing directly down on them. I forgot to mention that the torches are on the sand bed as well. I don't have a par meter to check at the moment but will try to order one this up coming weekend. hopefully it won't be too late. I have also turn off the whites, reds, and greens on the radions coral lab as well to help lower intensity. its a really deep tank so I don't expect there is much par reaching them bottom sand bed tho, give or take maybe 100 par or so?

It really seems light related to me and it sounds like you made a good move here. While most sps do great from 250 to 400 par, any shift within that range is going to have less of an effect on them vs. a coral such as a torch that can live in 100 par but has to be gradually be acclimated to 300 or more par. What’s happening here might be the equivalent of taking an acro’s lighting from 350 to 800 par in a short period of time. The nice thing about torches/frogspawn, etc. is if they need more light, they can just extend their tentacles more to capture it.


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I’ll keep an eye on this torch this weekend and see how it does. Hopefully everything is ok.

Simply having it not go full-brown jelly and kick the bucket is a good sign. It tells us that something has been irritating it for a while but not enough to outright kill it.


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I have never seen brown jelly before but it’s not melted or lost color. I’ll google brown jelly and see what it looks like and get back with an update if it has gone to that stage yet which I don’t think it has yet.