Acro nightmare

[wrestle1952]

Your tank sounds like my pre San Diego experience. I am willing to try other frags especially with colonies as old as yours. I am frustrated as I currently am watching an Idaho grape and orange monti do what all my other caps have done. Look good for a few days, get a brown film on them, fade out and die. I could grow those with my eyes closed and no testing in the past. It just seems weird my maintenance is soooooo much better here with weekly water changes, weekly testing, biopellets etc only to have everything die.

[Bogg]

[naso tang]

ahh, delicious sticks. Can't go wrong with Jason's frags either, although they looked better in jason's tank than they did in mine. Still, after I almost killed a beautiful BOP colony, the tips survived, and are now colored beautifully!! And welcome back to dry land, Jason...

[wrestle1952]

Thanks alot everyone for your offers. My plan after unhooking the NPX pellets is to do another 30 gallon water change get fresh chemipure elite to place in my canister filter and get frags from my trusted sources in the Bay Area when I visit for Christmas. If that doesn't produce the results I want then I will take you up on your offers. My welso's (Thanks Will @ Aqua SD) and my other LPS that survived my move are fine. Of course the easies like Japanese blue cloves and GSP's are doing well (again thank you Aqua SD!) After all my upgrades with sumps, skimmers, improved circulation via Koralia pumps you, weekly water changes (as opposed to months at a time) one would THINK I would have better results. That's what I get for thinking I guess.

[naso tang]

update, three weeks post crash. STN has stopped, everybody is recovering nicely in the display tank. Although several colonies got fragged extensively, only completely lost 2-3 specimens. Polyp extension is back and color is returning. Woot!!!

[hydrahawk]

John, nice to hear your sticks are coming back. I truly believe in the natural/simplify method. Run some macro/cheato in a fuge, do regular water changes and dose my 2 part regularly.

[naso tang]

agreed. When I upgraded my display I got a sump that didn't have a fuge, so I went with GFO for awhile, and then with the biopellets. But now I've arranged a fuge section in the sump. I do regular water changes and have almost never missed a day of two part in 1.5 years on this system. But I'm also finding I need more Ca+ than I do alk when using BRS two part, and you need to keep on top of Mg++ and maybe supplement strontium/molbydenium when using the BRS two part recipe. For two parts like TLF or Bionic, I don't think you need to worry about adding back the trace in this category. And my Ca+ demand is/was so high, I'm dumping alot of two part and having a hard time keeping the levels up.

When doing biopellets, alk is run a bit lower than when without. So I went from dKh of 7 to probably 9. And maybe there was a subsequent phos/nitrate bloom due to bacterial die off after stopping the carbon dosing, so like anything with SPS, change is not usually tolerated well and dirtier water may have stressed them out. I still don't know why only the acros were really affected, but in retrospect, there was only 1 or two acros that were having an STN problem among 20-30 colonies/frags, and dipping agressively/moving to quarantine is what caused most of my damage. Patience is a virtue after all and overreaction to STN is not advised (unless you are trying to stop RTN I think)...