My shrinking Ricordia

[agent007]

Over the past year it has shrunk approx 30%.
Do you have any ideas?

 

[redfishbluefish]

Too little information!

Lighting? Water parameters? Flow? Location within the tank? Neighbors?

I know they aren't crazy about MH up close and personnal...too much light.

 

[JohnS_323]

Do you normally have luck with rics and this one just isn't doing well or is this the first one and it's not doing well? The reason I ask is that for whatever reason, I can't keep rics at all. Everytime I've tried they shrink away until they're gone. Apparently there is something about my system that just doesn't work for them.

 

[agent007]

Water params are good are good:
PH 8.2
Am 0
Nitrites 0
Nitrates 0
Cal 400
Kh 9

I have had it for about 3 years. I actually had two pieces. The smaller one has disappeared.
I have T5 bulbs, I have reduce lighting over the past few months to help fight the algae. Shrinkage
was noted before this. I have been fighting quite a few things in the tank over the past year
and params and photo periods have been adjusted a month at time during that course. I try to make adjustments
in small increments - no chemicals.

I have it near the bottom of the tank next to (below) a leather coral - they are attached to the same piece of rock.

 

[Phyl]

It seems like they haven't been growing (there should be more of them by now if you've had it for a while). Do you feed the tank heavily? Really light? Skimmer? Sounds like it is starving to death. Either lack of light or lack of nutrients in the water.

 

[REEFLECTIONS]

i feed my tank rather heavily, and keep nice fresh bulbs in my t5's but i've had similar thing happen to a couple of mine, lost a beautiful pink ric the same way, made me soo sad :'( ..... i think sometimes they get the "mystery no explanation shrinking issue" that happens sometimes with zoos, cause i have one that has been great for a long time also

 

[Phyl]

It might be a mystery to you... but there's something real affecting the rics. How's your Magnesium?

We've never been able to keep rics. We don't even try anymore.

 

[REEFLECTIONS]

i just saw one of the pics of your tank phyl, (what i aspire to btw) but you have such an amazing variety of corals in there would make me assume all of your levels are correct...

 

[Phyl]

There is something about the system that melts Rics. That's why I assumed it must be low nutrient related. Up until recently we have fed notoriously little to our tank. We've been feeding like MAD lately, so it would be interesting to see if they did better now.

 

[stcreef]

I had rics that wouldn't expand and appeared to be shrinking in one spot, but others were thriving. I realized the ones not doing so well were in a laminar flow. So I moved them and almost 24hrs later they were fully expanded. Just a thought..........

 

[REEFLECTIONS]

laminar flow? ???

 

[stcreef]

laminar flow? ???

Linear......aka unidirectional.......constantly flowing in a single direction parallel to the surface......

 

[REEFLECTIONS]

ok, thanks, my apprecitaion, my gratitiude to you.

 

[Candi]

This happened to my orange rics, in 2+ years one had grown to several on a rock they shared with a couple different colors (blues/greens)in my aquapod... over the past say 4 months or so they got smaller and smaller until they are all but gone, managed to get one off and put it in my 70g but it disappeared. However all the other rics in the aquapod (including a really neat yellow) are huge and growing/multiplying. Can't figure it out but bummed out as I really liked the oranges.

 

[agent007]

I feed pretty lightly. Phytoplankton or Coral Plankton once a week. Cyclopeez 3 times a week.
I feed fish once a day. All part of the effort to combat the algae - did I mention, by the way, it is a loosing battle.

Mg ~1300