Torch coral slowly fading away??

[Mjc092]

Hi everyone! Hope everyone had a good holiday! Well let’s start with the issue. My buddy gave me a torch coral several months ago as well as a hammer coral. The hammer and torch are next to each other, not touching. Both located at the bottom right corner of a 30g long tank. The hammer has been growing new heads and just doing great. The torch was fully opened when I got it but has slowly been receding over the past month. Any ideas on how to bring this prized coral back? Also I have a lot of green slime algae starting to form. This is not normal for me. I added 2 Mexican turbos and cut back on feeding only frozen lrs reef frenzy 1x daily.

I do dose the following: 5ml of Reef Plus 2x week, 5ml of strontium 1x week, Kent Chromaplex mixed in with food 3x week.

My parameters are as follows: nitrate 10, phos .25’ish, mag 1300, salinity 1.025. Temp 77. Black box led light 11 hours a day 100 blue and 20 white. Uv led 5050 strip for about 4 hours as night light. Using 1 teaspoon kalk in ato.

 

[myrjon]

mag is real low what is alk at.

 

[Mrx7899x]

How much flow is it getting. It Looks like it's in a shaded area they like a little more light and flow then a hammer.

Green slime is probably cyanobacteria from the amino acids in the reef plus and the chromaplex maybe cut them back a little.

 

[Mjc092]

Alk is 9 and I had a dip to an alk of 7 around 2 weeks ago when I refilled my ato bucket with just fresh water. There was a lot of residue in the bucket and I wanted to see if this residue still had any kalk left in it. Well I can tell you that there wasn’t enough for normal operations.

The coral is kind of shaded on the left side.

I’m thinking of breaking up the 6 heads and planting them at different locations around the tank to see if I can find the best place for it.

I recently downgraded to this 30g tank in September and do not like how small it is. It’s hard to manage flow for my tank. Currently using 2 jebao pp4 wavemakers set on pulse wave mode at the 2 light mark and the dial is set at the half mark.

Maybe too much flow or not enough? Sprinkle in the lower light fluctuations in alk and maybe that’s why they are shrinking? I know this is tough to help someone out without fully knowing the tank. I’m currently saving for a dosing pump to switch to 2 part. I just got a good deal on a used Aquac remora skimmer and will be ditching my Coralife super skimmer.


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[falconut]

I had similar issues with some LPS & it drove me crazy trying to figure it out. Eventually I started dosing lugols solution & they eventually stopped receding. This was years ago, but I continued to dose lugols & everything grew great afterwards. I forget the dose, but it was only a few drops every few days. Maybe worth a try. Good luck.

 

[Mjc092]

Thanks for the help!! Im going to try the lugols out. I asked my buddy that has the mother colony about my dilemma and he suggested that I move it away from the hammer and see what happens. Once in a while I’ve seen a super long tentacle come out of the hammer and kind of just feel out the neighborhood. So coral fighting may be the cause to my problems. On a side note, what do you do to get algae off of a coral? I have green slime algae growing on some of my lps skeletons.