Alveopora

[Staceon]

I would like to hear as much detail/experience as you can muster on this coral. Some of you may remember my on again, off again problems with this coral for the last year and half. Well I am still having problems with it. I recently found my water change water I was getting had a salinity of around 1.018, so that didn't help anything.

I orginally had the coral under 65K PC's, about 7 months ago switched over to 10K MH and it has not been the same since. In the last month it has been the worst.

Polyp extension is down to almost nothing, going from 6 inch extension just a few months ago. Also starting to get brown looking spots where some of the polys should be.

There are two colonies of the Alveopra in the tank. Both are looking about the same. One is much larger than the other. I have the larger one under a cliff and smaller one rests near the bottom of 18" deep tank. So larger one is mostly shaded.

The tank is very underskimmed 54G. About 120lbs of LR. Lighting is 1 175W 10K with 3 NO's as actenics. Tank been running about 3 years. Ca around 400. Nitrates about 5 ppm.

Horge, I think I remember you said before that although you have never seen one, these come from deeper waters?

Any comments welcomed.

[sculpin]

What are your feeding habits? I have two goniopora which I recently moved to a heavily fed 20L tank, both of which have demonstrated signs of improvement, at least based on polyp extension. Both of these have been 1 year in captivity, and were previously in a show-type tank.

The tank they're in now is designed for corals and other invertebrates with special feeding requirements and is fed 3 drops tahitian blend, two sizes of golden pearls, 1/2 tsp sweet water zooplankton, 2 cubes of brine shrimp, and 1 cube of mysis, daily. It also has a mature 3" sand bed with a large worm population, 100-200 micro stars, mysis shrimp, and burrowing amphipods. Suprisingly, I have minimal microalgae problems (although my macroalgae grows amazingly quickly).

I'm hoping that by fostering a large animal population I can increase the volume of circulating zooplankton, thus providing more nutrition to difficult to keep corals such as goniopora.

Hope this helps,
Mike