Ok, where did I start going wrong with my zoas?

[Shooter7]

Back on January 1st, my new 120 gal tank was born. I transferred into it the entire contents of my 26 gal bow and some odds and ends from a 10 gal. This system includes a 30 gal sump with fuge that had LR and chaeto in it. Euroreef skimmer, mag 12 return, Seio 1500's and MJ 900's for in tank flow, AC jr controls the heater at 80 - 81.5 degrees and the dual 250w 12k reeflux MH bulbs. Things were pretty good from the start. The zoas I put in there thrived in the new surroundings. Looked like this:





And the purple ones up in my avatar. Back then my pH ran around 8.0, not sure about Ca and alk as I wasn't terribly worried about it when I first started. Nitrates stayed around 5 and phosphates were 0.3 or maybe a tiny bit higher. They grew great, increased in numbers, I had many frags off of them, and their colors were beautiful.

Around May to June, I decided I wanted to try the SPS route and ordered frags from a couple of the guys in the SPS forum. I opened up my Seios all the way for more flow, but kept the same lights and lighting schedule. I started adding kalk water and bumped up my pH to 8.1 - 8.2, alk at around 10, nitrates and phosphates are undetectable, especially after I started running a canister with phosphate remover and carbon in it. Zoas still seemed to be ok. In July we had a very bad storm that knocked power out for a little over a day here. I eventually ran out and bought a generator to power some of my pumps. After this, I began developing this light tannish/gray colored "fuzz" on the sand (SSB), rocks, back glass, and powerheads. I still have it to some degree even now. I decided to revamp my sump as my fuge area was getting detritus piled up in it. I opened up my sump area and created a fuge in a tank above my sump that gravity drains down to it now. While waiting to do this, I had put off doing a water change for longer than usual. I did some tests at this point as I was noticing trouble with my zoas. Only thing of note was that my Mg level was pretty low at 1140. I have taken steps to do the sump revamping as stated, a 30+ gal water change, added some of randy's recipe to boost my Mg up to 1300. The "fuzz" seems like it's going away to some extent now.

My zoas continue to look poorly though. Those ones with the blue rings above, someone told me they needed more light. So I split up the colony and placed them in various heights on the rock to see who did best. All of them continue to only slightly open irregardless of position. My eagle eyes still open just fine, but with very faded colors and almost no skirt extension. My purple ones open but leave their skirts curled inward and also faded. I place some of the ones in the first pic in my 10 gal with PC lighting and they have opened up much better and with more skirt, but their colors are nothing near like you see in the pics up there. Is it something to do with my water chemistry that's wrong? Other corals seem to be doing great. I have frilly shrooms that are growing and multiplying, rics, LPS, etc doing fine. Another victim here is my GSP's, as they only come out occasionally now and have not grown at all, but they used to be out constantly and grow like weeds. I also appear to have lost a couple of large feather duster worms during this too. So anyway, if anyone can lend any insight after all of this I'd appreciate it. As mentioned, I have tried different lighting by placing in different positions in the tank (higher, lower, full light, shaded, etc) with no real effects being noted. Thanks for any help.

[geoxman]

sent a PM

[divecj5]

Can you possibly post what was sent in the PM? Not trying to be nosy or anything, just interested to see what the suggestions were and what you've decided to try. I'm always looking to learn and see what people do to try and diagnose problems.

Adam

[Shooter7]

It was a suggestion regarding the possibility of nudis. I have not really gone that route of checking because I had not had any problems in the past and have not added much to my tanks in the past few months except SPS. I won't be able to do anything until later this evening, but I intend on taking a very close look at my various zoas to see if there's any nudis on them. I'll post on here if I come up with any. I've been trying to squeeze in some time while at work today to look at the dipping thread above and such. Thing I wonder about is that if this were a prob due to something like nudis, why did some of the zoas I took from my 120 and placed in my 10g start looking better? hmmmm...zoas under magnifying glass later today.

[Shooter7]

Another possibility is this weird "fuzz" stuff I've had. After it started, my two large featherdusters that were on a rock on the sandbed just disappeared, my frilly shrooms that would drape themselves off the rock they're on and out onto the sand stopped doing that and would actually curl their edges up so as not to have to touch the "fuzz" on the sand. I'm really not sure just what this stuff is, but I'm hoping I'm getting the upper hand on it by really dialing in my water chemistry. Still haven't seen improvement in the zoas yet though.

[K-Dubbs]

Any fish you have that might take a liking to nipping at the zoas?

I had a lemonpeel angel that nipped at my zoas and feather dusters but nothing else.

[Shooter7]

I don't really think so. I have a foxface, scopas, 3 lyretail anthias, a chromis, and 2 ocellaris in there right now is all and I've never seen any of them hassle any of my corals. The fish get fed daily and they'd have to hit about 8 different zoa colonies every day without me seeing it to keep them all looking this sad. But again, I'm not thinking this is fish related at this time.

[Whaledriver]

I don't know much but I would say that things got stressed during the power outage and the tank is reaching a new equilibrium. Alot of bad stuff can happen in a canister filter when the flow stops. Stop looking for problems that might be and work with the problems you know. This is still a new tank and things are settling into the new environment of the tank. Watch your alk,ca,mg.

Just keep doing water changes on a regular basis and things will settle in. 10 or 15 % weekly with ro/di water and things should be fine in a month or so. This is still a new tank and the power outage has reversed some settling of the tank environment.

[Shooter7]

Attacking the problems that I'm aware of is what I've been doing. I have corrected everything that I feel I can at this point. Yes, the tank is almost 9 months old at this point, however, it was stocked with well established rock from systems that had been running for some time. I had no true cycle or anything like that, a little algae and cyano at the very start that went away on its own. And while it was new like that, I had 4+ months of the zoas looking great, better than they did in the previous tank.

Ok, here's what I came up with from my investigating so far this afternoon. I pulled 3 larger colonies (from baseball to slightly larger than golfball sized) from my large display, and 2 smaller groups of about 20 polyps from my 10 gal. I inspected them under very bright white lighting with a large magnifying glass and then dipped them in ro/di to see if anything would come off. This revealed the following:

One starfish embedded at the base of the largest group. Don't know if this means anything as I see these guys at various places in my tank and could have been a coincidence, but here's pics:





And then there were a bunch of these "specks" that came off in the FW dip water. They looked like little bitty pod-like guys to me, but it was hard for me to tell because they're so small. I looked extremely hard for any of these eggs that I've seen pics of and found none at all over virtually hundreds of polyps. Here's my specs...sorry, best pic I could do:



Any further input?

[Azurel]

What are your water parameters? Not "everything measures out" but actual measurements. It sounds to me like it might be a chemistry issue...Something lacking in your water or in excess.

[Shooter7]

Well, I put most everything in that first post. The values as of my last tests a couple days ago are:

pH - 8.2 as measured per probe on my AC jr

Alk - 10.4 dKH (salifert - actually, all following results are salifert)

Ca - 400

PO4 - undetectable

NO3 - undetectable

Mg - 1300 (was 1140 until I added some randy's recipe to it about a week ago)

Temp - ranges from 80 - 81.5

Lighting schedule on two 250w 12k Reeflux halides is 9 hours.

Fish get fed once per day. Nori for the veggie guys, formula one flakes, cyclopeeze, frozen enriched brine (strained), and maybe some pellet, but not all at the same time. Most of the time it's the nori and flake.

Kalk gets dripped almost nightly.

RO/DI is the only water that goes into my tanks.

Oh, and I run PHOSaR and carbon in a canister filter that gets cleaned frequently. But I started running this AFTER the problems with the zoas started.

[Azurel]

That all looks good......What is your specific gravity? Man with test like that I can be sure as to what it is....Possiably a bactrial infection. Have you dipped the FW/iodine dip?

[Shooter7]

Iodine is something I'm lacking right now, so can't do that yet.

As I look over at my 10 gal, everything is open and pretty happy in there. The guys I moved from the 120 into the 10 are definitely doing much better, not as colorful as in my pic, but still much better. All I did with them was move them from one tank into the other. The 10 gal needs a water change pretty badly and is lit with a 90w PC. Don't even know what the water tests in there are. It does have coralline everywhere, so something is happy. But anyway, within a couple of days of being moved there the zoas are looking real good in comparison, and I didn't do anything but move them.

[Shooter7]

Oops, sorry, salinity is 1.025.

[Shooter7]

Something that occurred to me last night after I signed off here, back in June I started switching over my salt from one brand to another with my water changes. I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes as I did it just with regular 20% water changes and maintained all my numbers where they had been with the previous salt, but this is just something else that coincides with the poor performance of my zoas. I switched from using Coralife to Instant Ocean. Also coincidentally, I am still using what I had left of my coralife in my 10 g tank. So, if anyone thinks this might have anything to do with things, let me know please. Like I said, I tried to make the switch slowly and not get any variance in my chemistry values otherwise. I have done probably 4 or 5 water changes since I started using IO.

[geoxman]

"Iodine is something I'm lacking right now, so can't do that yet."

Do you know what your levels are? You might be low? I have the Seachem test if you need. I also have some Lugols if you need

"The 10 gal needs a water change pretty badly"

They might like it there, higher nutrients and you are not running carbon on that tank-are you?

I switch salt to whatever MS or GWA has the best deal on, and have done so for years-so I would not worry about the salt. JMHO I switch from TropicMarin to Coralife back and forth and rarely use IO. It is usually low in a few things, but $30 for 200gl is hard to beat!

I am glad there were no nudis! and the starfish could have been munching-it is hard to tell from the pic though.

If they are happy in the 10gl QT then all you have to do is figure out what you are doing different in the 90. Good luck and LMK

[Shooter7]

No, I haven't been running carbon in the small tank. It's my low maintenance setup. And yeah, one of those sales made me think about drifting over to IO from coralife and that's how I ended up with that. I had read on some of the salt polls of the known or perceived deficiencies of various salts, which is why I watched my parameters closely when I did the first couple of changes and tried to make sure things stayed or were adjusted to where they had been before in my 120g. The main difference I can come up with in my bigger tank is just that, much lower nutrients. Not only does the 10g not have carbon, I don't run a skimmer on it either. I pull all kinds of gunk out of my big tank, have a good sized fuge with chaeto in it, and feed pretty lightly. When I first started the tank, I had nitrates that were around the 5 - 7 range and phosphates were a little higher. They're not even registering now.

Here's my purple guys from back in the day:

[czieler]

I know exactly how you're feeling ... my zoos do great in one tank..and not the tank I setup for them..heh..

I'm slowly raising the salinity now as it was suggested to me ( I had it at 1.022)... hoping it ends up helping...

But it sure is frustrating sometimes when stuff does well in one tank and not in another!

[beaker77]

According to ZoaID.com some Asterina Starfish eat zoanthids. The last one the their gallery looks an awful lot like the one in your pic.

[Shooter7]

Yeah, he could have been bugging them. I just question the tank wide ability to irritate 7 or 8 groups of zoanthids simultaneously. I still lean towards the chemistry angle because this is a tank-wide event with similar symptoms across the board of faded colors, incomplete opening, and almost no skirts out. That coupled with the fact that I stared at several of these colonies last night, both in and out of the tank with a magnifying glass under intense light, and I was not able to find anything on them that looked like it could be doing something to them. And even under that starfish I found no tissue damage, or at least none my eyes could detect. Like I said, I stared at these things until my eyes almost bugged out of my head last night. I even waited until way after lights out and swooped in with flashlight in hand - still nothing.

[ct_vol]

Have you checked your tank after the lights went out??? About an hour or 2 after dark, sometimes preds come out... I have a bunch of those Asterinas in my tank with no affect... But in my 75, I had an outbreak of "fuzz" that seemed to make some of my zoo's uncomfortable... I think its some sort of Algae... Is it Greyish in color and cover the substrate like a carpet??? I'm still battling it with weekly water changes and heavy skimming... But LMK if you have pics of your "fuzz"...

[Shooter7]

I'll see what I can do on the fuzz picture. It sounds exactly like what you're describing though. And it has to be some kind of an irritant because everything that comes into contact with it tries to avoid it. I've already posted how my frilly shrooms, who normally expand out and touch the sand from where they are actually were keeping the lower part of themselves curled up so as not to touch this stuff on the sand. I think....think, I'm making some headway on it since revamping my sump, doing a large water change, bumping my Mg up, and running my canister filter with the phosphate remover in it. The stuff seems to be a little less anyway.

For anyone reading this, it is just as described above, a greyish fuzz that develops bubbles in it towards the end of the day. It's almost like a jr sized dinoflagellate. It has some blobs in it too. It covered the majority of my substrate and up many of the rocks, but mostly on the bottom substrate. It seemed like it popped up overnight.

Pics I do have, a couple of what my zoas that are pictured above currently look like (I need to work with my white balance a bit, color isn't right on, but will do):

The purples


and my eagle eyes

[ct_vol]

Love your purples...

[jasonj90]

that sounds kinda like cyanobacteria, except its not the cyan color. hmm.... have you checked your phosphate levels? it is possible that could be the culprit.

[Shooter7]

yep, posted that they are undetectable per salifert test. I'm also running a full container of PHOSaR currently. Plus this doesn't really behave in the same manner as cyano, or at least any that I've ever had or seen.