I thought things were going well in the picoreef; the film stopped covering the substrate a some days ago, though there’s still some in the tank, the coral was opening up every night and feeding, then I get up Tuesday morning and find this:

Sun coral in trouble

There was a thin film over the affected polyp, the same stuff I’d siphoned out of the tank. I blew it off with a turkey baster and siphoned the few patches in the tank that morning, doing a 1/2 gal water change then and another 1 qt water change that evening. I did not feed that night. Yesterday morning I did another 1 qt water change and again this morning. Last night I fed, but just zooplex and I did not see the coral open to take it. The film on the substrate is still there in a few places, but not much. I find it frustrating that when the coral had been feeding well and the problem in the tank was going away then the polyp dies. Not when it wasn’t feeding for days, not when the tank looked like it was crashing from stuff all over everything….nooooooo, after the mess has been cleaned up and subsided, after the coral has been feeding really well and everything is looking good, then it starts to die overnight.

I feel especially frustrated because there is damn little I can do about it. I’m really stuck between a rock and a hard place. If the die-off is indeed caused by whatever that cyano-like slime that didn’t seem to be cyano which was no doubt caused by so much nutrient in the little tank, then the solution is to move ahead and put the sun coral in the minireef. No more noxious hitchhikers have shown up, so I really don’t think quarantine is necessary any more. OTOH, the reason this coral got quarantined in the picoreef was that I was treating the mini-reef for cyano—and I’ve had to repeat the treatment. After 24 hours (when it’d disappeared the first time I ever used this stuff) it not only hadn’t faded but had gotten noticeably worse. It wasn’t until after the 48 hour second dose that I saw any sign of decline at all. It does appear to be very, very, very, slowly fading away. But it’s not gone and tomorrow marks the one week period. Should I do a water change and another round of cyano treatment? Or should I just say “screw it”, do a water change and acclimate the sun coral to its permanent home? The cyano isn’t bad in the main tank. It’s just persistent in a couple of places, small patches. But if I just remove it by hand it keeps coming back—and spreading—as if I’d done nothing at all. The only thing that seems to keep it down to a couple of small pale patches is the cyano-killer.

So, which is worse for the sun coral—to stay in an overloaded, poorly filtered, tiny quarantine tank, or to go into the main tank where it which will be dosed with cyano-killer again (probably Sunday)?

Aside from a couple of small pale patches of cyano the mini-reef is in great shape. The creatures are happy, growing, thriving, feeding. Kyo absolutely pigged out at lunch today. Probably because he wasn’t hungry for breakfast this morning. Kalimba, Tam, Calypso, Cortez and the amphipod army love it when Kyo is too sleepy to eat in the morning. They scramble over the rock to scarf up the pellets he ignores or feints at.

I’m going to be up and out early tomorrow morning and gone all day so I won’t be able to do my usual late Friday afternoon water change. The weekend plans are still up in the air. My gut feeling is that I need to go ahead and move the sun coral over to the 29 gal tank. I’ll need a block of time to acclimate it. It will be either Saturday or Sunday. Tonight I’ll try to feed it, then do a water change before I leave the house tomorrow morning. This is really bad timing for the coral to have problems because I couldn’t just move it over that day because the cyano treatment was still too fresh and the skimmer was a bit wonky from the treatment. Now that the one week period for the treatment has expired I won’t be home to acclimate it right away. I feel edgy about each day that passes, but the coral doesn’t look any worse. The pic above was snapped today and it looked like that Tuesday morning. I feel certain the polyp is dead (or so far gone that it will not come back).  The rest of the colony looks healthy. I’ve got my fingers crossed—and if nothing happens to make me change my mind, I’ll move it to the mini-reef this weekend.