Lobo trouble

[Swordsman82]

My tank has been having a creeping issue. About a two months ago my croc island scoly, after doing amazing for 6 months slowly withered on one side and died. Weeks later my one of my Acan colonies started to not fully open. This was a colony that had been in the tank a year plus. I waited to see if it would recover on its own. It did not, so I dipped in Lugol's, and the flesh fell off the skeletal structure immediately, like they weren't attached to it at all.

The issue with that Acan colony appeared in another colony, then another. I lost 4 acan colonies that had been doing pretty great in the tank for years.

Now my Lobo is showing a strange issue of "bubbling" in the center. It comes and goes but it is most of the time bubbles up, and the inflated area moves very easily, like its full of water.
Parameters of the tank
Alk: 7.0-7.4
Nitrate: 0.0
Phosphate: 0.03

Dosing:
All For Reef: 2.5 mls a day

Feeding:
Fish get flake food one to two times a day
Corals a mix of Reef Roids, Benepets, Reef Chili, and Fauna Marin LPS pellets twice a week
Weekly dosing of Brightwell Restore for coral amino

Livestock:
2 clown fish
1 tailspot blenny
half dozen Astrea snails

I do have an extremely large bristle worm population, but to my knowledge they don't eat coral.

The strangest thing is everything in the tank is doing great, then it isn't and is dead in two weeks. None of the corals appeared to have bite marks or predation from possibly the blenny.

Hoping to get some help with this before I loose my Lobo too.

 

[thrillreefer]

Bacterial infection maybe. Have you tried dipping affected corals in Cipro and/or other antibiotics? Or even whole-tank dosing? I’ve done both on sick LPS and SPS with success, or at least no harm. And there are loads of threads on R2R or elsewhere that discuss protocols and dosages.

 

[Swordsman82]

I have not tried that yet. My only go to I have tried for bacterial stuff is iodine dips. I am a little nervous to try and dip it though. I lost multiple acans trying to help them with dips

 

[thrillreefer]

Haven’t tried iodine dip but my hunch is antibiotics would be much gentler than iodine. Their mode of action is often targeted only toward components of bacterial cells like their protein production, cell wall synthesis, or DNA replication machinery (Cipro fits here), which don’t exist in the same forms in animal cells. Versus pretty indiscriminate oxidation of biological molecules by iodine in any cell.

 

[thrillreefer]

I dipped a bubble coral that was near death from some type of infection. And it bounced back, healthy and growing today.

 

[dz6t]

Besides bacteria infection like other members discussed above, I notice that you are dosing All-For-Reef. I highly recommend dosing two-part additives.
1. AFR is calcium formate, how it works is that the “formate” part of the compound is consumed by bacteria then the bacteria release carbon dioxide in the water. Due to the high pH in salt water, carbon dioxide is converted to bicarbonate (show up as Alkalinity).
2. The “formate” part of the compound can also be converted to formaldehyde by bacteria, which is going to poison the fish, coral etc in the tank.
3. It lowers the pH if one really cares about maintaining high pH.

Calcium formate is really a questionable compound to dose in a reef tank. However, there is another compound will do exactly the job of AFR without the formaldehyde issue, it is calcium acetate, which was used many years ago but never catch on.

One of the issue for both AFR and calcium acetate is that they act as carbon dosing, which promotes bacteria growth, (good and bad bacteria) and increase the chances of bacteria infection.