RTN? Help!!!

[Silvio]

Last night I noticed one of my acros shedding tissue. When I got home from work tonight there was only the skeleton. Now, the bird's nest next to it seems to be fading at the bottom. I just took it out and put in a cup of tank water.
What is RTN. Is it a disease that spreads from coral to coral? Is it a reaction to some adverse condition. I raised my KH from 9 or 10 to 12. What do I do next?
Should I move my other SPS to my other tank? It has an even higher KH (14).
Should I do water changes?
Should I run carbon?

 

[Ray]

Frag the coral if it is RTNing
once it starts there is no stopping it

 

[Ray]

Also check this thread out
http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=418469

 

[denvig]

The quick KH rise may have started it. Do things sloooooow. A KH of 7 to 10 is more than high enough IMO

 

[Greg Hiller]

If you really want to save things you can use Chloramphenicol, but it is SERIOUS medicine for a reef tank, and you need to be SERIOUSLY prepared if you want to attempt to use. It will only work for SPS. I suggest you read up about it. If you do a search on Chloramphenicol, and Craig Bingman you might find the methodology he (and I) once used to treat an entire tank.

Here, I did the search for you. The info is HERE. If you need some of the med let me know.

http://www.reefs.org/library/talklog/c_bingman_040697.html

 

[ScottM]

great link greg!

 

[Chuck Spyropulos]

Rtn

I also have RTN in my tank...nobody really knows what RTN is, in fact RTN is a term that is used to label a host of coral diseases that are not well understood. I spoke with Julian Sprung at MACNA and he did not have much advice to combat the disease.

I have been running carbon and polyfilter and have been doing massive water changes(30 to 50 gallons per day, 300 gallon tank, 500 gallons total system) for the last week or two. Also, I reduced my lighting period and moved my lights further away from the top of my tank. The strong lighting can be stressful to corals that are not doing well. These steps seems to be turning things around. I actually have on acropora colony that turned totally white and I was going to remove it until I noticed that the tips are growing new polyps. Also my capricornus is growing back around the rim. I would try these steps before doing more serious treatments with chemicals.

I also fragged most, if not all of my colonies and gave them to people to hold in their tanks in isolation from my tank. These frags will provide me with some insurance agains a total loss since I can start over again and regrow the frags into full colonies.

Good Luck!

Last night I noticed one of my acros shedding tissue. When I got home from work tonight there was only the skeleton. Now, the bird's nest next to it seems to be fading at the bottom. I just took it out and put in a cup of tank water.
What is RTN. Is it a disease that spreads from coral to coral? Is it a reaction to some adverse condition. I raised my KH from 9 or 10 to 12. What do I do next?
Should I move my other SPS to my other tank? It has an even higher KH (14).
Should I do water changes?
Should I run carbon?

 

[NateHanson]

Great article greg.

 

[reefsmurf]

I brought a frag home from MACNA that RTN'ed..... and within a week my only two blue acro corals RTN'ed (the second one tissue sloughed). They were frags I bought from Armando about a year ago, so very sad.

So I would have to agree with they hypothesis that in many cases there is some chemical agent that triggers this as I haven't had any incidents in a very long time.

 

[Armando]

ARGH Macna killed my frags! Where is the "i hate Macna" thread?

 

[reefsmurf]

I believe we've had enough of those

 

[NateHanson]

Maybe Armando killed your frags to drum up more business from you. You could hate him!

 

[Chuck Spyropulos]

Falling Dominos

I brought a frag home from MACNA that RTN'ed..... and within a week my only two blue acro corals RTN'ed (the second one tissue sloughed). They were frags I bought from Armando about a year ago, so very sad.

So I would have to agree with they hypothesis that in many cases there is some chemical agent that triggers this as I haven't had any incidents in a very long time.

Yup, some sort of chain reaction it seems. Once one of my colonies RTN'd others followed. In five years since my tank has been running, this has never happened to me. But mine was due to a preventable equipment mishap.

 

[Greg Hiller]

I used the whole tank Chloramphenicol treatment once before on a 125 gallon frag tank. It stopped the progression of RTN, and saved most of the colonies. The RTN that I have had experience with is not a SLOW disease. It is almost always in response to the addition to your tank of a wild collected, or seriously stressed Acropora that was not prophalactically dipped in an iodine based bath.

The episode I had started from a very small wild collected A. gemmifera I picked up at a local shop. I would not recommend the treatment unless you have a tank with a lot of large colonies that are dropping like flys in a domino effect, and there is no reason from a chemical standpoint that anything is wrong (alk, calcium, magnesium, no sudden massive use of carbon or PO4 removers, no accidential poisoning of the tank with something or the other, no temp spikes, no huge corals dying, no loss of water motion, etc.). If all you did was added a wild collected Acro to your tank without a dip, and everything is melting ('melting...what a world, who would have thought a little girl like you could destroy all my beautiful.....' okay I'll stop there) then you may want to think about the CAM treatment.