Cali Kid Corals

Torch flesh peeling back from the bottom?

IOnceWasLegend said:
@Danhsj I have been dosing Restor, and did an in-tank cipro treatment last week following the guide on Humble Fish, with no change.

I've also recently had an explosion of vermetid snails, which I was made aware of the extent of them when I did a water change, stirred up some detritus, and saw tons of mucus strings. Given the location dependency of torch death, the fact that one of my torches (on the sand bed) has been doing fine, and the fact vermetid snails stinging the bottom of flesh could cause this recession, I'm wondering if that may be the case. I'm doing a dip of my affected rapunzel torch today, and I'm going to try and put it on a frag rack in the tank away from any vermetids.

Related note: I'm pretty sure the answer is "purge your rockwork", but is there any in-tank method to treat (or knock back) vermetid snails? I've been gluing the tips of some, but they keep getting worse.
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I dosed (when I had Rsr250) 3 ml each night from(mixture of a 500mg pill and 50 ml rodi water). I did it for 6 nights straight
 
JVU said:
I think of them as less of a pest than bristle worms and some people don’t think of those as a pest at all. They both could be considered clean up crew yet can cause problems at high levels. Vermetids are just so easy to kill and don’t multiply that fast. Plus most of the time they don’t cause problems.

If they are hurting your coral or other livestock then they are a pest, but pretty easy to deal with in my experience.
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What makes you say bristles worms are worse? I don’t see them hurting corals really? I do however see vermetids damaging corals often. At least they don’t move! I still don’t understand how they reproduce and or pop up random places. They are nowhere near the end of the world, and like almost all pests easiest to deal with early on before your tank gets overrun, but I’d say worse than bristle worms for sure
 
Coral reefer said:
What makes you say bristles worms are worse? I don’t see them hurting corals really? I do however see vermetids damaging corals often. At least they don’t move! I still don’t understand how they reproduce and or pop up random places. They are nowhere near the end of the world, and like almost all pests easiest to deal with early on before your tank gets overrun, but I’d say worse than bristle worms for sure
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For me bristle worms get too numerous and cause problems sometimes, whereas vermetids are there but don’t. I’m just saying they are in the same category in my mind except that vermetids are easier to control.
 
JVU said:
For me bristle worms get too numerous and cause problems sometimes, whereas vermetids are there but don’t. I’m just saying they are in the same category in my mind except that vermetids are easier to control.
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What problems have they caused you though?
 
Coral reefer said:
What problems have they caused you though?
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The main thing is that they sting me pretty often and it hurts and gets inflamed for a couple days. You can say that isn’t a direct problem for the coral, but it makes it so I don’t want to do in-tank maintenance or deal with problems in the tank like coral that needs to be moved. And makes it so I don’t enjoy my tank as much, which is a problem. Even makes it harder to harvest chaeto so I don’t as often as I should since they get in there sometimes. I don’t clean the sand often because I’d have to deal with them. Etc.

Also, they add a lot of biomass I don’t want. I’m pretty sure I have more bristle worms by mass than fish, partly because I stock lightly. Maybe a few times more. This brings down the pH more than I want at night and moves it that much closer to a possible feed-forward crash if anything dies like with RTN.

They cause me some headaches with my Berghia breeding since they can eat eggs/hatchlings so I have to keep them out of the Berghia breeding tanks which adds extra work.

As far as I know they have never done anything directly against my coral, but I suspect they have harmed clams. Can’t prove it and I’m well aware of the dogma about them only eating after something is already dying, but it’s what I think.

Probably some other stuff I’m not coming up with at the moment. I just don’t like them. I’d pay a lot if it were possible to not have them. I have plenty of other clean up crew I don’t dislike. So yeah to me they are a pest. None of this is a big deal which is why I wasn’t listing it up front. But vermetids don’t bug me very much at all, and when they do they are gone in a minute.
 
I hate vermetids besides their bothering of corals because I often have to deal with rock in client tanks and they often poke me and it’s not uncommon for the wounds to get infected for me. The worst is when the bit of shell that pokes me breaks off under the skin and I can’t get it out easy.
 
I have a number of sps that have encrusted the tube of vermetid snails. Those mucus nets have never caused a problem for a species that sensitive. I’ve stopped worrying about them a long time ago. Just my 2 cents.

Just for clarity, I’m dealing with the small 1cm purple variety. I have never dealt with very large ones like I’ve seen in some older tanks.
 
Blaise006 said:
I have a number of sps that have encrusted the tube of vermetid snails. Those mucus nets have never caused a problem for a species that sensitive. I’ve stopped worrying about them a long time ago. Just my 2 cents.

Just for clarity, I’m dealing with the small 1cm purple variety. I have never dealt with very large ones like I’ve seen in some older tanks.
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Those larger ones just need a faster coral to grow over them :)
My monti fighting rock has a few of the huge ones and the montis just grow right over them.

Coral reefer said:
I hate vermetids... they often poke me and it’s not uncommon for the wounds to get infected for me. The worst is when the bit of shell that pokes me breaks off under the skin and I can’t get it out easy.
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Yes, this is my experience too. Only time I get cuts on my hands is from those sharp tips.
 
Was anyone able to stop this in their tank? I seem to be having the same issue, I've lost 3 hammers over the past month. They look fine one day, look sad the next, and then full polyp bailout the next day. Did switching salt help? I also use red sea coral pro, I saw it was a possible culprit.
 
Here is picture an hour before this guy was pulled yesterday, I'm worried it's just going to keep mowing through my euphyllia, I never saw any BJD
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Everyone that is using red sea pro and having euphyllia issues your problem is simple,,,, that salt is extremely too high in alk and everything else in it for euphyllia,,,, that salt is meant for sps only I learned that the hard way years ago, get the blue top
 
I concur with the high alk being a possabliity. I've lost 3 torches and an octospawn in the last couple of months. I was having a contaminant issue (Tin) so I kept water changing every 5-7 days...and my alk went up and up and up. Slowly....but still. They were happy at 6 and dyeing back at 9+. I have good control of alk with kalkwasser in general...but the WC was killing me.

IORC, Red Sea, TM, etc....they all have a 9-11 dKh mixes and some have an 7-8 dKh mixes. If you are only doing WC to maintain ALK, maybe small changes with 11 dKh works well (it did for me for quite a while....but I did WC every other week). Since I've been running with Kalkwasser I've been able to dial in the alk, calc, mag levels better....but WC with high ALK salt has become a problem...so I've switched to TM Pro for the moment.

Depends on how you want to keep your reef IMHO. If dKh is the problem you are having with your euphylia....(it does seem to be mine....but I'll know more in a month once the new recipe has time to settle in).
 
Prestondeeply said:
I concur with the high alk being a possabliity. I've lost 3 torches and an octospawn in the last couple of months. I was having a contaminant issue (Tin) so I kept water changing every 5-7 days...and my alk went up and up and up. Slowly....but still. They were happy at 6 and dyeing back at 9+. I have good control of alk with kalkwasser in general...but the WC was killing me.

IORC, Red Sea, TM, etc....they all have a 9-11 dKh mixes and some have an 7-8 dKh mixes. If you are only doing WC to maintain ALK, maybe small changes with 11 dKh works well (it did for me for quite a while....but I did WC every other week). Since I've been running with Kalkwasser I've been able to dial in the alk, calc, mag levels better....but WC with high ALK salt has become a problem...so I've switched to TM Pro for the moment.

Depends on how you want to keep your reef IMHO. If dKh is the problem you are having with your euphylia....(it does seem to be mine....but I'll know more in a month once the new recipe has time to settle in).
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For sure it's wayyyy to high of alk for euphyllia there's no question about it, ocean is like 7.2 most reefers stay around 8 to 8.5 with regular tanks or mixed reefs , however sps people usually like it to be higher hence the coral pro comes in, I used the pro for a while due to lfs had it and didn't know, torches hammers, shrooms etc, do not like it, actually see much better results when it's around 7.2 to 8.3 in my tank and I have a ton of torches and hammers
 
2cent said:
Everyone that is using red sea pro and having euphyllia issues your problem is simple,,,, that salt is extremely too high in alk and everything else in it for euphyllia,,,, that salt is meant for sps only I learned that the hard way years ago, get the blue top
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I disagree with this pretty emphatically, given that - at the time I started this thread - I was keeping torches at ~10 dKH, was using Red Sea Pro, and the problem persisted through several different salt changes. Even when doing 20% water changes, Red Sea Pro only bumped my alk up to 10.4 (before rapidly going back down to ~10 dKH).

I eventually found out that my specific issue—tissue peeling back from the bottom (usually biased towards one side) of one head of torch out of several dozen, gradual 'withering' of the torch rather than rapid BJD, etc—was due to white bugs on euphyllia, after a lot of trial and error.

High alk can potentially be *a* cause depending on someone's tank, but pitching it as *the* cause oversimplifies it.
 
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