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[Victoria]

Operation Typhoon

As you all know my tank has gone through some changes. First after discovering that I had Red Bug, I under went treatment. All was well for three weeks after treatment. I had to go out of town for a week. Then it happened, some coral started to die for no apparent reason. My husband called to let me know and ask what he could do. I asked him to test, which he did, and all was within safe limits. The salinity was a little high, but he added some fresh water and brought it back down.

The death toil was 2 Acorpora and 2/3 of an pocillipora colony. Upon listening to podcast #12 on tank maturity. Rob read Eric borneman’s thread. It gave me some insight in to my tank.

I decided on the advice of Eric

Pull that Acropora that has turned brown out of the tank, and pull any corals still actively sloughing. Try to fragment them about 1/2-1" ahead of tissue loss area and then isolate those in a separate tank/container of water from another tank or even freshly made...don't use tank water they are in. Then, wait a day or so, and you should be able to replace them with no further sloughing. If any of the fragments slough while you are waiting, remove them immediately and re-isolate the others. Try not to let the sloughing ones stay in a tank with non-sloughing ones for any length of time.

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After I removed the sloughing corals in to a QT tank, I decided to change my tank around. I thought about what Rob read…

Now, the "too mature" system is the old tank syndrome. Happens in nature, too. That whole forest fire reinvigorating the system is true. Equally true on coral reefs where the intermediate disturbance hypothesis is the running thought on why coral reefs maintain very high diversity...they are stable, but not too stable, and require storms, but not catastrophic ones....predation, but not a giant blanket of crown of thorns, mass bleaching, or loss of key herbivores.

Which brings me to operation typhoon.. Here is the before picture

And here is the after picture.

Let me know what you think about the tank now.