george9
Active Member
Hi all,
I just noticed my blue tuxedo urchin I’ve had since March is looking a bit sad. He is missing some spines, and some spines look “droopy” as if there has been some sort of chronic stressor causing him to slowly lose spines. This is a mainly FOWLR aquarium with some random zoas and other softies that hitchhiked their way from my old tank but there has been no issues with salinity or high nitrates. I have a fromia star and cleaner shrimp doing well and my soft corals (mushrooms and kenyas) are not closed at all and haven’t showed any signs of distress.
I am thinking the most glaring issue could be my recent use of Phosguard to control phosphate. I had some issues with cyano after beating dinos. I let my PO4 creep up and stay in the .20-.25 range. I’ve been trying to get this down to around .10 consistently using phosguard over the past 2 months or so. I’m not sure if this has leached enough aluminum to start causing issues with inverts, but I haven’t noticed any issues with my other inverts or soft corals. Maybe the urchin is the most sensitive or any organism I have and it is the canary in the coal mine here?
I have been using almost 2x the recommended dosage of phosguard to make a dent in the PO4, but cut back my usage yesterday to the recommended amount when I noticed this issue. He is still crawling around pretty quickly and his tentacles are QUITE active extending a significant distance from his body. I definitely think he can bounce back if I fix this issue quickly. He is not starving because he made a significant dent in some lobophora on one of my largest rocks just this week.
Only other changes I can think of are:
1. slightly bumped MG up from 1200 to 1350
2. dosed a TINY amount of iodide (talking mere drops) for my shrimp.
Has anyone noticed issues with urchins using phosguard or should I focus elsewhere? I bought some poly filter to hopefully absorb some of the excess aluminum. Haven’t done an ICP test.
First photo is yesterday and second photo is March when I acquired it. It has significantly less spines, although it has grown quite a bit.
I just noticed my blue tuxedo urchin I’ve had since March is looking a bit sad. He is missing some spines, and some spines look “droopy” as if there has been some sort of chronic stressor causing him to slowly lose spines. This is a mainly FOWLR aquarium with some random zoas and other softies that hitchhiked their way from my old tank but there has been no issues with salinity or high nitrates. I have a fromia star and cleaner shrimp doing well and my soft corals (mushrooms and kenyas) are not closed at all and haven’t showed any signs of distress.
I am thinking the most glaring issue could be my recent use of Phosguard to control phosphate. I had some issues with cyano after beating dinos. I let my PO4 creep up and stay in the .20-.25 range. I’ve been trying to get this down to around .10 consistently using phosguard over the past 2 months or so. I’m not sure if this has leached enough aluminum to start causing issues with inverts, but I haven’t noticed any issues with my other inverts or soft corals. Maybe the urchin is the most sensitive or any organism I have and it is the canary in the coal mine here?
I have been using almost 2x the recommended dosage of phosguard to make a dent in the PO4, but cut back my usage yesterday to the recommended amount when I noticed this issue. He is still crawling around pretty quickly and his tentacles are QUITE active extending a significant distance from his body. I definitely think he can bounce back if I fix this issue quickly. He is not starving because he made a significant dent in some lobophora on one of my largest rocks just this week.
Only other changes I can think of are:
1. slightly bumped MG up from 1200 to 1350
2. dosed a TINY amount of iodide (talking mere drops) for my shrimp.
Has anyone noticed issues with urchins using phosguard or should I focus elsewhere? I bought some poly filter to hopefully absorb some of the excess aluminum. Haven’t done an ICP test.
First photo is yesterday and second photo is March when I acquired it. It has significantly less spines, although it has grown quite a bit.
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