My corals have recently been looking sickly. Most noticeable was my candy cane coral. They looked deflated and sick. I decided to do a 50% water change and the next day everything was super puffy and happy. I dose kalk daily and that’s about it. My levels all seemed good so this is a mystery. Has anyone seen this before? What makes candy cane corals super puffy?
Candy cane coral deflated
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water is everything...and when you put it in a little glass box 2 things happen...stuff that makes your corals happy gets used up...and stuff that makes them unhappy builds up...and the substances in question probably aren't things you normally test for...so in my keep it simple mind doing water changes is the easiest place to start to remedy this as i have no interest in monitoring systems or sending samples off to labs...it could even be a toxin that found its way in from your household rather than being a natural occurrence within the tank
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thank you for the reply. What’s throwing me off is i do water 10% water changes every week. But I agree something bad was taken out or something good was put back in
10% wc is not as good as you think. Obviously something was building up and your 10% wasn’t doing much.
I stopped doing 10% weekly and do more like 25% biweekly.
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I found on my nanos, that weekly 10% was enough to strip my tank of nutrients after a while. I had to back off. Now I do 1 - 20% every three weeks and hang pretty tightly between 5-10 ppm nitrate. I do have to dose though. Mainly through kalk and occasional magnesium doses.
But I get way better color when I hold off between water changes.
I run higher nutrients now. So I like to wait longer on my WCs now. Just did it yesterday on my nano. Did something like 3 gallons on a 12 gallon tank.
300g, not the most recent picture I have a bunch more coral in there now, fairly new tank still, migrated a 3month old 75 into this 300g a week ago or so, but I do a 25% water change weekly. did 25% weekly on the 75g before migration.
My reasoning is pretty simple, Toxins build up after a while no matter what, I like to keep them diluted down as much as possible.
Nutrients are absorbed out of the water column by all my critters and changing out some water replenishes some of the nutrients.
I know it is not a perfect system, but I would much rather do a water change weekly, than invest in pricy, and sometimes un-reliable Dosing systems to add my Calcium, Magnesium etc back into my water, or worse try and measure out dosing myself and manually add it to the system.
You may note Ido not have many SPS, that is by design. I stayed with the softies and LPS becauseI love all the movement from those types of corals.
![20230430_192039[1].jpg](https://test.reef2reef.com/data/attachments/3059/3059937-f6044aac487688b1b65d0ad8e2a94498.jpg "20230430_192039[1].jpg")
My reasoning is pretty simple, Toxins build up after a while no matter what, I like to keep them diluted down as much as possible.
Nutrients are absorbed out of the water column by all my critters and changing out some water replenishes some of the nutrients.
I know it is not a perfect system, but I would much rather do a water change weekly, than invest in pricy, and sometimes un-reliable Dosing systems to add my Calcium, Magnesium etc back into my water, or worse try and measure out dosing myself and manually add it to the system.
You may note Ido not have many SPS, that is by design. I stayed with the softies and LPS becauseI love all the movement from those types of corals.
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