Green button polyps\yellow polyps doing bad

[david]

Im going to try this here also, but here's the story.

2 years ago they were doing good, in my 55.
for the last 1.5 years in my 110 the yellow polyps shrunk from about 15 in patch to about 2 in patch.
The brown and green button polyps just never open during the day. i've seen them open at night a few times.
The buttons are at 3 levels in the tank, also in shade, light, an even upsidedown.
they all seem to be doing the same. no growth and closed up most all the time. In the 55 gal they doubled in size in 1 year.

The 110 tank has 2- 250 mh 6.5k and 3-65 wt -03 pc's for the first year, now 2-250 -10k's and pc's "3 weeks"
30 gal sump, small skimmer, small amount of bio balls.
4in dsb I just added another 50 lbs of esv last week, 100 lbs live rock.
nitrate is about 10-15
everything else stable

lots of Green star polyps and one orange/pink sps , pulsing xenia
all did/doing great. I removed the xenia it was getting too big too fast.
Green and blue shrooms doing ok-good "some in too much light"
fish all healthy.
I don't know what could be causing this problem
They don't seem to be getting eaten/picked at.
Dave.

[HoopsGuru]

A few questions:

Are they located near any other corals, such as the GSPs?

Have you tried relocating them to different areas, levels of the tank?

Do you feed them?

[david]

6 locations in all
the ones with gsp growing on them are doing the best.

no i dont feed them
I use to feed the tank 3-5 x per day for fish though, 2x now.

[Zack]

why don't you feed them? ever tried just them

[david]

when they were in my 55,they grew alot with no feeding.
I will try though.

[HoopsGuru]

Awfully hard to nail down. I would guess coral allelopathy from especially the gsp's but you stated that those rocks are doing the best. Try running some carbon on the tank and see if you see any improvement. Also, the yellows especially are predators and require feeding. I would suggest getting some Sweetwater Zooplankton and putting it through a blender to make the particle size smaller. Perhaps in your old tank, the increased feeding of the fish naturally gave it available food.

Keep this thread up to date. There are many possibilities so perhaps we can just go through trial and error, as we rule things out it may give a clearer indication.

One last question, has there been any major change to the tank in the last few months? (skimmer, lighting, anything)

[david]

Lots of changes in the last month.

This problem has been going on for 14 months.
First thing i did was tried carbon for 6 weeks, later lighting cycles, many of them over the last year.
ie no mh for 4 weeks, 2hr mh, 10 hr mh all 6.5k
normal is 7 hr mh.
I had I had 180 wt's of pc 50/50 bulbs the hole time average 10 hr day.
tried changing that also.
The pc's are what the buttons were loving when i had a 55 gal set up.
I will not fuss with the light anymore, That and carbon are all i messed with in the past 12 months, and placement.

Just for notes I am using 2- 4 ft NO bulbs 50/50 , o3 overdriven 3x. 1- 65 wt 50/50 pc and 2 250 wt 10k bulbs. as of 4 weeks ago

2 weeks ago I added 30 lbs esv sand,and removed most bio-balls.
Removed my 18" green haddoni anemone that ate my prize moorish Idol 8 weeks ago, that had been doing great for 11 months" getting new one soon "
This week I removed prefilters and started adding some sort of micro-food?
Today i removed 25 lbs of awsome liverock, mostly covered in green star polyps. and replaced with 27 lbs of O my god this stuff sucks compared to what i had live rock.
It's ok stuff,
and also bought a new 4" patch of green buttons, placed 2/3 hight on new rock. after 1 hr it was full open @ 1 am with lights off new buttons were still open and old buttons closed.

"I would guess coral allelopathy from especially the gsp's"
I don't think this was it, but still possible. I removed most of the rock so i could control the gsp for now on.

Gsp is now on 2 small rocks 6" sq. and my filter box 20" sq.
The yellow polyps are now gone with the 25 lbs liverock.

I will try anything other than lighting now.

My success at keeping things that i like is very good, Ie Moorish Idol, green haddoni, powder blue tang. Very difficult according to others.
green and blue shrooms 3- sps? pulsing xenia" had to get rid of", gsp, coralline allege.
All of these have done excellent.

On a positive note 2 weeks ago 1- 6" green button rock had some gsp's on it. I took it out of the water and brushed on calicum chloride to the Gsp.
8 bristle worms jumped out of the rock the rock was out of the water for about 20 min.
Over the next week that rock seem to be doing a little better than before.
some polyps were about 60% open compared to the normal 35% open, from complectly closed.
any thoughts on that ??

You can see a pic. here http://www.reeflounge.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=199&highlight= in my last pic.
this is what the brown button polyp has looked like for the last year

[david]

Quick update
I placed one piece of buttons in my sump zero light.
and have been trying to target feed the rest.
no results yet on above
new buttons are still looking great.