Question regarding to Leather Coral

[teambutterfield]

Hi, I have several Leather Coral in a 50 gal. with turbo floator as my skimmer in the 10 gal. sump. My lighting consist 2 96w pc actinic, 2 36w pc actinic, 2 32w pc 10k day light, and one 10k 175wmh. All the corals are doing very well, except the leather coral. All the leather corals are about 1 1/2 years old, their tenticle stop coming out about 2 months ago, and they are starting to getting smaller. Please tell me what i should do.

PS: The finger coral in that tank is doing very very well.

[bulldogger1]

In the 1 1/2 years that you have had them have they ever molted (shed a layer of skin)? Are they getting enough water movement? Do you see any evidence that they are decomposing (holes, brittle, crumbling)? What are your water parameters? Sorry for all the questions but I keep 6 different type of leathers so I am a little curios.

[Pineapple House]

I think we need to know a bit more prior to this. What fish do you have? Did you recently add anything? What are all your water parimeters? etc.

What gets me, is that you say you have seven leathers. Leathers, as well as a large variety of soft corals, will release a strong stress coat, when stressed, or is in danger. Lets say you add a nice frogspawn to your tank, the frogspawn fully opens, touching the leather. The leather will add out a strong toxin into the water, which should hopefully should discurage the neighbors growth (kill it). Although I doubt this, this could be a good posibility. Any new additions to the tank could have stunted this. Soft corals might also fight with themselves. Considering you have had these for a while, they might have grown, and soon endangering themselves overtime.

One thing I should add, is have you ever bought any new fish lately? Some fish will tend to nip at coral polyps, esspecielly some dwarf angels, some wrasses, as well as a large variety in more agressive species (triggers).

One other thing that catches my mind, is you might have gotten a parasetic snail into your tank somehow. I have a feeling this is what it might be. The Rapa rapa snail, is from the group Coralliophilidae. They will burrow into almost any coral, such as a Toadstool leather, or finger leather. They will grow fast and slowly kill the coral off. So just remember, if you have a soft coral that for some odd reason is not doing well, look for any holes in it, and check it, there might be one of these interesting, yet lethal hitchhikers having a feast inside.


Those a just a few posibilities. Without the proper information, you won't get the proper answer.

PH =)

[HoopsGuru]

There seems to be a little bit of confusion here, exactly how many leather corals do you have?

My initial educated guess is going to side with coral allelopathy. Leather corals are very dynamic, some are very tolerant of neighbors and non-toxic....while others are the polar opposite. In order to make a better evaluation of your problem, is it possible to provide genus names or even pictures would do. For example there are several completely different genus' that are termed "finger leathers". Yours could very well be a very toxic form that is literally choking out the rest of its competitors.

This is all speculation until you can provide a little more in depth information. In the meantime, I would suggest doing larger, more frequent water changes (how often do you perform them now?) and additionally run some carbon. Both will help remove the toxins and if this is the case you may see improvement.