favia dying

I have a favia brain for almost 7 years. it has grown from a 3 in piece to more than 12 inches accross,but, it is now drying. the only change in the last month has been a change to nx pellets and the use of mb7. all parms has been good, with no spike when i stopped using gfo. i have had a similar die off of a orange monti , where about 1/3 of it died off but, the rest looks good and healthy. parms are:
temp 77
cal 420
alk 9
phos 0.05
nitrate <.05
mag 1500

feeding consits of mysis,phtyo chrome,phtyoplan on a rotating basis.anyone have a die off when changing to a carbon based system?

 

Not something I have experienced delreefer

but I have only been carbon dosing in 1 form or another for about 12 weeks now

I did a quick search on here and other places

I have found threads asking same or very similar question
having read a few, I was unable to find 1 definitive responce indicating that the 2 things where directly linked (carbon dosing to problems with LPS)

Explanations found that may provide insight where

1 - if conditions are changed to rapidly and thus the LPS did not have a chance to gradually acclimatise to the lower nutrient levels, that may cause the issue

2- if feeding is not maintained/ increased to accomodate what is being lost from not being able to absorb nutrients from water column that may also explain the demise of the LPS


so no definitive answers, mostly just possible causes

And a bump for anyone on here that may have relative experience

Steve

 

In many cases, we run our systems on the border of nutrient starvation. Certainly it's reasonable that a sudden change in nutrients could have deleterious effects. LPS corals seem to be especially prone to sudden drops in phosphate. Even though your PO4 is detectable, you don't say what it was before, or how fast it dropped.

 

this is just from my experiance (only had mine for 3 weeks) was not looking good when I got him - actually the lfs gave it to me for free since they thought it was dead.

I fed it everyday till it started to look better - not it seems great and repairing.

 

I tend to agree, LPS may suffer from a ULNS type set up. One way to know for sure is to stop the pellets or cut back and see if you see some improvement. The use of MB7 may intensify the ULNS when used in conjunction with pellets. Honestly I can not count the number of thread I see from people reporting significant problems with pellets and MB7 used in conjunction.

I have never used pellets, but I have used MB7, love the product and never had an issue with it. Time will tell and it will be interesting to see how the use of pellets and MB7 pans out.

 

Any change in lighting?
My favia was nearly dead until I moved it to the bottom of the tank - it is even in shade from a rock and is now thriving.. FWIW.