Help White spot on coral???

[abigtroutt]

It started off a a small spot on on the base and it has been slowly getting bigger. What is it and what do I need to do Thanks for your help

[abigtroutt]

bump

[abigtroutt]

Anyone?? Im just afraid it going to die or im not doing something it needs...

[redwinger]

Have you inspected it for AEFW?

[abigtroutt]

Originally Posted by redwinger

Have you inspected it for AEFW?

What is AEFW???

[Fly Guy]

Acro eating flatworm. They are small and hard to see, they are whitish but can kind of take on the color of the coral they are eating. To be honest that white spot doesnt really look like it to me......but the discoloration in a couple spots above it kind of does. Get a container large enough to fit the coral and a powerhead or turkey baster in........pull the coral out and in the seperate container of tank water nail it with flow and make sure to get it from all angles. Put the coral back and inspect the container. If it is aefw's you WILL have some in the container.

What lighting do you have??

[abigtroutt]

Originally Posted by Fly Guy

What lighting do you have??

I have a Current Sunpod MH 150 HQI (http://www.drsfostersmith.com/Produc...&N=2004+113030) and the bulb is about 3 months old.

I will do that today with my coral. now with the worms is there something to treat them with to kill them in my tank so they wont destroy my coral?

[Fly Guy]

Originally Posted by abigtroutt

I will do that today with my coral. now with the worms is there something to treat them with to kill them in my tank so they wont destroy my coral?

From what i have found, they are VERY difficult to erradicate completely. If you are going to have a chance of doing it you will need to remove all of your sps into a quarantine tank for 6 weeks treating once a week with a fluke medication, along with blasting each and every coral. This is of course more or less comlicated based on the amount of stony corals you keep. There is another product, levamisole, that is more potent and what i think i will use for quarantining new corals, but it is dangerous and the wrong quantities of it has damaged and even killed entire systems. Follow the links to reefcentral in my "red bug" thread below this.
The red bugs(LRB's), we know enough about and have a drug that we can safely (somewhat)use in our systems to eliminate them from the entire system. Unfortunately, this same treatment kills acro crabs, which can make your acros that much more vulnerable to things such as AEFW's. In fact, it wasnt until i killed my LRB's, along with all the pods, acrocrabs and who knows what else, were the AEFW's able to do enough damage to make me notice them within 3 weeks of doing the interceptor treatments
With the AEFW's, the drugs used are more dangerous, and things like Saliferts Flatworm Exit is NOT effective on them. Furthermore, their eggs are immune to drugs that will kill the worm(at least at levels any corals could withstand), and they can begin reproducing WAY before they are big enough to see. The people who have successfully and completely erradicated them from their systems once they have them are very much in the minority, and some of the perceived sensitivities of SPS corals to "water quality" could very well be less relevant to water quality, and more relevant to these nearly invisible worms which cause bot STN and RTN depending on many variables.
I am by no means a expert. I didnt know anything about AEFW's one month ago. I do however think i have enough info to be successful in beating them, but it is going to take an entire system set up with that one purpose in mind.

[abigtroutt]

Bill today I did as you stated with a power jet and a bucket of water. There were two things (1) was a crab that lost his life due to heavy power jetting and (2) were small light brown worms (almost too small to see). I had to look several times to see them. Also where the coral was dead I scraped a small section and a green substance was in the middle?? If it is Acro where do I get this fluke or Levamisole?

Thanks

[Twitterbait]

Looks similar to a problem i had. I treated it like RTN.

[abigtroutt]

I looked up what the Acros look like on your site, the internet and in a 700 page book I have and what I have did not look like any thing like them?? Could it be the crab ?? he had a yellow body with 2 charp white claws. His main body was white with a black outline around the top of his shell. He as about 1/4" big but still to small to photograph

[abigtroutt]

Originally Posted by Twitterbait

Looks similar to a problem i had. I treated it like RTN.

What is RTN ?? I answered my own question Rapid Tissue Necrosis (my big book) and did you treat it with Melafix?

The more I see the less I know?? Darn I feel stupid

[Fly Guy]

RTN and STN are generic terms used when you dont know exactly what happened or is happening.....it just associates a rate of decline. Like i said before, rtn and stn both can be the result of aefw's or water quality or a combination of these or other things altogether. The thing with rtn is that being that the coral will be completely dead sometimes in a day or less all ytou can do is frag unaffected parts and hope you get lucky, odds are you wont.
Did you carefully examine the water in your bucket making sure you have a dark background??? I wouldnt jump to conclusions based on a couple of tiny bugs and 1 dead spot on a coral, they could have been any one of a million other little creatures. Inspect all of your sps and do the bucket thing with them, it doesnt take so much flow that anything has to die in the process, and for just trying to find out if youve got them you dont need to do it for more than 5 or ten seconds if you are putting the flow to it. sorry for not clarifying that, you can actually just use a turkey baster, a powerhead is just less work.

As far as the crabs go, here is a basic ID http://www.reefcorner.com/SpecimenSheets/acrocrab.htm
It sounds like a good crab that you had....are you sure he was dead???

[abigtroutt]

I had done this in a milky color bucket and inspected it on a dark brown background. I am very mad at myself that I used to much pressure and killed the crab It was the one on the link and he was dead, somehow he also lost both his claws too. As for the white spot there is a larger one on the other side I could not see until I removed it today. As for the tiney bugs I had to stare in the bucket for a while and watch the specks of dirt when I then observed small movements of 4 of them. They were very hard to see.