Dark Green Coraline??

I know coraline takes a while, even with proper water parameters but my current tank has been set up since 9/10/2007 and started with mostly my old dead rock and about 20lbs of some nice heavily coraline encrusted live rock and rubble that had purple, burgandy, orange, lime green and red coraline.

I have witnessed the new LR turn from all those beautiful colors to a dark, deep green coraline..................I think it's coraline??? It is ugly as you could imagine!
It is not slimey and can't be brushed off the rocks. It is hard and encrusting.

Not one single bit of any coraline has grown on the glass of the tank, of any color. There is one 1/4in spot of purple coraline that showed up overnight about 2 months ago on the magnetic base of my Koralia 3 on the back glass and is still there and still purple.

If you look hard, you can see tiny spots of purple on the rock that have grown in vertical areas of rock or on the under side.

I am thinking this has to have a lot to do with either light intensity or spectrum.

Lighting, since day one, has been.....

1x Giesemann 54w T5 HO Pure Actinic 12hr per day
1x Giesemann 54w T5 HO Actinic + 12hr per day
2x 250w MH XM 15,000k DE..Blueline Electronic ballast 8hr per day

I have just this week switched to Coralvue Reeflux 12,000k halides.

Water parameters:

Oceanic Salt

Ammonia- 0 Salifert
Nitrite- 0 Salifert
Nitrate-0 Salifert
Calcium- 430-440 Salifert
DKh- 9-9.3 Salifert
Magnesium- 1330-1350 Red Sea
Phosphate- .1 Red Sea
Temp fluctuations- 79.4-80.1F
SG- 1.026 refractometer
PH 8.0-8.1 Salifert

I was dosing 30ml per day of Brightwell Aquatics 2 part calcium and buffer and just a couple weeks ago, switched to using the Randy Holmes DIY 2 part solution.

4 stage Kent Maxxima RO/DI has always been used. I just had the TDS checked. My tap water is 77 and the RO/DI is 17 which is way too high so I am going to replace all the cartidges and the membrane but I can't see a 17 TDS causing this problem as there have been quite a few people using just regular high TDS tap water and still have good coraline color growth.

I had a very quick diatom stage in the beginning but have never had any cyano or hair algae at all.

The first time I had this tank going, I was using a crappy DIY metal halide setup with Advance Magnetic Ballasts and Iwasaki 6500k SE bulbs but had beautiful coraline growth on the rocks, glass, powerheads, overflow..........all over and also a monster outbreak of hair algae. Now I have a ton of money invested in good MH and T5 lights, yet coraline growth is horrible and there are no nuisance algae problems.

There are hundreds, maybe a thousand or so of the little white curly q tubeworms/feather dusters growing all over the back and side glass. Don't know if that means anything.

What I am missing?

I am using Oceanic salt. I tried one bucket of Reef Crystals and had to raise CA and alk before adding to tank so I switched back to Oceanic. That bucket of RC's mixed up at about 370 CA and less than 8 DKh. might have been just a bad batch?

I thought maybe it was due to settling in the bucket so I mixed it back and forth through 3 buckets, numerous times but still had the same results.

I have read posts that dated a few years back that stated some people had very bad experiences with Oceanic salt but nothing current. A reefer, who is employed by my favorite LFS, turned me on to Oceanic because it is all he has ever used and has a beautiful SPS system. He suggested I buy for Foster & Smith due to price.

atnixon said:

its possible yes. I have never had a mix of RC coming out that low in calcium...mine was always 420ppm or a little more..

Niko

Click to expand...

Nope, never tested strontium.