Can't keep my candy cane nor mushrooms alive

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aeharkins9092

Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Joined
Aug 7, 2011
Messages
43
Can't keep my candy cane nor mushrooms alive. My water conditions are excellent, I use Catalina water, the corals get feed.

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Ca was 360, trying to boost it little by little, skch was 8 and unsure on mag, don't have a test kit for that
 
May also want to check for copper or metals in your water if everything else checks out. So fish store use it in their tanks that they keep fish in so if you introduced and LFS tank water you may have something in it. How old are the corals? Did you dip them?
 
Using marineland led reef lighting on a 10 hr schedule and have not dipped them
 
How long have they been in the tank? How did you acclimate them?

I find that candy canes are sensitive to flow. Try placing it in an area of lower flow.

The light shouldn't be the reason either of them aren't doing well.
 
I think it is the lights. Even the Marineland Doublebright LED light doesn't seem to meet the parameters of an actual Reef light. None of them do.

The Reef light (18") has 18W of consumption with very low quality LEDs. With a mere 1305 lumen of transmitted light, thats about 70 lum per watt. Cree are over 120-140 lum per watt consumption, so these 18 LEDs are equivalent to only about 3-4 Cree 3 Watt LEDs. Who, in their right mind would use 4 Cree 3 watt bulbs for a 18-24" tank?

The accepted standard for a 24" tank is 120W of CREE LEDs. This is about 10% of that.
 
Mushrooms can be grown on an absurdly low amount of light. People have kept them alive on t8 lighting. While the marineland light is pretty low its still way more powerful than that.
 
Really? Look at the pics. It looks like they were taken at night with a tiny penlight providing the illumination. The mushrooms are in shadows and the trumpet stocks are only partially illuminated.

To the OP, I have both those corals under 216Watts of T5HO lights for a 4 ft tank. So thats 108Watts per 2 ft. Even if your LEDs are twice as effective in illumination, that is still 54W. My trumpet is 12" deep and my shrooms are 20" deep.You will never keep a trumpet under those 18W lights, and the shrooms would need to be on the top most rocks.
Marineland should be fined by the BBB for advertising them as REEF lights.
I would never trade my T5 lights for Marineland.
 
Using marineland led reef lighting on a 10 hr schedule and have not dipped them

Unfortunately those lights are not reef capable. They won't be keeping your candy can corals alive.

As for the mushroom it looks like it is under some rocks and/or in a covered section of your tank? With those lights I would move your mushrooms to the top of your rock structure. That should help open them up a bit.
 
The marineland reef capable light may be a bad light but it can still keep most low light corals alive and that IMO is what caulastrea and the mushrooms are. Mushrooms are low light and if you feed the trumpet coral it should do fine under those lights.
 
Really? Look at the pics. It looks like they were taken at night with a tiny penlight providing the illumination. The mushrooms are in shadows and the trumpet stocks are only partially illuminated.

How bright a picture looks is not a proper way to judge lighting. I could have my 120w led lights turned up to full blast and my camera could easily take a picture that looks exactly like that. While the marineland reef lighting IS insufficient for most reef applications the corals in question are both low light corals. Out of the different trumpet corals the krypto is by far the most sensitive to bright light and the mushrooms while they might not thrive will live under that lighting.

What exactly is the trumpet doing that makes you think it's dying? If it's receding into the skeleton I would place my first bet on the flow. My krypto candy cane coral is super picky about the flow it's placed in and after about 2 months of struggling to keep it alive I have finally found a place that has enough flow and low enough light that it's starting to come back.
 
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