brown jelly disease

[mr_X]

hi. i've asked this on a few other forums, and am still not satisfied with the response.
what causes brown jelly disease in LPS like torch/frogspawn/hammer?
what are known remedies?
how about preventative maintenance?

thanks in advance.

 

[Devilishturtles]

As far as I understand it... brown jelly is caused first from trauma to the tissue of the coral. Either from a fish/invert or from handling. Once the tissue injury is there, the infection results when/if tiny little protozoans can get to it before the damage heals. Once the protozoan infects, it can spread quickly and digest the tissue. The protozoans also excrete some sort of digestive enzyme, which is why the jelly can spread to other parts of the coral, or other corals, and damage those as well.

Remedies... I've heard simply taking it out and brushing off the jelly may work, some people do FW dips or lugols dips as well.

Preventative maintence... don't have coral nippers in your tank and secure all corals well so they don't fall or get bumped into?

Hope this helps.

 

[melosu58]

I agree with Lindsay on her explanation. I have found that it`s best to just break off the infected parts and discard esp. if a branching coral. I had an instance happen with my branching hammer coral and I broke the infected heads off and it is flourishing today. Here is a pic of the infection and what it looks like today.

 

[mr_X]

thanks alot.
the story goes- my frogs and hammers were doing fine....a friend had some with BJD, and he was losing heads quickly...so he asked me to put them in my tank, to see if they did any better.
they did. they healed up after losing another head or so.
i read somewhere that dosing vitamin c possibly could help, so i also did that.
i don't know what it was that arrested the BJD, but as for the cause- i never asked him what he thought the problem was caused by. i know that he had the corals for some time, and they weren't recently moved either. i'm guessing it was something picking at them.
i recently sold some of my old colonies, and replaced them with different ones, and those were the ones that got BJD as well. i'm guessing it was the stress of the move.

thanks again for the detailed info!