Salt Dreams Posted February 6, 2010 Share Posted February 6, 2010 Well my favorite coral has brown slime on it. I had the head that was covered in slime fragged and cleaned the remaining slime off. Two days late more heads are covered in brown slime. Please tell me if the Duncan can be saved. I tried the peroxide idea but I am unsure if that is working I just did it a few minutes ago. HELP ME PLEASE!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesL Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 Hmm.. just noticed nobody responded to this. Did things eventually get better? I don't really have any advise for you ... another member here (RobInAustin I think) had a brown slime problem with a torch or hammer coral. I think the solution for him was to cut off the infected heads. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
versace Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 brown slime ?? is that mean cyano?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesL Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 brown slime ?? is that mean cyano?? Normally not. It seems to be a bacteria infection where the polyp heads kinda of melt away. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
versace Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 Maybe... DINOFLAGELLATES If it's not cyano Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mFrame Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 Actually, it's referred to as "brown jelly". I lost an entire torch colony to it and recently lost 3 out of 15 heads of my duncans. There are a few things that I tried, I'll detail them and relate my experience. 1) Frag off the infected heads - worked on the torch the first two times I got the jelly, didn't the last time. The key to fragging off the infected area is to not allow the infected slime to touch the healthy heads. This means siphoning off as much jelly as you can before removing the coral from the tank to perform the operation. The second key I've found is that you have to cut into some of the good heads to make sure you've removed the infection. Just cutting off the infected head could mean that the surrounding heads are infected and not showing signs yet. Be pessimistic and cut off more than you think. 2) I treated the remaining healthy heads in a Lugol's dip and then treated with liquid vitamin C. You can google "Brown jelly" +"vitamin C" and you'll get hits on how others have done this. I'm not sure if this helped or not. 3) Before reintroducing the frags, do as much of a water change as you can. This seems to remove free-floating bacteria from the water and tries to clean the environment that you're introducing the frag back into. If you have the option of a QT tank then I would put the healthy heads there to see if they can recover. That way you're sure not to be introducing them into an environment that still contains the bacteria. 4) With my most recent duncan colony I had about 15 healthy heads when I obtained it. I put it in my tank and everything was fine. Then a frag from above fell and landed on the duncan hitting some of the heads. Within a few days I noticed one head covered in brown jelly. The colony is very tight so I didn't want to frag and figured I would just watch. Within a day that head was gone and the jelly was on to the next. I siphoned off as much as possible. Day three the 2nd head was gone and jelly was on to head #3. I siphoned again, a day later lost that head. The jelly has not since appeared on any additional heads. My conclusions so far are as follows: brown jelly is a bacteria that seems to target weak and/or damaged soft corals of this family. You can try fragging the coral but you risk stressing the colony and inadvertently damaging additional heads which will just perpetuate the problem. In most cases I think you're better off just constantly siphoning off the slime (prevents it breaking free and floating through the aquarium where it can infect other softies) and monitoring the situation. You can treat the tank as a whole with Vitamin C though I'm not sure if that will help. My duncan showed that the healthy portion of the colony can fight off and survive the jelly. In retrospect, my torch colony was handled and moved a lot and I believe it most likely was damaged which made it vulnerable to the jelly. The other thing I can say is that in EVERY case of brown jelly in my tanks that the infected coral was in an area of low flow. I truly believe that these corals need at least a medium and probably a high flow to aid their natural defenses to ward off the jelly. When it is allowed to sit on them it propagates quickly and makes it that much harder for the coral to resist. Hence my recommendation to siphon off as much as possible. In summary, I would siphon off all that I could from the coral and carefully move it to a section of the tank with higher flow. Anyone that can share info on their experience would help us build a knowledge base on how to treat it. Maybe we could have a section with FAQs on specific coral illnesses and the consensus of how to treat? That might address common topics of Ich, Brown Jelly, flatworms, etc. I do think that I saw a post on here about someone who was able to get an antibiotic from their vet that they used to treat the tank as a whole. They seem to have had great success with it. Hopefully that person will chime in here. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesL Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 Ah right, it was you vwmike that had the problem. Thank you very much for chiming in the with great response! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
versace Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 I thought alge problem haha http://www.asira.org/coraldisease2 can find web if that's the Flatworms problem Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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