candy cane dying

I have a bunch of fluorescent candy cane heads which were doing great for about a month, but now there all getting darker and smaller, some heads have allready died. How do i help? all my other corals are doing great tho? what could it be

 

Sorry to hear that ... always start here with problems like that:
http://www.3reef.com/forums/asap/asap-please-start-here-54456.html
Good luck.

 

need some basic info about your tank - age, parameters, flow, lighting, stocking, etc.

 

you could try to frag a healthy head or two and maybe move it somewhere else. I had my candy canes die after the great tank disaster of '08.

 

Might be your lights are not strong enough, or too strong. Maybe there is too much flow over them? Maybe you have a fish in your tank that nips at them when you're not looking? Provide us with some more info on your system, because if we don't know anything about your tank, we can't help.

 

what are you feeding your canes. Are they starving. I give mine pieces of krill, though they probably will not take it to start with. You might need to start with some mysis target feeding at night.

I have kept candy canes in PC, T5 and MH lighting...try feeding them a little and see how it goes. I had given some to my mom and she "lost" it in her tank. Her sandsifter carried it off and buried it. When I finally found it the polyp was completely shrunken and closed up..just some green left. I started feeding them and they are again thriving in her tank so dont give up on them

 

okay, so i suppose i have hope. I have 29g oceanic biocube. actinics are on for 2 hours before daylights, which are on for 8 hours, and then actinics continue for 2 hours after that. Im going to try moving them to lower part of the tank where theres a little less flow. How do i effectively break a frag off? please help with that. I would love to save the heads that are healthy. I target feed them every once and a while with zooplankton; is phytoplankton better?

 

try some mysis direct feeding. They like meatier food. I looked at your other thread prior to this, so I answered how to do it on that thread.

Are you hundred percent sure that the polyps you are going to get rid of are dead and not just shriveled?

Candy canes that are attached by the stalk share nutrients. When I feed mine krill I only hit a few polyps in a cluster at a time. You might want to seperate the ones that look dead but keep them in the tank and target them more. Like I said I stopped my mom from throwing some away that I brought back.

My first tank was a biocube 29, and I kept candy canes in there so you have enough light

feed them at night, after lights go off. I turn off my flow for a bit so that they have time to grab it

 

Mine loves silversides cut up small. Won't touch mysis.

 

Mine are thriving off of light alone. My corals occasionally grab some food that I feed for the fish, but they mostly survive off of the light.