What could have lead to such a demise?

I got a few lobos a couple of weeks ago and 1 has died. I knew it was never doing great except for the first couple of days, but im still trying to figure out what lead to its demise. I have many LPS corals and some of them are doing very well, but sometimes one or two just seem to slowly wither away in the course of about two weeks to about a month. They pretty much just shrink down until they have a little coating of flesh then after a bit that coating peels off and a skeleton is left. I cannot give pics or params right now, but any ideas? I have cfls for lighting, which I know are not the best, but they can keep LPS. I am considering upgrading to LEDs, but is light really the issue here? Any inpuit would be appreciated. Another loss I haver seen in one of my corals is that one of my finger leathers seems to also be unhappy for some reason. IT isdead, just unhappy. I has shrunken to much smaller than it was, and it is now a whittish color.
Thanks

 

Poor parameters could be part of the issue. The corals may have been sick when you got them. They may not have acclimated. They may have been improperly handled causing an injury you did not see.

 

My lobo loved a good amount of light(more than most other LPS but not as much as SPS) and medium flow. HTH

 

Hmmm... so basically there is no real, accurate way to tell what happened? I am going to test my params tomorrow and update this thread.

Thanks, 1.0. I will see if I can move some of them up. Or I might get LEDs soon

 

Some corals just don't acclimate to captive life well. Even captive grown corals can have issues from one tank to another...and certainly corals that are wild collected or even maricultured can have issues acclimating to water params/light in a captive system vs. natural sunlight and seawater. There may be some other underlying problems, but my point is sometimes you just can't do anything...and you will never know what the problem is/was. With all the corals we bring in from various sources I've found about 95% will acclimate and do well...the other 5% just never bounce back. Sometimes there is obvious issues from shipping, etc...but often there is no cut and dry reason why these 5% don't do well.

One issue I'm seeing more and more is people having issues with Chloramines in their source water. Because Chloramines are much more stable they are becoming quite widely used my more and more municipal water authorities. The problem is many RO/DI systems don't deal with them very well. Chloramine is basically chlorine and ammonia bonded together. The carbon in an RO/DI unit will break the bond and strip away the chlorine, but often the residual ammonia is not removed. I've seen quite a few people have issues (especially with LPS and SPS) that are quickly resolved by treating their water for Chloramines. Just something to think about.