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Shrinking Xenia

I have 2 kinds of xenia, 1 green star polyp, 1 leather finger coral, 8 colt corals, and 1 mushroom. All seem to be doing great but the xenia. For months my one xenia would fully open and the stalks were nice and plump. Now it seems most of the stalks on one of bunches is always looking shrunk and wrinkly, but the arms still kind of reach out. They are not melting. They just don't look as full as they once did. One stalk shrinks then gets healthy looking again and back and forth. My other pulsating xenia has 4 stalks. All looked great until a couple of weeks ago. One of them shrunk to a quarter of the size of the others. It still extends its arms but it is just shrunk. Everything else is doing great. Any ideas?
 

mnat

Officer Emeritus
Staff member
Moderator
We had some heat issues with our tanks last week and lost our xenia (among others). How is the temp in your tank been?
 
I changed the lighting to try and improve overall coral health. I went from a basic florescent to a compact florescent dual bulb, daylight and blue actinic. This really has not changed anything with the xenia. I was wishing it would but nope! No other changes.
 
IMO/IME a constant temp of 80 degrees was to hot and my corals showed signs of stress. I tried to keep my tank at 76-78. Over 78 and I started turning lights off to reduce the heat.
 

mnat

Officer Emeritus
Staff member
Moderator
Jcurry@wesketch said:
IMO/IME a constant temp of 80 degrees was to hot and my corals showed signs of stress. I tried to keep my tank at 76-78. Over 78 and I started turning lights off to reduce the heat.

We are the same way, when our AC went out temp spike to around 84 which was way to high.
 
i would have to say temp spikes too. same thing happened to my pom pom xenia when tank was getting to 82 day and 75 night...just too much
 
Are you running a sump? If you are it should be easy to add a fan blowing across the top of the surface and that should bring down the temp some. It worked for me. Needed more top off water after that.
 
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