Hammer dying back

[cvonseggern]

I bought a nice branching hammer with four heads from FA last week. It's seemed to do well in the tank so far, but one of the heads appears to be dying. There is only tentacle extension on about half of the head...I can see the skeleton on the other half. This has happened since I put the coral in our tank.

Obviously, I want to stop this from getting worse. I'm still experimenting with how much buffering the tank needs...alk has dropped from 8 to 6 dKH in the last few days. Ca is off the scale (using Oceanic salt). Will an alk swing like this cause this problem? I've read that branching hammers are somewhat prone to losing a head or two after acclimation to a new tank, but I'm more inclined to blame my inexperience. Any advice?

Chris

[R_S_C]

what other corals do you have in your tank...i've noticed hammers, torch and frogspawn sometimes tend to try and have chemical wars with each other. i had to run carbon to fix this.

[cvonseggern]

It's the only stony in the tank. There are a bunch of xenia fairly close by...any chance they're packing WMD's?

[matt]

what other corals do you have in your tank...i've noticed hammers, torch and frogspawn sometimes tend to try and have chemical wars with each other. i had to run carbon to fix this.

Actually, these corals (euphyllia) do not use chemical warfare, but they are very agressive with sweeper tenticles. The xenia might have something to do with it, depending on the species of xenia. Eric Borneman's book has a great chapter on coral aggression; I'm sure you'll find your answers there.
Zoanthids and other colonial polyps will fight with euphyllia; I had one almost die from a battle with some star polyps. Usually there's visible contact between the corals that are fighting.

But, your Ca and dkh imbalance is much more likely to be an issue here, or maybe there is a water flow issue; euphyllias don't like vigorous flow.
Good luck!

[Snausages01]

I just recently had a hammer starting to go down hill on me, when I had it in the temp tank. The hammer started bleaching and exposing some of its skeleton when the water conditions went down hill. All the other corals showed signs of bad health as well. However once I got them back in the main tank (it’s only been just over a week now) everything started doing much better. The hammer is sill bleached, but it is all ready starting to come back. I can now see some color is some places plus it is expanding much more than it did before, but not nearly as much as it did in the past. Just try to keep it in a moderate flow and keep good/stable water conditions; do a water change if you have to.