Thanks for the responses guys.
Since I posted the last message I've pulled 4, 19 hours work days trying to get a paper finished and ready for publication, and I'm giving a talk at a conference on Friday, so my tank has had to sit there slowly dying while I try to attend to the busiest time in my life so far. Murphy's law I suppose. 6 months ago I had all the time in the world to deal with something like this.
My phosphate levels were 0.06ppm last time I measured as checked by the hanna ULR test, which was last Tuesday.
The other thing that I did shortly before this carnage began was switch salt brands to a cheaper option. I started using the fluval brand of reef salt because it was $25 cheaper.
One of the things that I've been terrified of is that I'm not 100% confident on my alk readings. Many a moon ago when I had my first tank and I knew nothing about reef chemistry, I was stupidly using seachem reef buffer without understanding what the product was or what it really did. At the time I kept getting 'normal' alk readings for a high nutrient tank of around 9, and I dosed accordingly. What I didn't realize was that 'reef buffer' is a borate salt, which contributes to total alkalinity, but is effectively useless from a coral's point of view. I had similar SPS problems then, and when I bought the Seachem test kit that allowed you to test for borate alk vs. total alk, I discovered that my carbonate alk (the only alk corals care about) was 4.5.
As far as I know, seachem doesn't make that test kit anymore. Part of me has been wondering if the fluval brand of salt has a high percentage of borate salts in it, which has been making me think my alk is normal, as the only test kits I have access to now test total alkalinity.
I went back to H2Ocean because I figure it's one less variable.
Myka - as to your question, it's not sliming, it's burnt tips one day (as in I wake up and all the tissue on the growth tips is just gone), then over the following days, more and more tissue just sloughs off. My worst hit coral now has one piece of one branch left living, the rest of the previously dinner plate sized colony is a white skeleton, with cyano starting to take hold in places. In one case a coral that never even had burnt tips looked fine, with normal polyp extension one day, then the next day literally half it's tissue was hanging off it in sheets. Other corals that have a different colour growth tip from the main body have turned monochromatic over the course of a couple of weeks, and once the whole piece is exhibiting zero signs of growth, the tissue closest to the tips starts to slough off.
Water is clear, fish are fine, snails and crabs are fine.
What I'm considering doing is taking every piece of equipment except the skimmer and water pumps offline and doing a 100% water change using H2Ocean salt. The other thing that's making me think there's some sort of contaminant in this tank (or disastrously lower alk levels than what my test kits are showing me) is that I have a 4 gallon pico tank. It has been doing fantastic with 100% water changes, but I've been using my display tank water as it's water change water. Shortly before I went out of town, as a test, I did a 'normal' 100% water change on the pico using my display tank water. 9 days later every single coral in that tank is exhibiting serious tissue recession, I'm going to lose one acan frag for sure, and probably a medium sized open brain. There's prolific brown 'slime algae' (the kind your snails would normally eat, but the mantis shrimp that tank was set up for eats all the snails) growing, so I know it's not a nutrient problem.
Ugh. The worst. I didn't even have time to type this reply.
Does anyone in calgary have rubber maid bins totalling 300 gallons that I can borrow? I don't have that much water holding capacity and I'd like to have all the new water mixed in advance.
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