Losing Corals fast...question about GE Silicone II

[ScubaSteve]

Originally Posted by bkelly

are all your corals ding well now, how longs it been, GE emailed me back and said the Mildew inhibitor in Silicone II lasts for 5 years. Im wondering if this effects the reef. My tanks has also recovered except a couple corals (one acan/one duncan) its been over a month.

I made the swap over in early October to the new tank. The day after the swap I had my blue mille colony die. A few days after that I had a monti cap recede and was gone a few days after. After that I had a smaller tenuis colony start to recede and I lost part of my purple bonsai. My big green pocci had issues before the swap and slowly faded away over a month or so. These big colonies were about 90% of my SPS, though I still had several big colonies left. Other SPS were looking stressed and I had no PE in them for a few weeks but over time they've bounced back and are growing again. Strangely, during all of this my purple pocci, pink lemonade acro, zoas and pavona were unaffected and grew like weeds (the purple pocci has doubled in size since the swap). I even had a bonsai frag from the dying colony almost encrust the entire plug in just over a week and a chalice grew about 50% in 2 months.

Mid November I was correcting the tank for low mag by slowly dosing over the course of a week and a bit (going from 1000 to 1300 ppm over 9 days). Near the end of this I had a bunch of brittle stars "die". Some died, most recovered. I suspect this may have been from dosing with magnesium sulphate heptahydrate (which can anesthetize inverts) rather than mag chloride/mag sulphate. Brittle stars seem back to normal.

I would say it's been almost three months and everything is back to normal except for my duncan and a monti (which is on the mend). The duncan never really opened again and a few weeks back it just died in a matter of days. The monti cap has been looking rough but has been growing; it seems on its way back to health.

Overall, I'd say within a month to month and a half things were more or less back to normal but my nutrients were still high (nitrates ~10 ppm). After 5 weeks of vodka dosing my params are near zero and that alone has seemed to have had the greatest impact. I have full PE on all my SPS and everything seems to be growing nicely. Over the early few weeks of the whole ordeal I had the symptoms of a cycle (diatoms, etc) but never detected an ammonia or nitrite spike despite testing daily starting on day 3, so I was at a loss at to what was happening unless I missed a spike on the very first day.

So the mildew inhibitor affect the reef? Well, as you can see from this thread and yours and my experience, yes. Long term? I can't really say. My new tank now seems healthier than any system I've had before despite a few healing war wounds and the growing pains of a new reef. Over the past 4 to 5 weeks I haven't seen anything that would suggest that it is still having an effect on my system.