My mom's Colt Coral

[flavescens]

Somebody has to have advise for this question:

I bought my mom a Colt Coral for Christmas, beautiful thing, full, many stems and all that. It has been slowly withering, and I keep on her about testing the levels in the tank, and doing 2x monthly water changes. She can't get the nitrates down, but that is only recently, but the coral went from around ten inches when we got it to what she describes as spaghetti noodles just flopping around. Weird though, she has some mushrooms and two seperate polyp colonies that are doing great. This is not a fancy tank. 30g with a power compact, one skimmer, a hang on type filter with a bio wheel and a powerhead, maybe 25 pounds of live rock, and the whole thing is two years old or more. There is only three fish, two damsels and a lawnmower blenny. The only thing that is suffering is that Colt Coral.

So the question I guess is, what the heck are we missing? Does that organism need anything special that she is not giving it?

Thanx,

Chris

 

[Aquadiva]

Nitrates are probably coming from the bio-wheel.

Colt may be suffering from the nitrates. How high are they??

 

[~Flighty~]

I thought colts liked a little nitrate? (could be wrong on that though) Are there temperature fluctuations?