Monti cap frag is bleaching. How can I stop it?
I got a small monti cap frag over the weekend. Put it under my dual 150w MHs close to the top of the 36g tank.
Within 2 days the center turned bright white. A superman monti I had gotten from the same guy turned half white with what looked like a small amount of brown dust where over the white part.
Thinking that the only possibility is bleaching from to much light, I put the superman at the bottom of the tank. I put the monti cap in my 20L with quad t5 24w. 2x actinic and 2x 18000k. Thought it would be good at the top of this tank since there is alot less lumen going on than the MH was putting out.
This morning before work, I noticed the superman had gone completely white overnight. Now, after working all day. The monti cap went from 25% white to about 50% white and what appears to be a slime or mucus coming from where the white zone is. I'm guessing this is from expelling algae.
What can I do to stop the bleaching? Can I leave it in the dark for a couple day and hope it stops? I've never had bleached coral so I have no idea what the problem is or what to do about it before it's lost. If it does fully bleach can it recover or is it dead? I can care less for the superman but I really want to save my purple rimmed monti cap.
I don't know what lighting they were under originally. I got them at a annual frag swap. Being SPS, I assumed that they would have already been in intense lighting already. This was a mistake I seem to have learned the hard way. From now on, nothing starts out at the top of my tank. This really got me by suprise. It's not like my MH are 400 watts.
As for acclimation. I honestly don't acclimate anything really. I do always float my new guys to adjust temps and use the refractometer to make sure salinity is not vastly different. Temperature I acclimate very well, I just seldon actually drip it after floating. Lack of acclimation problems always seem to be from lack of temp acclimation anyway so I can safely say that this all started from a blast of MH unless bleaching could come from something that I do not know of... I do know Im not being hit by nudis also.