Coralkin honest saltwater & reef care

🌸 Coral Trouble Card

Birdsnest Coral Coral Trouble Card

The one page to have ready when a coral starts to slip. Corals almost never need a vet — recovery is a water-chemistry, light/flow, or pest fix. This walks you through the checks in order. Print it, keep it by the tank.

Black & white saves ink and prints cleanly on any printer.

Not sure it's serious yet? Run the symptom checker or the water-test checker first — many worries turn out to be a husbandry fix.

Coralkin honest saltwater & reef care · coralkin.com
Birdsnest Coral — Coral Trouble Card

🔬 There's no vet for corals — diagnose the water & environment

Corals almost never need (or have) a vet. A struggling colony is a chemistry, lighting/flow, or pest problem you fix yourself. Work these Coralkin tools:

📇 Fill this in now

My system
What I'm seeing
Recent changes

🚨 Trouble signs now?

  • Tips browning or fading — light too low or not acclimated, or nutrients off.
  • White skeleton appearing at branch bases and creeping up (STN) — a parameter swing or water-quality issue; frag ahead of the receding tissue and fix stability.
  • Polyps staying retracted — flow too strong or too direct.
  • Bleaching white all over — too much light too fast.

🚗 First things to check

✅ Do

  • Test the full parameter set — salinity, alkalinity, calcium, magnesium, nitrate, phosphate and temperature — and compare to targets.
  • Check the lighting and flow at this coral's exact spot.
  • Look for pests and for irritation from aggressive neighbours.
  • Check for recent changes — new livestock, a dosing change, a big water change.

⛔ Don't

  • Don't reach for OTC “cures” or dose blindly.
  • Don't change everything at once — stability matters more than any single number.
  • Don't keep a badly-failing colony next to healthy ones without isolating it or fragging off the healthy tissue.

📋 This coral's targets

Colony / form
A dense bush of fine, needle-thin branches; grows and branches quickly, and drops frags readily.
Lighting
Strong — roughly 200–400 PAR once acclimated (start a new frag around 50% intensity and raise slowly). Pinks want more light to hold colour; too much bleaches, too little browns it out.
Water flow
Moderate to high, random and turbulent — enough to keep detritus off the fine branches. Thin-branched colonies dislike one harsh direct stream; polyps retracting constantly means the flow's too strong.
Placement
Up in the light in a mature tank, with clear space around it — the branches are brittle and mustn't touch neighbours. Plan for fast outward growth.
Temperature
78–82°F (25.5–28°C).
pH
8.1–8.4.
Specific gravity
1.023–1.026 (reef-standard ≈35 ppt).
Other targets
SPS build a dense stony skeleton and punish parameter swings far harder than LPS — keep alkalinity (≈8–11 dKH), calcium (≈400–450 ppm) and magnesium (≈1300–1400 ppm) rock-stable and test weekly. With SPS, stability beats any exact number.
Feeding
Mostly photosynthetic; no target-feeding needed. Benefits from the general food in a stocked reef.
Growth & spread
Fast for an SPS — branches extend and multiply quickly, and dropped frags often settle and grow, so a small colony fills in fast.
Natural range
Indo-Pacific.

🌸 A struggling coral is almost always telling you about its water, light, flow, or a pest — not an infection a vet can treat. Stabilise your parameters to target, confirm the light and flow suit this coral, and rule out pests and aggressive neighbours before changing anything drastic. Sudden swings are themselves a stressor.

❓ Work through

  • Is a parameter off-target?
  • Is the light or flow wrong for this coral?
  • Any pests, or aggressive neighbours?
  • What changed recently?