Coralkin honest saltwater & reef care

🌸 Coral Trouble Card

Kenya Tree 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
Kenya Tree 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?

  • Staying shrivelled and not puffing up for days — check water (it takes a lot to bother a Kenya tree).
  • Tissue rot or melting at the base — a real problem; cut to healthy tissue, re-attach, and check water.
  • Spreading over other corals — prune the branchlets; it's competing for space.

🚗 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 soft, branching tree of polyps; droops by day, puffs up to feed.
Lighting
Low to moderate (≈80–250 PAR) — very adaptable.
Water flow
Moderate — it sways and sheds waste in decent flow; bottom-to-mid placement.
Placement
Lower or mid rock, ideally on its own island of rock — it spreads by dropped branches, so keep it off shared rock.
Temperature
75–82°F (24–28°C).
pH
8.1–8.4.
Specific gravity
1.023–1.026 (reef-standard ≈35 ppt).
Other targets
Soft corals don't draw down calcium and alkalinity like stony corals — just keep salinity and the usual reef parameters stable.
Feeding
Photosynthetic; benefits from the general food in the water — no target-feeding needed.
Growth & spread
Fast — and it propagates itself by dropping branchlets that settle and grow (can become invasive).
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?