Coralkin honest saltwater & reef care

🌸 Coral Trouble Card

Pulsing Xenia 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
Pulsing Xenia — 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?

  • Suddenly not pulsing or shrinking — check flow (too high stops pulsing) and stability; sometimes it's the unexplained “xenia crash.”
  • Stalks melting/disintegrating — remove affected pieces; it often recovers from a surviving fragment.
  • Creeping onto other corals/rock — trim it back and widen its isolation gap.

🚗 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
Stalked polyps topped with pulsing “hands”; spreads by creeping and budding new stalks across the rock.
Lighting
Moderate — around 150–250 PAR (reef-quality light; toward the lower-moderate end).
Water flow
Low-to-moderate. Counter-intuitively, the MORE flow you give it, the LESS it pulses (the pulsing is its own way of moving water) — too much stops the pulsing, too little lets detritus settle.
Placement
On an isolated rock or island — like GSP, it will creep across all your rockwork if it can reach it.
Temperature
75–82°F (24–28°C).
pH
8.1–8.4.
Specific gravity
1.023–1.026 (reef-standard ≈35 ppt).
Other targets
No dosing needed; tolerates (even likes) some nutrients. Keep it stable.
Feeding
Photosynthetic, and thought to also absorb nutrients from the water — it generally needs no feeding (some find it does better in slightly nutrient-rich tanks).
Growth & spread
Very fast and weedy — an unchecked colony can spread to every rock in the tank. Contain it with a “moat” of open space around its rock.
Natural range
Indo-Pacific reefs.

🌸 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?