I can't seem to ever keep Monti caps .its like I'll get one I'll place in in the sand bed and move it up slowly but over a week or so it just slowly becomes more and more white like its dying. They never seem to fully bleach out but just become an off color pale pin and they never grow .everything else in my tank seems to be doing great . My parameters are as followed .

Alk 7.8
PO4 .16
Nitrates 0-.25
Calcium 440
Mag 1320ish
salinity 1.025

Have a 220 with ATI 8x80

Can someone give me some ideas here ?

how did you acclimate them? you dont really need to move them up like that, when i bought my monti i just placed somewhere random in the tank and its doing great.

Do you keep any other sps coral in your tank?

Also, what is your pH before your lights turn on?

How old are your bulbs? Do u struggle with anything else? I usually don't put mine in the sand bed. When I do the begin to bleach. Others keep them there with little problem.

My ph is about 7.9-8.0 before the lights come on , usually 8.1 throughout the day when lights are on . I just drip acclimate. Them , my bulbs are anywhere from 6 months old to 1 month old . I do have several other types of sps in my tank

I'm not an expert by any means, but have you considered pests such as montipora eating nudibranchs?

Koll12 wrote:Phosphates are still too high. Anything above ~0.10 and you will start to see issues, primarily with SPS corals. Generally, with high phosphates you'll see browning and ULNS you see more bleaching. Either way, try to get them down under 0.05. With MENB, you will see tissue and then a line of complete tissue loss, so it doesn't sound like that at this point. I'd recommend continuing to bring down your phosphates to under 0.05. At the same time, just keep your alk/ca/mg levels stable and things should color back up over a couple weeks. If you have multiple montis doing the same thing you could try them at different heights, but I would lean towards lower-mid range.

I have three diffrent types of monti caps. They started to bleach out after a year. I inspected them and found montipora eating nudibranchs. I took out all of my sps in my tank and treated the with iodine. Broke off the peices that were bleached and all is doing fine. It has been over a years since.

polemonkey wrote:That sounds more like necrosis than bleaching. Especially if you broke off "bleached" portions and the rest of the coral was ok. Also, the MENB will on affect coral in the montipora genus, so taking out all SPS was probably overkill (Assuming all your SPS are not montis). Glad to hear everything recovered and is doing well now though

Did your Nudi's look like this?

jdaquatics.com/Blog.html?entry=montipora-eating-nudibranchs

I hate to detail Koll12's post, but how old was your youngest Montipora Colony? It really doesn't sound like the typical response for a predator Nudi.