Need Help with Chalice recession. Very detailed info

[hypermikie]

Hey All,

I have a beautiful red chalice that I recieved from a local club member at last years frag swap (April '08). Over the past year it has been located on the sandbed on the a sizeable frag disc. I haven't had much growth from it, but it did look nice, inflate, feed, etc. I just assumed its slow growth was due to the coral being a slow grower, my lazyness of keeping my Ca levels up, and overall tank neglect.

Well as of recently I have been much more concious of Ca levels. I have been dosing more and keeping up with Kalk drips at night. I have raised my Ca, Mag, and Str. levels. As a result I have noticed more growth in my SPS and other LPS. As well some of my browned out SPS are coloring back up. Ca last checked was 416. I also have been keeping up on water changes and recently changed my bulbs. Phosphates read little to none on 2 different test kits.

So onto the problem. As of late I have noticed the chalice always being closed up(night, day, feeding, etc.). I have noticed some recession starting to take place on the edges. As well, since it was located on the sand bed I noticed several hermits messing around it and thought they could simply be irritating it constantly. As of last week I moved the chalice to a low/mid level location in the rock work and changed location of some of my pumps to mix up the flow. It was my thought that these corals tend to like lower light levels and light to moderate flow (hence its original location). All of my other corals are doing great. This is the ONLY one that is having problems.

Tank Description and Parameters:
70g (36Lx24Wx20T)
2x175W MH (14k Iwasaki's just replaced 1st of Dec.)
SG 1.0255, Temp 80-81, PH 8.1 - 8.4
Flow = T4 on closed loop (to two outputs), Hydor K4, Hydor K1, Tunze 6025, Mag 7 Return on Sea Swirl.
Refug on reverse light cycle with cheato





Build thread with all other tank info:
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/sh...readid=1089092