Brown Jelly Disease and Treatment

Normally ignored by most people, until you start noticing that the flesh of the Coral has started disappearing around the jelly.

At this stage if not caught you end up losing the coral within days of first seeing the Brown Jelly.

It is most commonly seen in your LPS corals although it is also seen in SPS corals.

If not treated promptly you can end up losing your entire tank of corals.

There are a number of ways to treat this problem.
1. Try siphoning off the jelly. If caught in the early stages this does work.

2. Remove Coral and discard of it. When removing the Coral or the jelly from the Coral the best thing to do is turn off all circulation. Once the circulation pumps have been turned off, siphon off the jelly with airline tubing. At this stage you then can go ahead and remove the Coral. If this is not done and you try and remove the Coral with the Brown Jelly still on the Coral head, the Brown Jelly will spread throughout the tank within a few hours, contaminating all the corals.
If one doesn’t want to go extreme by removing the Coral and discarding of it there are other treatments one can try.

3. UV steriliser. UV steriliser does work in slowing down the disease, (bacteria) but as the bacteria is not in contact with the UV light as it is attached to the Coral it only retards the growth of the bacteria and not cure it.

4. You can use a product called Lugols solution. Make up a treatment of Lugols (which is iodine-based) in sea water at 10 drops per litre. Treat Coral for between 10 and 15 minutes. I use a 1 L container to administer the treating the Coral. Then return the Coral back to the quarantine tank. Repeat treatment after two days.

5. I Go with treating the Coral with an antibiotic and Lugols. Bathing the Coral in Lugo’s first, and then administering the antibiotic. The antibiotic I use is chloramphenicol (CAM for short) 250 milligram capsule. Dissolve CAM in alcohol (drinkable alcohol or ethanol).

Use a small quarantine tank of approximately 22 L. Please make sure you aerate tank properly. I use a 250 mg capsule for the size tank..

Treating RTN with Chloramphenicol (CAM.) I dose CAM at 20mg/litre. Leave Coral in the tank for 24 hours. If you need to repeat the treatment do 100% water change and repeat dosage. This generally finds the jelly has disappeared completely, only seeing clean tissue visible.
I then remove the coral back into the quarantine tank for a further 24 hours checking for
no RTN. I then put the coral back in the main tank.

Please make sure when using this treatment you are not allergic to any form of antibiotics. Very dangerous .

6. Improve water quality, such as water flow and water chemistry.

WHOLE-TANK Treatment
This is very dangerous, way of treating and as a last resort you are prepared to try it . As all other measures have failed and you believe that you are going to lose the entire tank of corals.
Use 2.5-5 mg/L chloramphenicol. Turn off the skimmer, remove any activated carbon or other synthetic adsorbents, then add the antibiotic, dissolved as above. This sets in motion a process that can potentially take the tank down.
Within 1-3 days, there will be a tremendous bacterial bloom in the system. A large part of the bacterial population will be killed, dissolve, and new bacteria grow. When they grow, the oxygen demand of the system increases dramatically. A few grams of growing bacteria can consume as much oxygen as a adult human. The ORP and dissolved oxygen of the tank plummet, and you must intervene to save the system from crashing. When the bacterial bloom hits, you need to immediately restart the skimmer. If the skimmer is flat, you need to add an oxidant to the system to restart the skimmer. Either use potassium permanganate, in solution, drop by drop near the pump driving the skimmer, or add bleach drop by drop, again, until the skimmer shows some signs of life. It can get fairly dangerous in the tank when the ORP is below 200 mV. I would start the skimmer if the ORP fell below 250 mV, bacterial bloom or no bacterial bloom.

At this point if you don’t act quickly you can have a total wipeout.
The success rate of my experience using chloramphenicol.
It works almost 100 percent of the time for me. I have only done the whole TANK treatment once, this was when the whole tank was infected..Essentially every coral in the tank was affected to some degree. After I added the antibiotic, I only lost three coral that had already almost disintegrated.
When the whole tank treatment is performed, does this cause a whole cycling of the tank?
It does not cause the entire tank to cycle. I was barely able to find ammonia in my system, and I suffered no fish losses. Just make sure you have a big skimmer on the system. The water should clear within a few hours after you restart the skimmer.