Well... here's a tank-event induced update. Yesterday, at about noon, I did my monthly, 50-gallon water change. This went as usual and was quick and relatively easy. I'd been mixing the new salt water for a day and a half so it was well oxygenated and temperature equalized to the tank. So... all is good there.
I have a good friend who works at a local hospital and we regularly discuss the events there and more specifically to their emergency room and how this relates to the lunar solstice. In fact, they do see more activity during the full moon phase. Just thought I'd throw this in here and you may already see where this is going.
And guess what tomorrow is? Yep... you guessed it, the full moon for this month. Hmm.
So last night, at about 11:00PM, with all the tank lights off except for the moon lights, the air injection system came on for one of its scheduled times. I noticed it was making an odd sound and different from the usual. It's amazing how many times sound, and not something visual, has alerted me to tank oddities. Anyway, I look at the tank and notice that the moonlights weren't illuminating the tank as they should during the full moon phase. When I got up to look closer, I realized I couldn't see the back of the tank for how cloudy the water was. My first thought, before putting it all together, was that there was a Kalkwasser incident which was the culprit. But the alarm should be going off due to a pH spike and it wasn't. So then, it dawned on me that the tank was experiencing another spawning event. Sure enough, the skimmer was going nuts and there was... um... coral... um... spawn scum in the filter sock and floating in the sump. Here' a shot of the fishnet I used to pull out that which was floating...
I know that this event was coral and not clam as was the case of the last spawn or something else as the smell was very intense and definitely of the SPS coral kind. Unfortunately, I was too late to be able to get any shots of the corals spreading their procreation excretions. There... I just coined a new phrase.
Anyway... as mentioned, the skimmer was going nuts and pulling out a ton of "procreation excretion" (PE) matter. Here's a shot taken after one of the many skimmer cleanings I did to keep it producing as efficiently as possible...
In addition to cleaning the skimmer multiple times, I also replaced my filter sock with clean ones at least six times and removed the prefilter box screens so that surface skimming within the tank was uninhibited. I also ran the air injection system manually several times which seemed to help greatly in removing as much PE as possible. After a couple hours of this, the tank was starting to clear and this morning, it's as if nothing had happened. Everything looks well. The skimmer still isn't foaming like normal but it's slowly getting there. There's apparently still some PE in the water but not enough to be visual.
So there you have it... a mass coral spawning event. While this may sound like an exciting event, it's quite unnerving, to say the least. Having this happen in a closed system is very stressful. For the tank and me.
Joseph.
