bacterial bloom from cold?

daveonbass

New member
well I came home from band practice last night to see that my chiller had messed up and was stuck on 57 degrees. so I thought all my fish and corals would die.

I unplugged my BioPellets (off line since I got home), made up all the warm salt water I could (10 gallons) and plugged in a small heater. I got the fish to start swimming again after the tem got to about 63-65 degrees. I couldn't believe that seemingly dead fish were comming back to life. But after doing an emergency water change and letting the tank heat back up from the pumps and the heater...once the tank temp was back in the 70's I noticed that the water was still cloudy. After 3 hours I finally checked the skimmer and noticed that it was reacting and smelling like when my biopellets had caused Bacterial blooms. But my boipellets were offline.

I worked from midnight till 10, and now that I'm home the bloom has not gone away yet. it looks like the fish are fine...but my corals are almost all dead. I don't think any of my nice pieces will make it back from this one. As upsetting as that is for me...and it is...I'm more curious as to WHY the bloom occured. It looked like all the corals were fine and would recover along with the fish...but now that the bloom has popped up the corals are dying by the minute.

So does anyone know if a serious cold snap like that woudl cause such a deadly bacterial bloom? any thoughts as to what transpired here to cause such a tank crash after the temp came back up?
 
Regardless of the cause the course of action is changing out as much water as you can, are you planning on spending a day switching out jugs?
 
I guess...I'm pretty much tapped out of RODI and salt...but I will make do with all I have left.

I've just never heard of anything like this.
 
I hadn't either. The coldest I got my reef on accident was 66 and things were stressed sorry to hear about your chiller!! I might even consider making up water with grocery store 5 gal bottles, my fear is a chain die off
 
I would run a lot of fresh carbon, in case there's any toxins in the water. Also, a diatom filter or something similar might help remove bacteria from the water column, if that's what the cloud is. I would check for ammonia, although I suspect there's none. If there is, some Amquel or Prime might help.
 
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