Well, as most of you know we have been working on getting our new 380 in wall up and running. This weekend we made great leaps forward with that endeavor in finally getting the pad for it poured (header already installed and hte stand should be here this coming Friday). But what I didn't publish in our tank build thread in the Large Tank Forum was that our existing tank took a major stumble this weekend. I am not 100% sure if it is related to the recent building activities or not, but we had a drain failure that not only flooded the house (had the wet/dry vac working overtime and fans running until just last night) but also left the tank uncirculated overnight Friday evening. Saturday I awoke to a tank of dead or dying fish, we lost most all of our prized fish, with only a few surviving.
I am not sure if it was a lack of oxygen (we have 2 tunze streams that were still running, and one of them was breaking the surface pretty well, so I thought oxygen exchange should have been fine) or it might have been temperature (but the temp didn't register that low), either way we lost the rosy fin, red margin and linneatus wrasses, amongst some others. The only survivors were our large Purple Tang (and just barely... he was lifeless when I got everything fixed and re-running, but he had some life left and is now swimming around), an orchid dottyback (same condition as the tang, but he is still swimming at little "off"), an ornate wrasse (Xmas wrasse), a cleaner wrasse, an engineer goby, 1 peppermint shrimp and a green target mandarin. I spent most of yesterday morning both fixing the problem and pulling out dead fish, it was a heart rending experience.
For obvious reasons I do not plan to restock any fish until we can get the new tank up and running and established.
Some snails were looking stressed and tipped up on their backs, as well as most all shrimp died (although I still hear that damned pistol/mantis ? shrimp in the back somewhere clicking away *sigh*). I even noted some larger pods floating around lifeless. Once I restored circulation (and replaced the lost water) everything seemed to recover (that had not already perished). So far I have seen no long term affects on any of the corals in there, which also makes me lean away from temperature. It could have also been that the conditions were not that bad, but something died and everything crashed downhill from there, I don't know. At this point I am saddenned by the losses but also grateful for the ones that survived.
This only serves to drive me harder to get the new tank setup so that I can hopefully design it to avoid any such future reccurrences.
I am not sure if it was a lack of oxygen (we have 2 tunze streams that were still running, and one of them was breaking the surface pretty well, so I thought oxygen exchange should have been fine) or it might have been temperature (but the temp didn't register that low), either way we lost the rosy fin, red margin and linneatus wrasses, amongst some others. The only survivors were our large Purple Tang (and just barely... he was lifeless when I got everything fixed and re-running, but he had some life left and is now swimming around), an orchid dottyback (same condition as the tang, but he is still swimming at little "off"), an ornate wrasse (Xmas wrasse), a cleaner wrasse, an engineer goby, 1 peppermint shrimp and a green target mandarin. I spent most of yesterday morning both fixing the problem and pulling out dead fish, it was a heart rending experience.
For obvious reasons I do not plan to restock any fish until we can get the new tank up and running and established.
Some snails were looking stressed and tipped up on their backs, as well as most all shrimp died (although I still hear that damned pistol/mantis ? shrimp in the back somewhere clicking away *sigh*). I even noted some larger pods floating around lifeless. Once I restored circulation (and replaced the lost water) everything seemed to recover (that had not already perished). So far I have seen no long term affects on any of the corals in there, which also makes me lean away from temperature. It could have also been that the conditions were not that bad, but something died and everything crashed downhill from there, I don't know. At this point I am saddenned by the losses but also grateful for the ones that survived.
This only serves to drive me harder to get the new tank setup so that I can hopefully design it to avoid any such future reccurrences.
