corals and polyps dead

[Deserter23]

I've been in SF for the past two days doing job training and I came back to Santa Clara today to find the pom pom xenia, pulsing xenia, zoos, mushrooms and polyps in my 24g nanocube dead or dying. I have a green chromis, watermelon wrasse, hermit crabs, snails, and a peppermint shrimp, and they all seem to be doin well. The only explanation I can come up with is that the heat eradicated everything, although I am surprised that if this is the case, it did not kill some of the fish and shrimp.

There are two variables that changed since last week when my tank was doing great.
1. I had to re-aquascape after moving rocks around to get an aggressive royal gramma out of my tank.
2. Before leaving for SF on sunday, I also added a fission nano skimmer in the back portion of the tank.

I have re-aquascaped before and it has never killed my corals and I do not know how adding a protein skimmer could harm anything. Unless...could the protein skimmer be installed wrong in a way to harm anything?

Please let me know if you have any ideas as to what happened.

 

[Thales]

I would guess heat. Fish can be more tolerant of it than corals.

 

[Sparkss]

I second what Rich said.

Watch your fish for signs of ich over the next couple of days also.

 

[BBishop]

Friday I lost power where I'm at for several hours, some kid hit a telephone pole and took it out. I didn't even realize that I was affected, but I had brought a couple of shrimp home that evening and left them in the bag for about 15 minutes. when I came back they were dead. What the ....? I put my hand in the water and it was very warm. I cooled it down as quickly as possible with ice and turned on the air conditioner. Things seemed fine until the next morning when I got up I could smell things were wrong, and when I saw my tank, it was so bad I couldn't even see through the glass. It was one big mucky mess. I lost all of my corals some of which I have had for many years, and my pixy hawk. My zoes survived and naturally most of the manjano. This is the first tank melt down that I have ever had in my 36 years of experiance. The funny thing is I even have a generator.
I wanted to change things around , but this wasn't the way I had planned it.

 

[Mr. Ugly]

Xenia will be among the first to go when the temps spike. For yumas, the pink and orange ones are more sensitive to temp, and prefer lower temps.

 

[GreshamH]

Just what I was going to say. Heat is a natural cue for Xenia to crash. If it weren't for that, the reefs would be Xenia only :lol:

 

[Vincerama2]

Yep, I'm guessing heat...like many of us other non-air conditioned reefers.

I lost xenia, colt (it was huge, I fragged it for every frag swap in the last 3 years, so the "legacy" continues!), neon green nepthea, finger leathers, toadstool leathers, almost all of my sps frags, a red chalice, an acans, some blasto (from the chain thread), etc, etc, etc ....

My RBTA's looked wilted but survived, as did MOST zoos, some mushrooms actually looked BETTER, and many of them died as well.

The fish looked OK, as did most snails, but I think my mexican turbos kicked the bucket.

The tank was at 96 degrees and that's what caused it (with 99% certainty), but I blame myself for not being more vigilant about tank temps instead of running off to the air conditioned mall...

V

 

[otterpop510]

damn.. there's been alot of losses locally and nationally from this heat wave..

 

[Ti]

*knocks on wood*

 

[Sk8r]

So sorry to hear it. Hard stuff.