I have had a tank setup for about 8 years now. I used to check water parameters often, but have since not kept up with it other than salinity. I change water often, keep up with the skimmer, and used other filters so my water when I do check has always been good. Over the weekend, I noticed my water looked as if someone had thrown a cup of milk in it. A couple of hours later all of my green mushrooms started melting. Everything else was ok, even other colored mushrooms and a few ricordia were all fine. Snails, serpent stars, shrimp and fish never showed any signs of distress. I ran more carbon and started skimming agressively and by the next morning had the water clear again. Even the few hard corals I have never showed anything wrong. Any idea what may have happened?
Mushroom meltdown
- Thread starter yakfishin
- Start date
ddmiller38
New member
That sounds like a bacteria bloom. It usually happens when the biological filtration is interrupted, meaning you lost some bacteria and it's catching up again to the fish load so the water becomes white. You have to just let it run it's course, it will clear itself in a few days or so, just be patient
No, I didn't say I was having a problem and needed help, I asked what might have 'happened'. The problem, what ever it was, was over by the time I wrote my post on here. I do 20% water changes weekly, so after checking parameters for the first 5 years, and never having any problems, I do them only about twice a year now. I'm sure with the shrooms having melted, I would assume my nitrates and/or ammonia probably spiked had I done a check with the water still cloudy. I have a 220 gallon with a light bioload, the only corals are the shrooms, some yuma, leather coral, and some montipora cap which happened to grow out after a friend gave me some live rock. If water quality were the issue to start the "green" mushrooms to melt, why not the red, blue, or purple mushrooms? Why were none of the yumas, inverbrates, or fish showing any signs of distress? I always assumed that the mushrooms were the hardier organisms in my tank and not the 'canary in the coalmines'. My thought is that as Erica suggested, perhaps a bacteria bloom. But again not sure why only one colored mushroom would have been the only things effected at all. Perhaps a chemical warfare started by someone, and the greens were most vunerable? Or did they go through some sort of sexual reproduction that might have done it? I had time to do a water check last night, and nothing was really off except nitrates at 16 ppm. But I thought that might be even be higher given that about 75 mushrooms had just disintegrated less than 2 days before. I just that it was a wierd thing to have occured.
Erica- thank you for your reply. I hadn't thought about the fact that whatever made the water cloudy, a milky white, might have been the cause of the mushrooms melting. I had it more in mind that my mushrooms melting was the cause of the cloudy water. Still not sure which came first, but I googled images for bacteria bloom in water and it did look similiar. Now I'm wondering what possibly could have created the bloom. I did do a water change and vacuumed the substrated a bit on Thursday. It was Saturday evening when I first noticed the water was turning cloudy and shrooms were disintigrating. Perhaps in my water change something entered the water that wasn't supposed to. But I use dedicated buckets and equipment for that. All is well now, and I'm actually thankful that the shrooms have thinned out a bit.
