Mysterious coral losses - at my wits end.

[asylumdown]

So a while back I posted that I was having mystery issues with sudden and widespread loss of SPS corals. Before it started, I had changed a bunch of things, I'd switched salt brands, switched supplement brands, etc. My biopellet reactor had also clogged up and died, so I had taken it offline and modified it's effluent line to be 3 times wider, but stupidly had put the same volume of pellets back in the reactor when I started it back up.

When the carnage began, my alk spiked in to the 9s, when it is normally in the low 7s, but I had assumed that was because the corals had all stopped using it so my constant dosing rate became an over-dosing rate.

As the corals died en-mass, cyano went nuts, eventually delivering the knockout punch to many colonies that had been just barely hanging on.

Since I couldn't isolate what I had done to cause it, I took everything offline - GFO, all dosing, the pellet reactor, everything. The only thing I left running was the skimmer. I then began a massive campaign of water changes, switching back to the brand I've used since the beginning. I changed 20% a day for 10 days, culminating with one massive 60% water change (It took a while to make that much RO water). I also treated the tank with chemi-clean. After a bunch of reading, I became convinced that the reactor modification coupled with restarting it with several litres of pellets OD'd my tank on organic carbon, killing everything and fuelling the cyano.

After this, the corals all very suddenly started turning around. I cut away all the dead skeletons I could and things started plating over the dead spots. New growth tips formed, though I did lose quite a few whole colonies. I added back elements piece by piece, first my 3 part dosing solution as my tank was losing 1.7 dKH/day. Alk fell as low as 5.5, and I slowly brought it up to the low 7s over about 10 days. However, without pellets and GFO, my previously undetectable nutrients spiked. Orthophosphates detectable to a Hanna ULR checker rose to about 0.11ppm (not that I put much stock in phos numbers in general), and nitrates rocketed up past the 5ppm my red sea kit maxes out at being able to measure.

I put a teeny tiny amount of pellets back online at the end of March. About 10% of what the reactor used to hold and WAY less than the recommended volume for my system's size. I briefly ran GFO at the same time, but it knocked phosphate so low I was concerned the pellets wouldn't start working, so I took it offline and it re-stablized at about 0.11

Now this long story gets to today. I thought things had stabilized, but late last week it all started all over again. Every bit of progress my corals had made recovering wiped out in 48 hours, and colonies that weren't damaged in the first wave have lost tissue.

This time, I've changed nothing. I literally hadn't touched the tank in two weeks except to measure parameters. There only thing I did in April was dial in dosing rates, do water changes (using the same batch of salt), and test parameters.

The only thing that is measurably different from a week ago is my alkalinity. On April 26th, it was 7.5, where it had been for almost the whole month. On May 4th, it was 8.5.

Now, I haven't adjusted my dosing rate since April 12th-ish, so I'm not sure what caused the spike, if it was a slow creep over 8 days, or a sudden jump. Some people on the Canadian forum have suggested that the rise in alk could be responsible for this because I have (a very small amount of) pellets on the system, but I can't tell if the alk has spiked and caused damage, or if something else caused the corals to stop growing, leading to a spike from the constant dosing rate. My nutrients are nowhere near "ultra low" either.

Parameters as of Sunday:

Calcium: 415
Alk: 8.5
Phos: 0.11
Magnesium: 1260
Nitrate: About 2ppm, the pellets are finally starting to bring it down
SG: 1.025
Total system volume: 375 gallons
Display: 275 gallons
Tank age: 2 years in April

I shut down the alk dosing pump Sunday night, and today it's only fallen to 7.23, so the tank is using far less than it should. On the advice of some Canadian reefers I also put the GFO reactor back online, and on my own fear that this is somehow an organic poison, I added a bag of ROX carbon to the filter sock and did a 20% water change. I've also ordered a kit to have my water sent to a lab to be analyzed for all the ions we can't normally test for.

I know many people are going to say that this is biopellets, but please remember that this tank ran with several litres of pellets for almost 2 years, they've been in the system longer than my corals, so every dinner plate sized colony I have grew from frags in pellet dosed water, so something else has to also be going on now. The reactor presently has less than a cup of biopellets in it.

I'm at my wits end. If I can't turn this around this tank will have to become a closet. Any thoughts from the chemistry gurus?

ETA: I don't mean to sound like I won't accept that biopellets are causing this, I just mean I'm hoping to try and figure out what the pellets are interacting with now to cause this damage, or if they're even related at all.

 

[asylumdown]

I'm seriously considering ditching the biopellets at this point and switching to vinegar just to see if I can halt this kind of damage, but not sure how wise of a choice that would be given what's going on.

 

[bertoni]

I might remove the bio-pellets, but I don't think that will fix the problem. My first guess would be that something got into the system, due to the long period of recover and sudden decline, but that's only a guess.

Those numbers are all good enough that I wouldn't think that they'd cause a dieback like this. I don't have any very good ideas. I might try adding a PolyFilter, in case copper is getting into the system somehow. A DI phase, if your system doesn't have one, might help deal with something coming from the tap.

 

[asylumdown]

I do have a DI phase. When this all started I also changed all my cartridges (measures at 0TDS coming out on two different TDS meters) and emptied and thoroughly cleaned my RO reservoir.

I'm trying to track down some poly as well. It's so heart breaking to watch this happen as I feel like there's nothing I can do.

 

[asylumdown]

I picked up a couple sheets of polyfilter and have put them in front of a baffle in my sump so 100% of the water in my tank is forced to flow through it. Any idea on how long it takes to change colour if there is a toxic metal present?

 

[BrentH]

I wish u luck brother .... And I understand your frustration I'm sorta going through what u are to some degree my alk is up and down from day to day I just started vinegar dosing a week and a half ago and I also used to have bio pellets I don't think making the switch will necessary fix your prob but for some reason I feel better or safer with the vinegar

 

[asylumdown]

Well in about 3 hours, the part of the poly-filter that water is being forced through (it's pressed up against the baffle by the force of the water) has turned a distinct medium tan colour.

According to the product information, this is the colour organic compounds create when they bid to it.

I can't figure out if a colour change that fast is normal, or if that's an indication that I had very high levels of dissolved organics in my water?

Does anyone know if the kind of organic carbon sloughed off from biopellets would be bound to the polyfilter? Since all my standard tests are within normal ranges, my three working hypothesis are:

1. There's somehow a toxic metal like copper leaching in to the system
2. There has been a slow build-up of untestable levels of organic polymers from biopellet sloughing that finally reached concentrations toxic to corals
and/or 3. that excess organic carbon is interacting with alkalinity to somehow causing tissue toxicity

However, without ever having had a frame of reference, I don't really know how to interpret what I'm seeing from this filter pad...

Here's a pic of how it looks after a few hours - can anybody with experience with this product say if this is 'normal' for a few hours use?

 

[BrentH]

Have u thought about running a good amount of gac just incase ? I saw u said u put a bag of it in sump .... But would help with all three of those issues you mentioned?

 

[asylumdown]

The GAC is in the filter resting almost in contact with the drain pipe from the tank, so it's about as good I can get without buying another reactor for it.

However, I was reading about Polyfilter just now and saw a post by Randy-Holmes Farley saying they wouldn't adsorb ammonia in salt water, which made me realize I haven't thought about ammonia at all because my tank is two years old and why the heck would I test for something simple like that?

Well:



I'm kind of freaking out right now. I don't know if this is a symptom of what's happening to my corals, or the cause. Nothing in the tank (other than coral tissue) has died, all fish and snails accounted for, I haven't added a fish in months... the only thing I can think is the chemi-clean treatment I did after the cyano exploded during the initial wave of this? But that was in March, if that triggered a cycle, it should have either killed everything weeks ago, or be done by now. My corals shouldn't have spent a month recovering.

I'm at a loss, but this is more of an emergency situation than I thought.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

You used the word carnage above. I realize that was a while ago, but then some things started dying again. Dying things will cause ammonia, and the ammonia can kill more things in an ugly spiral downward.

i'd double check the kit on some new salt water and/or RO/DI and if that is not as green as the tank test, I'd use something like Prime or Amquel in the tank.

 

[asylumdown]

yup, just confirmed with RO water, colour develops to a nice bright yellow. I'm getting an emergency water change prepared now and am dosing with Prime (I also have Amquel, any suggestion for which would be better?).

I seem to remember a time when this was fun.

 

[asylumdown]

Alright, after a water change and a dose of prime, my API test kit is no longer returning an ammonia reading.

I understand that products like prime only convert super toxic ammonia in to relatively less toxic ammonium, so the ammonia is still in there. Is there any research showing how toxic ammonium is to SPS corals?

I also took my biopellet reactor completely offline. The only thing it could possibly be doing with this much instability in the tank is adding more syncopated variables. Once this ammonia situation stabilizes I'm going to explore vinegar dosing to control nitrates.

 

[reefwars]

So now the question is was the ammonia the result of the die off or has it been there since the meltdown or prior and the massive water camping was diluting it making you think things were back on track then two weeks pass and were back to high ammonia?

 

[reefwars]

Im going to bring up the cow fish in hopes we can rule him out.


Do you guys think there would be any reason to be concerned with a large cow fish and that large a system , I know he's well established and healthy and that it's rare but is it a possibility he's contributing or causing this?

 

[asylumdown]

Well, he's nibbling on one colony of SPS, and one colony of acans. Every so often he'll also bite off a couple tentacles of my elegance coral, but only if I neglect to feed him in the morning. He's been doing it since last year though, and before this all started the corals he was munching on handled it fine as he tends to go for the same place each time and they're all quite large. I don't think he's actually eating the SPS, I think he does it to wear down his teeth. When this all started in February, an entire acro colony next to the one he normally chews on died. He'd never paid the slightest attention to it until it was a glowing white skeleton. Then over 10 days he chewed that skeleton down to nubs.

His bite marks are very distinctive looking and I sit next to the tank all day so I know he's not chewing on anything else. The colony he's been all over since 2013 has also suffered tons of non-cowfish related tissue loss, so he's certainly not helping in that case.

I had considered Ostracitoxin, but all my fish and motile inverts are doing fine, he's about as relaxed as a fish can get, and no one bullies him. The most excited he ever gets is when he surprises himself with a monster poop (and they are monstrous). Adding GAC hasn't seemed to have any effect on this.

He does require an enormous amount of food though. 20 fish and 50% of the food that goes in the tank is for him. 4 manilla clams in the morning (he eats 2 and a half of them), and the equivalent of about 12 cubes of frozen food at night, of which 6 are exclusively for him (hence my need for nitrate control). I've built up to that very slowly as he's grown and I got him when he was less than 2 inches long, so I don't think that caused the ammonia problem. It's certainly not helping it now that it exists though, so if you know anyone local who wants a cowfish, please let me know.

Basically I don't think he was the source of this, but there's no question that his requirements add an unfortunate amount of pressure now that the system has broken down.

 

[BrentH]

I think he's implying that the cow fish release a toxin when stressed? Which could be causing some of his probs

 

[BrentH]

How much of a due off did u have for the amonia to spike up so much did all your sps rtn

 

[asylumdown]

I'm starting to think I have an idea about what's happened. I posted in my local forum, but maybe someone here can critique my thinking for me. It's kind of long (I'm wordy, it's a flaw), so don't feel the need to read it

In November I had a crazy cyano problem. To fix it I double-dosed the tank with chemi-clean (as in, repeated the treatment after 48 hours and a water change). I then immediately started dosing huge quantities of MB7. The effect on the system was pronounced - white bacterial slimes started growing like mad on the glass, my biopellet reactor turned in to a mulmy soup, and things generally just got really gross in ways they had never done before. It eventually lead to my biopellet reactor clogging up and failing in... late January I think, which is what I thought started all of this. I then took the reactor offline, cleaned it, and put it back online with a drastically enlarged effluent pipe and the same volume of pellets. Where I had been dosing something ridiculous like 70mL of MB7/day for the two weeks after the November chemiclean treatment then between 6-10ml/day for most of December and part of january (I finally stopped because it was creating such a maintenance headache in the reactor), I think I only did one or two doses of 10 mL after putting the reactor back together. I wasn't paying close enough attention to the tank or dates, but things started dying within a couple of days of that, followed closely another cyano outbreak of biblical proportions. I was so busy with school the tank basically just decayed for the whole month of February.

In March I shut down everything but the skimmer, started changing huge volumes of water every day, culminating in one massive 60% water change. I also re-dosed with chemiclean, which wiped out the cyano. Everything started to recover. At the end of March I put the reactor back online with a teeny tiny amount of pellets and dosed a very small amount of MB7 for a while. A month later, things fall apart again.

Contrary to what the makers of chemiclean would like people to believe, I'm pretty sure the active ingredient of that product is a form of erythromycin. They make a point of stating it contains no erythromycin succinate, which is a whole lot more specific than saying it contains no erythromycin when there's 4 other kinds of erythromycin that I know of (estolate, stearate, gluceptate, and lactobionate according to wikipedia). Erythromycin works against gram positive bacteria, and all the "good" bacteria in a tank like nitrosomonas (the guys who munch on ammonia) are gram positive.

They probably get away with saying its safe because the kind they're using has less activity against the nitrifiers. The "true" nitrifiers metabolize and divide like a hundred times slower than cyano and heterotrophic bacteria, and erythromycin damages bacteria by making it hard for them to build cell walls, something that is particularly important during cell division. This should mean that a 48 hour treatment should be far less harmful to "true" nitrifiers than cyano and heterotrophs that divide every couple of hours, but it most certainly would have an effect on them.

In most people's tanks, I'm sure the effect is small enough to not cause any harm. But I double dosed. Then I started dosing with mad quantities of rapidly reproducing heterotrophs in an environment rich in organic carbon. And I have a 10 inch cow fish that eats more food every day than most people feed in a week. Since heterotrophs can also facultatively use ammonia as an energy source, I've read theories that suggest providing excess carbon during a cycle can lead to the rapidly reproducing heterotrophs outcompeting the nitrifiers for space and resources, creating a "false" cycle. When the heterotroph populations inevitably crash for whatever reason (run out of carbon or some other nutrient), there's nothing left to pick up the slack and ammonia levels start to fluctuate - long after the reefer has stopped measuring it. The theory is that this creates many of the phantom stability issues that plague new tanks.

It's very possible that this was all started by an OD of organic carbon when I modified my reactor, but it's also possible that the chemiclean treatment damaged my tank's capacity to process the massive amount of poop my fish make and I exacerbated/masked that by dosing huge volumes of MB7 in an organic carbon rich environment. It's possible that when the reactor clogged, they lost their food source and the population crashed, and my tank started to cycle and I just didn't know it. By the time I added the reactor back to the system there could have already been detectable levels of ammonia in my water, which, coupled with a sudden massive over-dose of organic carbon with hardly any bacterial dosing at all, caused a nasty positive feedback loop of corals death, causing more ammonia, causing more coral death.

I never measured it, so I can't say there was any ammonia in the water then for sure, but doing a series of enormous water changes fixed the problem. But then I dosed chemiclean AGAIN.

If any of the novel I just typed out is accurate, what I essentially had at the beginning of April was an unstable, half un-cycled 375 gallon tank packed to the gills with stressed SPS corals and a ridiculous bio-load. There were probably low levels of ammonia building up, but I was doing 20% water changes every 5 days or more at the beginning of April. I didn't, however, do a water change in the last two weeks of April, I just tested everything but ammonia. It wouldn't have taken much of a rise to push my already stressed corals back over the edge, creating another positive feedback loop.

I should also mention that during all of this, my blue-throat trigger developed a horrible case of pop-eye. It got a lot better after those big water changes, but last week it exploded again. It looks like his eyeball is actually going to explode. A couple of months ago I also started really noticing the gills of my copper-band butterfly. As in they're particularly red and engorged looking, but I thought that was normal and I had just had never noticed it before. Two weeks ago though, he developed a tumour under one of his gill flaps. My Richmond's wrasse has also been having some dermatological issues on one side. It looks like he's been trying to de-scale himself. I thought they were all unrelated, but put this all together and you get a picture of ammonia poisoning.

Again, all conjecture, but it's the best explanation I can come up with? The pellets are off the system, and I'm going to try and ride this ammonia thing out.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I understand that products like prime only convert super toxic ammonia in to relatively less toxic ammonium, so the ammonia is still in there. Is there any research showing how toxic ammonium is to SPS corals?

Just to clarify, that isn't exactly right. pH changes (lowering pH) alone convert ammonia to ammonium. Prime does somethign else which is independent of pH, and does reduce the toxicity so you need not worry about it.

Here are the sections from my ammonia article:

Ammonia and the Reef Aquarium
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2007-02/rhf/index.php

Treatments for Elevated Ammonia: Hydroxymethanesulfonate
Various types of compounds are used in commercial products to bind ammonia in marine aquaria. One is hydroxymethanesulfonate (HOCH2SO3-). It is a known ammonia binder16 patented for aquarium use by John F. Kuhns17 and sold as Amquel by Kordon and ClorAm-X by Reed Mariculture, among others.

Ammonia's reaction with hydroxymethanesulfonate is mechanistically complicated, possibly involving decomposition to formaldehyde and reformation to the product aminomethanesulfonate (shown below).16 The simplified overall reaction is believed to be:

NH3 + HOCH2SO3- à H2NCH2SO3- + H2O

What ultimately happens to the aminomethanesulfonate in a marine or reef aquarium is not well established, but it does appear to be significantly less toxic than ammonia, and more than likely it is processed by bacteria into other compounds.

Marineland Bio-Safe claims to contain sodium hydroxymethanesulfinic acid (HOCH2SO2-). I do not know if that is a typographical error, or if Marineland really uses this slightly different compound.

Note: products containing hydroxymethanesulfonate hamper the ability to test for ammonia when using certain types of test kits (see above). Presumably, the H2NCH2SO3- formed is still reactive with the Nessler reagents, even though it is not ammonia.



Treatments for Elevated Ammonia: Hydrosulfite and Bisulfite
A second type of compound used in commercial products (such as Seachem Prime) that claim to bind ammonia in marine aquaria is said to contain hydrosulfite (could be either HSO2- or - O2S-SO2-) and bisulfite (HSO3-). These compounds are well known dechlorinating agents, reducing Cl2 to chloride (Cl-), which process is also claimed to occur in these products. It is not apparent to me whether these ingredients actually react with ammonia in some fashion, or whether unstated ingredients in these products perform that function. Seachem chooses to keep the ingredients of their product secret, so aquarists cannot determine for themselves what is taking place, and how suitable it might be. Nevertheless, many aquarists seem to have successfully used products such as these to reduce ammonia's toxicity.

Note: products such as Seachem Prime hamper the ability to test for ammonia when using certain types of test kits (see above). Presumably, the product formed is still reactive with the Nessler reagents, even though it is not ammonia.

 

[dkeller_nc]

Here are just a couple of overall thoughts based on the info you posted:

The FTS you posted on your blog wouldn't leave me to believe that your tank is massively overcrowded with fish, presuming that you've a highly functional skimmer.

Dosing much of anything into a reef system other than basic ionic chemicals like calcium, carbonate and magnesium is exceedingly perilous. That's particularly true with additives where you really don't know what's in them (such as MB7).

Ditto for items where you might know what's in them, but really can't control the dosage, such as bio pellets. Randy would have to comment on this in his case, but this is precisely why I choose vinegar for nitrate control rather than biopellets.

My thought on Chemiclean is "never, ever" in a reef system. Same for anything that contains antibiotics, as you really don't know for sure what you're going to be killing.

Your ammonia issue was likely very transient. In a functioning reef tank with ample live rock and a substantial sandbed, there's a huge amount of ammonia-processing potential. If it were me, I wouldn't continue to dose Amquel, Prime, or any other "ammonia binder".

If it were my tank: I would immediately take the biopellet reactor out of the system (completely), leave the GFO off-line, continue to use GAC that's changed out once a week until your tank stabilizes, and probably execute 4 or 5 20% water changes every other day until your coral necrosis reverses. During this period, the only thing I would dose into the tank is calcium, alkalinity, and magnesium. I would also consider putting the tank on a controller, if you don't already have one, to ensure that you're not getting fooled by something like intermittent power outages overnight, or temperature swings well outside the safe limits.