Painful watching my tank nuke... Advice?

[kevlow]

I don't do this as a matter of course, it's something i mentioned as an easy and effective way to help increase the 'richness' of your water borne coral nutrition. It keeps a constant supply in the water rather than throwing some bottled BS in once a day etc.
I always skim wettish - dark tea color like most guys. There's no need to adjust anything and over think things, just let whatever you normally remove cycle back through the system and watch your reef to see how things react.
If you see positive signs from doing what i suggest - stop the skimmer draining thing and start adding a food that will quickly increase your nutrient levels such as mysis.

The only way you can not get a reading from your water is by not feeding your bio filtration the amount of food it can handle. I feed 5 mysis cubes a day, nori and multiple pellet feeds and my nutrients are still dropping - i will feed more until i reach a balance because the more food i can process daily the better my acros look.

Excellent advice. Tomorrow I am having a fitting and hose modded onto my skimmer cup.

 

[deputydog95]

I basically just rotated the collection cup a little to ensure it all spilled into the sump and pulled the plug. No hose.... It'll just run down for now.

Doser has been off for about 2 days. No drop in Alk or Ca. Everything still looks really angry and the bleaching continues.

I have a newer frag that is now falling victim as well.

This sucks...

I'll continue feeding coral chili etc and fish food min 1x preferably 2x a day and let the skimmer dump into the sump.

Fingers crossed this balances out and the carnage slows or better yet stops.

 

[ezcompany]

When things are going bad I wouldn't add anything in the tank, not even coral feeding. (except for the fish)
If you're out of options how about sending it to a lab for testing, maybe you'll see a discrepancy somewhere. Couldn't hurt.

 

[deputydog95]

When things are going bad I wouldn't add anything in the tank, not even coral feeding. (except for the fish)
If you're out of options how about sending it to a lab for testing, maybe you'll see a discrepancy somewhere. Couldn't hurt.

Any suggestions for testing?

 

[deputydog95]

Doser has been off since last Friday I think. Alk actually went up to 9.5 for a bit and has been slowly settling. It's down to 8.5 as of yesterday.

I know you don't want to do anything drastic, but is there a slightly faster way to drop the Alk? I'm assuming the coral are ****ed and aren't using anything which is why it's dropping so slowly.

Anything I can do to help this along to get it down to 7.5 or so?

 

[Jim Z.]

When your SPS stop growing, alk use decreases so that explains the increase in alkalinity. Let the alkalinity drop naturally to around 7 DkH. This may take several days and then set your dosing to keep the alk at or near 7. Once the corals start growing, you will see alk and calcium levels drop at a faster rate and that's when you need to bump up your dosing. It takes a while for a reef tank to reach an equilibrium point between nutrient and trace element utilization and coral growth. You cannot rush biology so be patient and go slowly with any dosing........................Jim

 

[deputydog95]

Makes sense... Taking forever to drop on its own though. Getting impatient

 

[steallife904]

I recently found my calc and alk levels where low. I decided to bump both up on my doser. Calc was normally 430 but dropped to 250. Alk was 7.7 and was down to 6.8. I bumped both up and alk went to 9.3 and calc around 400............ in just a few days. it has not been good on some of my corals. I am trying to fix it all. I went from a thriving reef to many losing color, some acros and montis bleaching and a chalice that is completely dyeing back, not sure how or if I can save it or any others. I guess on the positive note it didn't hurt everything in the tank. really only a few. hope I can fix it. Can get really tricky sometimes with how much to dose to make the tank happy.

 

[deputydog95]

I feel your pain.

With the doser off for around 5 days now, it's finally dropped to about 7.85. Give or take.

Calcium is holding around 410.

Things seem to be looking worse, but I'm guessing once the progression starts, its hard to stop it....

I'm guessing I'll probably be in the 7.4 to 7.5ish range tomorrow, and will start to lightly dose again to catch the down swing and keep it at 7, before it goes too far the other way.

 

[steallife904]

goes uphill slow.... goes downhill quick! that's what I have learned the past 10 years in this hobby....
I had to frag apart 2 of my colonies last night in hopes I can save them.... it hurt!

FYI, I actually just thought I haven't checked the magnesium levels.... I will as soon as I get home, may want to as well if you haven't!

 

[deputydog95]

Mg is solid at around 1250-1280.

Bought all new reagents for my red sea kits llast week to be on the safe side.

Still looking like crap even though the Alk has dropped. Everything is ****ed and continues to recede...

I'm guessing this is going to be a complete do over. Shame, some of these corals were three years old and looking awesome in the old tank.

I'll try to take some pics today.

 

[steallife904]

may need some more sps pros to jump in but it seems they are very sensitive to the alk swings. I think once they start bleaching its hard to stop. Out of all my sps I have 3 acros that started bleaching (showing skeleton) in the middle and have kept getting larger, I might frag them today as well. Anyone think they should be fragged or is there nothing you can do to stop it?

 

[deputydog95]

My LFS comes out every two weeks to bring water and change it. Today was the day. Unfortunately he decided to yank out 3 years worth of coral that was going downhill rapidly. Painful to see it all die off... He thought it best to get all the dying coral out of there for fear adding any toxicity to the water.

There's STN on the rest, so I'm assuming they're all goners at this point. Worst part is, I added 5 or 6 recent frags. Many fairly expensive from world wide coral. When I added them, things were looking awesome and had no reason to suspect it would go sideways on me. Now they're on the way out too.

This sucks!

Alk is holding steady at 8, Ca at 410, doser still turned off. Changed 25 gallons today. Hoping for a miracle.

 

[Nanighan]

If hope is almost lost, I would do this (I have done this several times and it works). I would get a 20g high as to not take too much space and fill it with completely new batch of saltwater. Use a high gph pump (or several) and let it mix for several hours and transfer the the sick corals. I understand that this is the opposite of a seasoned tank but I have used this method to save/transfer/redo my tank, and the corals seem to respond positively.

Edit to add that it should have all the amenities of a full blown tank like light, heat, and a few fish like damsels etc. The live rock should only be what the corals are attached to.
Edit 2.. Salt I use is Red sea Coral Pro and it seems to mix very fast. Also some examples of sps that have gone through this are a palmers blue mille , stawberry shortcake, bonsai , pink lemonade. Not high end stuff but these guys came out ok.

 

[deputydog95]

Appreciate the tip. Unfortunately this tank is in my office and I just don't have the space to setup a second tank.

Interesting that technique works. I wonder why?

 

[Myka]

Anything I can do to help this along to get it down to 7.5 or so?

I'm not necessarily suggesting this because I don't think your corals would appreaciate a quick alkalinity drop, but there is a way you can drop it faster. When you go to do a waterchange add muriatic acid to the freshly mixed saltwater (not your display tank!!!) and then mix it for several hours to let the pH come back up (the acid will drop it around 6.0 pH temporarily). Using muriatic acid you can lower the alkalinity of your freshly mixed saltwater without affecting other parameters (once the pH comes back up). If you lower the alkalinity of your salt mix bucket to 6.0 or something, and do a waterchange with it that will lower your tank alkalinity too. Too big of a swing would be bad though.

I used to do this when I used H2Ocean salt mix in my SPS reef since H2Ocean mixes up to about 9.5 dKH and my tank sits around 6.8-7.0 dKH. I would use about 8 mL muriatic acid in about 17 gallons of saltwater to drop alkalinity from about 9.5 dKH to about 7.0 dKH. YMMV.

 

[deputydog95]

Just checking bad in with an update...

Things went from bad to worse. My LFS tech ended up ripping out almost all my 3 year old SPS that was bleaching badly. Decided it was a solid precaution to prevent any rotting in a new system and or eliminate bacteria spread if that was the culprit. Either way, he felt like it was a lost cause...

That was a real bummer.

Even more so, when things were looking really good a month or so ago, I picked up some new (expensive) corals from World Wide Coral since I was passing through Orlando.

While initially it was just all the corals that had been transferred were dying, now all the new corals I had added from WWC and my LFS are also dying.

Originally we thought it was maybe the transfer of the old corals into the new system, but now with the new corals dying off it has to be something else.

I ended up letting the dkh fall to 8 and have kept it steady there. I generally try to not be on either the high or low side to give myself some wiggle room.

So the current specs are as follows:

8 dkh
420 Ca
Mg 1350
.08 Phos
78.5 Temp

I ended up running the skimmer for 12 hours per 24 hour period at night as a compromise between stripping the water and aeration.

I'm still not sure what happened, but since I let it settle in at 8dkh, things have begin to level off. The ph was initially swinging from 7.9 to 8.3 and now maintains and 8.1 to 8.3. Ca holds steady. Temp is a constant 78.5 with less than half a degree variation. Light cycle is 12 hours per day, with a 3 hour ramp up and a 3 hour ramp down. Lighting intensity maxes at about 55% with a mostly bluer spectrum of light.

Couple things I noticed in hindsight. Tank went really sideways when I added the skimmer and ran it 24 hours per day. It was skimming in the first 10 mins it was turned out. Never seen that before...

Been running a polyfilter and a carbon pad as a precaution to soak up any weirdness created either in or outside the tank.

Several suspicions...

A) I stripped the phosphates to non detectable levels very quickly at a dkh of around 9.5 and shocked the heck out of the SPS corals

B) The tank was just too new and the ionic balance wasn't dialed in enough to support sensitive SPS

C) Maybe there were small cycles going on with trace amounts of ammonia coming and going since I was using all new rock, sand, and water

D) Combination of all of this

Now I'm just sitting back and waiting to see what happens.

I have one more strange phenomenon going on...

I have a hammer coral and a frogspawn. Both several years old. Kept them together in the old system. I transferred them both to the new system on the same day.

The hammer opened and acted naturally on the first day. The frogspawn has been more or less on lock down for a couple months now.

Does this offer any clues to what's happening in my system? They're essentially cousins and thrive under the same conditions, so doesn't make sense to me.

I'm hoping now that I've attained some stability and got the nutrient levels back up that I see a 180 here. Been painful losing all these animals. Although I may add a couple hours to the skimmer as .08, imo is starting to creep up on the higher side.

 

[spkennyva]

I don't do this as a matter of course, it's something i mentioned as an easy and effective way to help increase the 'richness' of your water borne coral nutrition. It keeps a constant supply in the water rather than throwing some bottled BS in once a day etc.

This is a nugget of gold for someone struggling to keep nutrients up. I'm going to give this a whirl.

 

[deputydog95]

Tank is still not behaving though... I have leveled alk at 8 dkh and 420ppm for CA. Mg is around 1400. When I went below 8dkh, I started seeing some real pH dips at night.

Right now everything is pretty conistent.

Temp 78.5 (only varies .3 degrees)
pH Night 8, Day 8.2 (average swing)
Alk 8 dkh
Ca 420ppm
Mg 1400ppm
Phos .08 (probably slightly less as it's between colors)
Nitrate detectable
Light Cycle 10 hours per day with half hour ramp up and ramp down
Flow remains constant with circle pumps running 24 hours per day
Skimmer runs 24 hours per day

Two things I've noticed. ORP is noticeably lower than the 3 year old seasoned tank everything came out of. Both tanks were very close to each other in the office. Generally ran around 400 in the old tank and only low 330's in the new tank. Not sure if it's a probe issue or is the ORP that much lower... Then again not sure it even really matters.

pH on the weekends spikes up a bit. I'm assuming that's because there's no one in the office on the weekends, so a lot less CO2 to supress it. Goes up at least .10 than normal. Nothing crazy, but not sure how to normalize that.

Anyway, the tank still looks like crap despite. All the corals that were part of this transition are still angry as hell. Nothing looks right and things continue to bleach and recede except for a hammer coral. This includes the corals that were transferred into the tank, as well as all the new frags I added before it all went sideways.

My LFS added a green slimer two weeks ago and it seems happy, full of color. Good PE.

What do you guys make of this? Do I need to rip everything out and just start over again?

 

[Gig 'em]

Have you closely inspected corals for pests? Sea spiders can be hard to see and you have to be real patient and focused at night to see them. Also I've heard of tiny little pods on corals that bug them to death. AEFW and red bugs aren't the only coral pests out there, it's important to always dip and QT every coral and keep a close eye on them at night when it's easier to see them and evidence of them