Slow Painful Crash...

I am not but recently started prodibio which is.

I am glad to report after 50% loss, things have turned around.
 
so sad . I am going through the same thing.
I have even removed my titanium heater and replaced it with a glass one.
are you carbon dosing ?

Is there a reason you thought the Titanium heating tube was the culprit? I'm using a Finnex Titanium tube also.


I am not but recently started prodibio which is.

I am glad to report after 50% loss, things have turned around.

What is "prodibio"?
 
Is there a reason you thought the Titanium heating tube was the culprit? I'm using a Finnex Titanium tube also.




What is "prodibio"?

Sorry for the slow reply. Prodibio is a an off the shelf carbon dosing system to lower nitrates. You ad viles of bacteria and viles of a carbon source. Works very good. However I have recently switched to vodka dosing and that works very well on the nitrates...
 
So just an update. I am still slowly losing sps colonies while others are growing. Some go from the base up. Others burn at the tips. others just melt in the middle.

My frog spawn has stopped growing and does not look that good throughout this process. My palys still grow like weeds. My gsp looks like crap some days and other days looks good.

My fish and clams look great and happy.

Here are some of the latest parameters:

Nitrate .2
P04 .02
Alk 9.3
Calc 378.
PH 8.1
Mag 1320

So as colonies die, my demand for alk and calc drops. The alk has been steady in that range but calc has been slowly dropping. I keep increasing it each week and the demand is a tad higher than the alk so I am not sure what that's about. But non the less it would not be killing colonies.

I do 10% water changes twice a week. This is a new bucket of salt for the past month or so. So that's not it.

Poly filter not showing any metals

PAR of LED's has not changed and the color of the corals is stable so I don't think that is it.

Temp is stable.

Sand bed never gets disturbed

Skimmer is skimming nice black junk. Particularly with my vodka dosing. (problem started before vodka dosing)

I since changed from ESV to BRS two part so it was not a bad batch of that.

I stopped using any supplements in case there was a contaminated bottle.

Nothing new in the house. No construction, no increase in house keeping, no other people in the house, no small children, same other pets, so signs of any pests on the colonies, no new additions in months and even months before this started. System is 3 years old not and has always been very stable.

I am tempted to scrap the entire system and rebuild and recycle using all new rock and sand. I have a 50 gallon frag system that is full of RBTA's and some forest fire digi that grows like a weed but I am hesitant to put any of the old rock into that system. Colonies that I transfer have not been recovering in the frag system. My PAR is quite low and most of my SPS like it around 350 so that may be the problem...
 
I'm not to experienced on this but.....
Could this be not enough lighting or to much? who knows! It doesn't hurt to change a little.
I hope everything gets better soon.
 
Did you ever get an answer as to what your skimate no longer sinking might have to do with things? It seems that one was left unanswered.
 
Well since carbon dosing it stinks plenty.


Coral growth was off the charts for over a year and an half with the current light output. Also too little light will cause a color shift in the coral to a brown color long before it dies. typically
 
Well a couple of months after this started I developed a stray voltage issue. Got that under control. I am now focusing on my sand bed. It is a shallow sand bed but when I had crazy growth I could not vacuum it regularly. Now that 90% of my colonies are gone, I have started to focus on it. Since I have been doing it my frog spawn looks a bit better. Ill do this for a few weeks and possible add a new SPS frag from my other system.
 
I would chime in a say you have a bacteria imbalance in your system. Bacteria are the most important part of a closed ecosystem and the part we unfortunately know the least about. When dosing and fiddling around we eventually force natural selection to make some bad choice over time to what i believe cause "Old Tank Syndrome" THe Chemiclean and probidio option I think it your best bet for normalizing your bacterial levels and hopefully getting back to your old system. Its hard with a DSB though since we try to create anaerobic and aerobic bacterial layers in the substrate that usually do not perform as intended in our artificial reefs. My best advice would be a partial reboot: Remove the sand and start over with a fresh 3/4" aragonite bed and a BioClean_Salt package from Probidio.
 
Thanks. I do not have a DSB...only an inch of aragonite. Was using prodibio for a couple of years and did stop a few months before the downfall began. My nitrates were too low for my taste. The vodka dosing started a month after the downfall began. Just a cost cutting thing. I agree about the bacteria as a possible cause. I started prodibio again this past weekend and stopped the vodka. If the prodibio keeps up with the nitrates I will probably keep with it...
 
So now that my sps is 90% gone (just my Copps Hoek colony growing like a weed) I am making making space and preparation to re-aquascape. I have also been paying attention to the gravel now that I can get to it. Something strange. Since I gave away those Paly rocks my foxface has better color, is no longer hiding and actually hangs out in front when I am looking at my tank. He would always hide when I came near the tank. I have had him for almost a year and he was always patchy in color and hiding. He is now bright yellow and friendly. Started the day I got rid of those rocks....
 
First reading the post I was on the same thought of the non registering p04 being the culprit for your issues. I had almost exact same symptoms from a bad batch of ulr reagents and not realising I was stripping the tank of p04( I had a back up kit but realised to late it was wrong and I broke the cardinal rule of checking new reagent against old before trusting it) ..it took a few months to recover but once I realised my mistake things halted rather quickly.

I'm really at a loss how so many people say you have to run 0 p04 for a successful sps tank,even though so much real world experience says otherwise it's constantly regurgitated daily that it's the absolute enemy. That was the worst my coral have ever looked, and only thing I did to change it was remove the gfo and continue to feed heavy. It's been 3 months and my tank is stable on nopox alone for n03/p04 and I couldn't be happier, no gfo and levels are stable for now. I'm glad to see that you have let the levels rise fwiw .

My next question is, You are not concerned with running such a high level of alk while carbon dosing? I start loosing tissue from my sensitive acros whenever my alk would be above mid 8', I now am diligent on leaving it below 8 and everything is happy. I know that initially you were @7dkh but have let it rise to 9 due to casualties?why not bring it back down to 7 to rule that out? It's pretty widely acceptable practice as of late to not run elevated alkalinity while dosing any carbon source.
 
In the earlier stages I took the GFO offline just to be sure. After a couple months I put it back online as my po4 was way higher than my typical success window. I have had very good success with 0 po4 so I am not leaning in that direction. It is currently .02 and has been for a while.
Regarding my alk and carbon dosing, the vodka brings my nitrates from 20 to .2. At that level I have had no tissue issues at all running it over 9 but when my nitrates were zero 9 was my limit. It is hard to keep it down now because of the die off. The more things die off the higher it goes, so I cut it back every week and I am keeping it below 9... I am shooting for the 7-8 window where I have had the best success...
 
Have you considered supplementing with amino acid additives? That's standard practice for many ULNS systems and may help with coral nutrition. As a disclaimer, I haven't tried it, but it don't see how it could harm anything.
 
Well at .2 nitrates and .02 p04 I don't think I am considered ULN anymore. When I was at the beginning I did add amino acids and they worked well. However once my tank got detectable nitrates, my growth took off and I haven't dosed aminos in months and stopped after the crash started just in case I had a bad batch... Also most would agree that the answer is almost never to start dumping more stuff in your tank.

Thanks for the suggestion though. I appreciate it.
 
So since I have been focusing on cleaning the sand bed and dosing prodibio, I have noticed my one dying frag has great PE and my GSP has begun to grow again... Hope I guess..

I did notice all my micro brittle stars are gone. Maybe the fox face ate them. I vacumed out the sump today. Plenty of big fat worms.
 
Well Glad it stopped. I just doubt 3 years of not feeding my corals and epic growth all of a suddenly stopped one day because my corals got hungry. But as I am game for trying things, I have started feeding. By the way the frags moved over to my other system that I don't feed, are doing well...
 
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