Sulphur Dioxide Poisoning

[mwilbur1084]

I have had my tank set up for a year and recently have had problems keeping anything I added new alive in the tank. I have had 7 damsels and a yellow tang in the tank from day one they all seem to be very healthy. Can they grow immune to whatever is going wrong with the water?

My sump is an old 120 gal tank in the basement with a has a 4 inch deep DSB I have a 140 gal tank upstairs for the show tank with 140lbs of live rock that has grow a nice coating of green and red coralline algae . The pair of Iwaki MD70's push tons of water up the 8 feet of head for lots of flow The 900 W outer orbit lights the show tank up extremely well. I have a reeflo 250 skimmer and a geo calc reactor that keep all of my water parameters just about perfect. all measured water parameters are well with in normal ranges ph 8.2 SG 1.025 CA 400 ALk 9.9 Ma 1250 NH3/4 < .1 NO2~ 0 NO3 ~0

I cant keep anything new that I add to the tank alive, plants, inverts, corals, and fish, everything dies in 2-3 days.

I started doing aggressive 20% weekly water changes and vacuuming deep into the DSB in the sump and found the siphoned water had strong sulphur smell. This smell is starting to diminish with each water change vacuum siphon cycle but is it to late for the tank ? Should I just shut it down and remove all of the sand in the sump and start over with a new sand bed ?

Any advice would be very welcome


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[moondoggy4]

Someone told me that if you remove the sand in a tank that you will have a ammonia spike.

 

[hairyman1]

How do you acclimate new animals? How many do you introduce at one time? The sulphur smell is from hydrogen sulfide which is a toxic gas from the anerobic conditions in your dsb. If you have some sand sifting organisms this will be greatly reduced or if you reduce slightly the size of your sandbed and in any case is not toxic until it is released into the water. This is not likely your problem as it would kill indiscriminately everything new or old. Since you've already vacuumed the sand bed I would just leave it be and test for ammonia/nitrite before adding any more livestock. Damsels can be hard on new fish introductions so watch their behavior after a fish is introduced.

 

[mwilbur1084]

Harry

what would you guess is killing the new stuff I add

I have been drip acclimating 6-8 hrs and then adding the new corals to low light areas and they all almost imedatatly close up and die in 2-3 days inverts take longer to die but they are noticably inactive as soon as there introduced to the tank

There has to be something in the water that is causing this I guess i can just keep doing partial water changes but it would be great to know what the heck is causing this and that I am not just reintroducing the problem with the new water as then I will never get it right

thanks for your reply

 

[Macimage]

You should not disturb a deep sand bed.

At this point, I would leave the sand bed alone and do water changes.

If the livestock started to die before you disturbed the sand bed, I'd call your local water company and verify whether or not they have recently added chloramines to their water supply. This is happening all over the country and chloramines are much stronger than chlorine and blow out RO filters much quicker.

Good luck!
Joyce