The Tank of Death

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BraveHeart

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Hello Reefers,

This is my first visit to this BB, so I'll have to appologize in advance if I make any blunders in form or content. A friend saw a post that I made on another board and suggested that I post it here as well:

Iââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ve had nothing but problems with my 75 gal ever since I set it up a year ago. Iââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ve invested heavily in good equipment (sump, protein skimmer, vho lighting, etc.) but had little or no luck. Iââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢m so sick of "major water changes" I could puke. Algae out the kazoo and dying critters (even killed my damsels in July). Button polyps and zoanthids clamp down within hours of introduction. Snails typically only last about a month. I have to dose with kalk and buffer like crazy to keep the pH above 8. Iââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ve got about 100 lbs. of live rock and have never really detected any ammonia, nitrite, or nitrate. Just had the tank tested for copper, and that was negative, too. I use RO water for my weekly water changes (even though my LFS says that most reefers in this area get by with tap water) and only have one little clownfish who acts like heââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢s starving every night when I feed him his two flakes.

I had to move the tank in September, and at the advice of my LFS, I jerked out my plenum and most of my coarse crushed coral. I thoroughly washed the remaining reef sand/live sand and added a couple of bags of oolite sand when I set the tank back up. I then added about 10 pounds of new, nice looking live sand with lots of cool critters (e.g., about 20 or 30 spaghetti worms). That gave me a total sand depth of 2.5 to 3 inches.

The tank seemed to be doing ok until I noticed some dark gray spots forming down inside the sand bed about three weeks ago. Shortly thereafter, the spaghetti worms pulled themselves out of the sand, rolled around on top for awhile, then simply disappeared. The dark spots have grown until about 75% of the bed is discolored. Iââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ve got a nice dinoflagellate bloom, now. And, thereââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢s been a significant increase in green gunk skimmed out by my Turbofloater. I pulled a tablespoon sample from three different places in the bed yesterday morning to look for life and found nothing. That really surprised me because I have tons of bristle worms up in the rock work and there were lots of them in the sand bed when I moved the tank. What I did find was the smell of rotten eggs which leads me to believe that the bed is now nothing more than a big sewer of hydrogen sulfide.

This is basically my second failure at establishing a sand bed. The plenum-based system that I had for the first 6 months was a lifeless sewer as well, even though I seeded it with nearly 30 pounds of live sand. I'm really worried that there is some sort of toxin that's precluding any life below the bed line and most life above. My LFS is suggesting that I may have to dump my bed and try for sand bed # 3.

Questions:

The bristle worms up in my rocks were originally introduced in some live sand when I first set the tank up. Why have they abandoned the bed?

I thought you bought live sand to "seed" the bed and create a little eco-system of detrivores. Why did my spaghetti worms die?

What's killing my snails (astrea, trochus, margarita, turbos, etc.)?

What are the odds that some sort of poison continues to exist in the LR? Am I likely to continue to fail unless I discard all the LR and the sand bed and start over from scratch?

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BraveHeart
 
Braveheart, lots of possiblities here, but maybe some others can help as well. One thing I didn't notice in your description was water movement. You mentioned the sump and the skimmer, do you have any other pumps/powerheads just moving the water around? Also do you have a tight glass top? The low ph makes it sound like you aren't getting a good gas exchange which is very important. This could also possibly be affected by the room that the tank is in, if it is open or a stuffy back room. Snails are affected by changes in salinity and need to be acclimatized very slowly (several hours). You may want to stop dosing Kalk for a while and see if you can get your ph back in line. It doesn't sound like you have any big calcium users anyway and waterchanges should keep calcium up fairly well. Are you sure about the dinofagellate bloom or could it be plain old diatoms? Do you have any hermits or brittle stars to run around on the sand and keep things stirred up? Just a bunch of questions that may help others figure out what is wrong. Patience is a very important asset in this hobby. FWIW, Nathan



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Visit my homepage at padens.homepage.com
 
Have you considered adding a sand stirrer such as a goby? I'm sure the constant stirring of sand would prevent H2S pockets from forming.

Dave
 
Nathan,

Thanks for the reply. Here's a little more info:

I'm running a Little Giant 4-MDQX-SC pump that I have to keep throttled back a little bit so that my overflow can handle it. Besides that, I have two Hagen 402 powerheads and an Emporer 400 for carbon and a Poly filter.

The top of my tank is open and the whole system is in our family room in the basement. That allows me to keep the temperature very stable. I'd like to keep it at 80, or so, but I've got it down to 77 right now to keep the algae at bay. I get about 1 gallon of evaporation, daily.

I have been acclimating the snails, but only for 30 minutes, or so. They just seem to slowly loose their grip on life after a few weeks.

I've only been dosing with Kalk for about a month, now. My pH problems were just as bad, if not a little worse, before that. As a matter of fact, I've always had a pH problem. It's like the tank is an acid factory.

Some of the algae in my tank looks a lot like the dinoflagellates shown in the photo on pg. 436 of The Reef Aquarium vol. 2. It's kind of wierd because it will sometimes spin off a single, hair-like thread that can be several inches long. On Thursday, I had 30 or 40 of these threads waving around in the tank. My LFS is also calling this stuff dinoflagellates. He says he doesn't see any diatoms in my tank.

I have six blue-legged hermits that have survived since October. Before that, this tank killed 25 scarlets and several other blue legs. I also have a Sally Lightfoot that has been in the tank for about a month and a pistol shrimp that's been there for less than a week. We also tried to add a Bar Goby to get some sand stirring action last Monday, but it's been MIA since then and I fear the tank has taken another casualty. I had a green-star polyp, some brown polyps, and a plug of zoanthids in the tank, but I pulled them yesterday and took them back to the LFS -- I figured they had gone through enough misery. Some of them haven't been open for months.

Oops. Forgot to mention that I have 15 to 20 Nassarius snails that have managed to survive down in the sand for the last month. They don't seem to be as affected by whatever it is that's whacking my other snails.

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BraveHeart

[This message has been edited by BraveHeart (edited 12-12-1999).]
 
Hey Braveheart--Welcome to the board.
When you say "major" water changes, how much and how often? where did you get the live rock? Are there any artificial decorations, or metal components in the tank?
Over the past two years I've seen situations like this appear on message boards, the "tank of death" as you call it. Makes a person want to go look at the tank and how a person maintains it and see if something obvious isn't amiss.
It might help if you post basic parameters like salinity, ph morning and night, and alkalinity.
Good luck,


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Larry M

My Personal Site, Northern Reef
 
Larry,

Thanks for the warm welcome. Maybe this will be a good place to hang out.

When I say "major" water change, I'm talking 40 or 50 gallons. I've probably averaged at least one of these per month for the last 8 months. They've been at the advice of others in response to algae blooms, death of fish, or just trying to get the polyps opened up. The last change like this was a week ago, today. No positive effects -- just an ensuing algae bloom. Other than that, I try to change 5 to 10 gallons every week or two.

Nope, there isn't anything as obvious as a metal decoration in the tank. I wish it were that simple. I got the rock from an aquarist who moved back east. She ran a fish and anemone system with little or no sand bed. It looked pretty good when she had it. She did indicate that she had experienced a bad bout with ich, but she claimed to have tried nothing stronger than Coral Vital to correct it (unsuccessfully). As I understand it, she got the rock from Flying Fish about three years ago.

I try to keep the salinity at 1.024. I've been using a couple of teaspoons of Superbuffer dKH daily and replacing all of my evaporation with kalkwasser to try and keep the pH and alk at acceptable levels. I typically see a pH of about 8, or just a smidge above, before the lights come on, and a pH of something less than 8.1 by evening. My last test for alk showed 3.5 meq/L and that's the highest I've ever seen it. If I stopped dosing, I bet the alk would be below 2.0 and the pH would be down to 7.8 in less than a week.

Hey, I'd be more than happy to have you stop by. I'm only about 1,500 miles west of you. Seriously, my LFS is really a pretty successful reefer who has started up a little side business for a few extra bucks. I'd give my left arm for his worst tank. He's been here on three different occassions, and if anything were obvious, I think he'd be right on it.
 
Well, I really didn't think it was anything too simple but when dealing with people you don't know you have to start somewhere. Does the lfs guy have a theory? I find it hard to believe the sand bed is causing the problem. A ph range of 7.8 to 8.1 is not the end of the world, all four of my tanks run continuously in that range, with a dkh of 6 or 7. Yeah, I went through wishing they were higher too, but the animals are happy and growing so I gave up worrying about it.

Problem algae like you describe is not unusual for a new tank, and basically when you pulled the plenum and replaced the sand bed you started over again.

Dark or colored spots in the sand bed are no big deal, and it can take over a year for a bed to really be "live".

The kicker is the animals keep dying. Needless to say, that shouldn't be happening. How much do you feed? Are you adding the animals gradually so as not to overload your young bio-filter?

This is the advantage of having more than one tank, IMO. I have gone through periods with one tank when I could have pulled my hair out of my head. Having success with one of the others kept me in the hobby, not to mention a place to put my animals.

But I'm sure you're not interested in setting up another tank right now. ;)

I don't know, maybe someone else will have the magic answer.
Good luck,

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Larry M

My Personal Site, Northern Reef



[This message has been edited by Larry M (edited 12-12-1999).]
 
How much organic material were you adding to the tank from the time of adding the spaghetti worms till now?...In your first post you mentioned the "two flakes" fed to a clownfish daily...The posibility of a "dead" and decomposing sandbed, from lack of nutrient, might need to be considered...Just a thought...Jim

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Tank at: members.xoom.com/jimhobbs/reefstats.htm
 
Oh, I missed the "two flakes" part. That is a thought, if you added a bunch of sandbed critters and didn't feed much it could have contributed to the problem.

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Larry M

My Personal Site, Northern Reef
 
Larry,

I really appreciate your words of encouragement and no, I'm not the least bit interested in setting up another problem right now -- I haven't paid for this one, yet.

I give my single little clown the equivalent of 2 or 3 thumb-tack-head-sized flakes each evening. About two weeks ago I showed this to my LFS and he was concerned that the amount wasn't enough to keep the bed alive, so he suggested that I also drop in 4 to 6 BB-sized sinking pellets every other night, or so. The crabs and Nassarius snails come to life when those pellets hit! Is this too much?

The tank move in September was a pretty big event. I had to move it about 250 miles about a month before I could move. After the move, I had all of my critters at a pet hotel (a friend's tank) for about a month. I had another friend top off the tank and add a pinch of food occasionally until I could move. I put the clown, a flower anemone, two or three polyp rocks, 10 trochus, 6 astrea, 2 margarita, 3 turbo, 6 blue legs, 20 nassarius, and a partride in a pear tree in the tank at the same time I added the live sand. A couple of weeks later, I added the Sally Lightfoot. It was another month before I tried to add the pistol shrimp and goby. Is this too fast?

I guess the good thing that I'm hearing is that you may not agree with any more dramatic moves (e.g., replacing the sandbed). It sounds like you may just be recommending that I be patient and not feed any more sacrifices to the tank. Is there anything I can do to help things along?



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BraveHeart
 
Wow, lack of food could be this issue. Realistically, I believe we all have the ability to feed our tanks more than we think. The live sand and the other critters need food just like the clown. I think frozen brine shrimp is always a good addition to a tank. Almost every fish will eat it, as well as the shrimp and crabs, and finally, enough will fall to the sand to feed it also. IMO, decaying food is just like decaying fish poop, it goes through the cycle just like everything else. If your tank is mature enough to handle it without a spike, than no problem. You've got a big tank, you don't need to worry about a few extra pellets or some flakes. Just don't let it build up.


Hee, Hee, I said poop.
 
Boy, I sure am talking like I know what I'm doing here. I keep hoping someone else will bail me out. :D
So the sand bed you have now is mostly fine-grained sand? If so, I wouldn't remove it.
No, I don't think you are feeding too much. Here is an archive with some good, specific info about feeding your tank.
http://www.reefcentral.com/ubb/Archives/Archive-000001/HTML/19991126-1-000503.html

I would only caution that new tanks probably are not going to need to be fed quite as much since they don't harbor the life that a tank of a year old or more does.

I also don't think you added animals too fast. Crabs and snails are a minor consideration, IME, to the bio-load. The only catch may have been the "live" sand, if it was cured or not.

If it were my tank, I would test all the water parameters I could think of, and have the results confirmed by someone else with a different test kit. (Like your lfs guy)
I wouldn't add any more corals or fish to the tank for a month or more.
I would keep up with your regular water changes, and might consider this instead of one huge change to get rid of any possible pollutants in your tank: 4 or 5 30% changes spaced 2 or 3 days apart. I know, it sounds like a pain. But it might be good insurance.
I would put in some good carbon (like Black Diamond) and also put in a Poly-filter, paying attention to whether it is changing to a wierd color which would indicate a pollutant.
I would also clean the skimmer cup and neck often, like every two or three days to ensure it is working at full capacity.
Then, just hang in there--time is on your side. :)
Good luck,

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Larry M

My Personal Site, Northern Reef
 
Sound like starving sandbed could be on track though I'm getting alarm bells from algae blooms after major water change. Are you using Reverse Osmomsis and or DeIonized water. Have you tested the source water and post filtration water before adding Kalk. If your water used to make up SW are high in nutrients, heavy metals or other contaminants large water changes may be aggravating the problem.
Also when you removed plenum it most likely caused major disruption in sand bed. Die off of infauna can lead to hydrogen sulfide formation you think may be occuring. If thats the case it may recover slowly like Larry said esp if reseeded with sand dwelling animals. Stirring it will only make the problem worse I think. The other choice that comes to mind is to siphon out and clean the sand, then reinstall and reseed. Hopefully someone else will examine the logic here and comment as appropriate, HTH

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I reefed,so I spent,it would have been cheaper to do it right the first time.........Doug@thereeftank
moderator
 
I see your alk. reading looks ok but dont you guys think adding 2 spoons of buffer per day could cause major fluctuations in the tank. I have seen people wipe out part of a tank trying to do this.
Also think Doug is on the correct line about disturbing the sand bed.
Doug
 
Hang in there Braveheart!

My sense is that you have a few different things going on and probably not one explanation will suffice. I'll only specifically comment below on the algae problem, but I will encourage PATIENCE and to take things real slow from here on out. You have had some major dramatic changes to your system in the last few months. I would encourage you to avoid such dramatic changes.
(plenum removal, adding alot of live sand (cured?), adding alot of life at one time, major water changes, major buffer additions, etc.)

I sympathize with your dinoflagellate problem, since recently I have had similar algae troubles. There have been a few recent posts from others suffering from this also. See recent "Snot algae" post. Page 436 of TRA vol II looks alot like what I have also, though I also think I have diatoms as well. One similarity we share with this curse is relatively recent plenum removals (Sept.), which we may now be paying the price for now since our sand beds were disrupted. I also have a relatively dead aragonite 4" sand bed.
With respect to the dino removal, I have been improving my situation with increased skimming (upgrade to Turboflotor), kalk dosing, directly siphoning out the algae, and a shorter photo period.

Again go slow. IMO 40-50 gallon water changes all at once is too much for a 75 gallon tank. Instead siphon the algae with a narrow ended siphon (better suction). 5 gallons a day might be okay,, but not 40-50 at one time. I'll leave it to the experts, but can't adding too much buffer fast be dangerous?

Your other problems are more baffling, but I wish you the best.

- Also, TRA vol I talks about snails rolling over dead when eating dino. Mine are often upside down and although still alive, look like the sick. A couple days later they seem to revive and move on.
 
BraveHeart,
Welcome, how are you? I give you this much. You seem to know what you're talking about. I guess going through disaster and obsessing over it gets you thoroughly trained. My stab in the dark...
A couple of people hit on it already, but I'll go with the Hydrogen Sulfide formation. It's deadly stuff. I don't think your Sand bed was the cause, but do think it may be harbouring it.You mentioned you have 4, I believe, inputs for water circulation, right? You might want to try and actually increase the circulation in your tank. Redirecting the flow so it sends water down towards the sand bed. This, of course, will help gas exchange and will slowly get rid of the Hydrogen Sulfide. You could also try rearranging your rockwork so it has more open areas for water to flow in and out. A good piece of equipment would be a wave maker. That's if you have any dough left!
Anyhow, your sand bed might not have died from lack of food, but most of it would die off. The die off would actually supply food to the sand bed. Hydrogen Sulfide would kill off your sand bed, though.
The main reason I'm harping on Hydrogen Sulfide is because you mentioned the rotten eggs smell. I'm almost convinced this is your problem, but without being there I couldn't say for sure. Keep us updated.
Later,
Bill


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http://www.homestead.com/reefjunkie/highenergy.html
 
Wow, my hat is off to all of you. Your responses have been terrific.

Larry: I've been using Black Diamond carbon and changing it every 3 weeks, or so. I've also been running a poly filter for about 3 weeks. It's about the color of the green gunk in my skimmer. Thanks for the pointer to the feeding thread.

Rinaldi: On the surface, it appears that you and I might have the same tank. Odd that we both jerked our plenums at about the same time and are now having similar problems with dinos. There must be some correlation. I don't have TRA vol. 1, but I do have snails that behave as you suggest. They "play dead" for long periods of time (sometimes days). Then, I find them on the other side of the tank. Eventually, though, the dinos must finally cause them to croak.

Again, thanks for all of your suggestions.

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BraveHeart
 
Braveheart--FWIW, I just happen to have a Poyfilter here, and the card that comes with it says it turns green if removing ammonia. (I've used polyfilters several times, never had it turn green. Usually a dingy brown.)
Which would explain a lot. I would say get a new ammonia kit and check it again.

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Larry M

My Personal Site, Northern Reef



[This message has been edited by Larry M (edited 12-12-1999).]
 
Larry,

Sure won't hurt to get a new kit and double-check. But, the green on my pad looks and smells like particles of algae that have broken free and gotten sucked into the power filter. If I rinse it a little (not sure I'm supposed to do that) it turns back to white.

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BraveHeart
 
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