Why did your urchin die in the first place? You might want to look into that, before getting a new one.
Thanks, I'm not looking to replace it immediately.
Due to my travel schedule, I've been on the road about 90% of the time for the last few months. Maintenance in my tank faltered as I was not home to take care of water changes, chemistry, etc. (the wife is too small and has RA so she can't haul water) My tank was taken over by cyano. I battled it in the day or two here and there as I could for about two months until it started to actually suffocate and kill corals.
It got to a point I could no longer battle with lights out, blowing it off of rocks/sandbed, vacuuming, lowered feedings, very frequent water changes, etc. All the things you are supposed to do to eliminate cyano, and it wasn't working. As a last resort I used a chemical treatment (Chemiclean).
It of course did exactly what it was supposed to do and eliminated all traces of cyano within 48 hours. One has to expect side effects of such a treatment (antibiotic) as it not only kills the bad cyanobacteria, but the good denitrifying bacteria as well (what makes your rock "live" rock).
During the treatment my filter socks (that I changed twice daily during the treatment) looked like a tickle me Elmo doll and smelled worse than dark skimmate.
I was expecting this and once the treatment period was over I did several water changes, monitored water chemistry, and a small cycle occurred due to the large amount of cyano being broken down. I can only change so much water every day. Never had an ammonia spike, but the massive amount of cyano being broken down created a large and fast spike in nitrate. (from 10-20 to over 100+).
Inverts and urchins are much more susceptible to rapid changes in nitrate than fish are. The casualty of this problem was my beautiful blue spot urchin. All my shrimp, snails, fish and my tuxedo urchin made it through ok.
I'm slowly bringing down the nitrate levels still with 15 gallon every other day water changes. They were down to 60 as of yesterday.
As for the other questions: Yes I have a tuxedo, nothing messes with the urchins in my tank except sometimes the Kole Tang seems to "nip" at the spines. Hes done that since I got him and it never seemed to bother either urchin. Think he likes the taste or something.
