I haven't posted any updates in a while, so heres the good and ugly of whats been happening with my tank.
Good:
-GHA gone. Since mid december I was able to get rid of my GHA from my tank. I got back on track with bi weekly water changes, scrubbed as much as I could out of the tank with a tooth brush, and then when that wasn't getting rid of it all, I started using vibrant. GHA is gone from my display and frag tank. Once gone, I stopped using vibrant.
-Once the GHA was taken care of, I moved on to getting rid of the byropsis that I had in my frag tank. This was a carry over from my previous frag tank. Reef flux was dosed, and appears to have taken care of it. Its been a few weeks since dosing and things are still looking good. The recommend procedures were followed and a water change was done at the end of the process.
-For a good week, the tank looked the best its ever looked, and then Cyano took over. I let this go for a few weeks, trying to manually deal with it through turkey basting rocks, but since it kept getting worse, I resorted to using liquid Chemi clean. Ive used this in the past and it worked great. This was done 1 week ago, and following the instructions on the bottle, carbon was removed and UV was turned off. Cyano is now gone.
and here is where my troubles have just began:
-Earlier in the week, I started noticing one of my monti's color fading. I thought it was simply stressed from the past month of additives to take out the 3 issues. I've seen this occur before, and corals usually recover. About mid week, I noticed my bounce shroom much more deflated than previously seen. I thought nothing of it, as its done this before. Friday night, I noticed that my red montipora had lost most of its color, though the polyps were still there. Looking around the tank further, I noticed that all of my montipora's were starting to fade and appeared to be bleaching out. This concerned me, and I started realizing some of my mistakes.
Problem 1: After the previous weekends chemi clean treatment, I didn't put my carbon back in the tank. I run a mixed reef: mostly SPS and LPS, and though they are seperated and I've never noticed any stinging, I try not to chance things and typically run carbon to take out any chemical warfare going on between corals. I've also kept a medium sized sarcophyton in my frag tank, and I've read accounts of this causing issues in tanks.
Problem 2: UV was turned off and not turned back on.
Problem 3: I didn't do the recommended water change.
Friday night I added some carbon back to the tank, turned the UV back on, and mixed up new saltwater, though the saltwater wasn't up to temp until saturday morning.
-Saturday morning: Red plating monti was bleached out and dead. This included the main colony, and random frags I had placed throughout the tank, and also in the basement frag tank. This makes me assume it's something in the water. All my other monti's are now looking worse, or just as white. My birdsnest, and a few other sps are starting to look pale, and polyps are receding back. My LPS throughout my display tank also started slimming up, with many receding with skeletons showing. Not looking good. Oddly enough, my Acroporas look fine. In the morning I did a 30gl water change (roughly 10% of the total system volume).
-Saturday afternoon: All monti's dead, LPS not looking good. I removed the dead skeletons and put in my sump with some other live rock. I did a second water change with the remaining 20gl I had mixed up.
-Sunday morning: Most LPS are mostly bleached out and down to skeletons. Some could still make it though I'm not to optimistic about their survival. Acro's all currently appear to be fine. Considering everything going on, this strikes me as odd. All fish appear fine.
Throughout this process, while I made a few mistakes with the chemi clean treatment process, and I suspect this is what caused things, I did test the water pretty frequently and for the most part things looked fine. Also regarding the chemi clean, the bottle I used was purchased 7 months ago and previously used. I did not see any expiration date on the bottle, but maybe the liquid should not be used after sometime?
Salinity: 34.5/35. This has remained relatively stable and I use a hana pen to check. My last recalibration was less than 1 month ago.
pH fluctuates between 7.9-8.2 throughout the day. Calibration was 1 month ago.
Alk/Cal/Mg via the Trident
Alkalinity: 8.5 average - though typically I keep around 9. 1 week ago my Co2 tank ran out causing this to drop into the 7's. Luckily I had a replacement, changed it out the next day and got it back up throughout this past week
Calcium: 468 average with no significant variations
Magnesium: 1445 average, no significant variations
Nitrate: 1ppm on 20 January, 5ppm 25 January. Possibly related to the Cyano kill off.
Phosphate: .02ppm 21 January, .08 25 January. Possibly related to the Cyano kill off.
No changes have been made to my lighting.
Looking through my notes on my tank, other possible causes to issues:
-Flow from my main return pump was increased 1 month ago and I removed my filter roller because it was going through 1 roll a week.
-Over the past week, my 3 tuxedo urchin's were losing spines. They were still moving around, though this morning it looks like they might have died off. Upon further inspection, they are dead and removed from the tank. I likely killed off their food source, though they always seemed to eat more coralline algae then GHA.
-A serpent starfish was losing bits off its legs, and I started noticing this about a week ago, and this morning it appears to be down to nubs in the front of the tank, though still squirming around. It has been removed from the tank.
-Refugium tank flow increased. It's possible that this stirred up detritus and who knows what sitting underneath it all causing the tank to react adversely. I wanted to increase the flow here after killing off the cyano so the chaeto could suck up more nutrients.
-I read that macro algae can bleach out / reproduce, causing tank crashes, but Its all mostly green still so I don't suspect this as an issue.
-New frag tiles added to frag tank. Over a 2 week period, I added about 10 new 3x3" ocean wonders frag tiles to my frag tank, all with new frag's from online orders and with some Acropora cuts from my display. All frags were glued down using polylabs frag glue. I'm not saying this was the cause, simply one more chemical added to the system. I can imagine larger scale operations add a lot more glue to their systems at any given time, though they likely do more frequent water changes avoiding excess buildup. So you never know.
-My blue tang has been picking up everything not glued down and throwing it around the tank. This resulted in me gluing down all my scolys to 3 more frag tiles. Initially the scolys looked fine, but now they are receding. The frag tiles were simply washed off and scrubbed down before putting into the tank, as per the instructions they should be ready to put in the tank.
I'm not aware of any external chemicals that could of gotten into the tank. There are no candles or air freshners used near the tank or anywhere in my house, and no cleaning products have been used on the floors near the tank. Tables/surfaces nearby are usually wiped down with wipes due to a 1 and 4 year old in the house, no sprays used. Our kitchen is in the room next to the tank and earlier in the week while cooking the oven burned some food up causing smoke to come out, though doors and windows were opened.
So that's where I'm at right now. It's unfortunate to go through what I'm calling a tank crash. It's a bummer to lose so many corals that I've had for over 2 years now, but I guess that's part of challenges with this hobby. On the positive side of things, this has given me an opportunity to fix some of the rock work in the tank and make it more stable.
Clowns
