Help!!!

[BPUMFREY]

Fish are dying... Two Clowns and a Turbo snail in the last week... tank is established 8 months old...

29 Gallon Tank
Approx 30 pounds of sand
approx 35 pounds of liverock
Compact Lighting Actinic Blue/10 k White on for 10 hours a day
PH 8.2
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0
Nitrates 5-10 ppm
Calcium 480
DKH 11 or 196.9 ppm?

We had a recent outbreak of cyano which my wife skimmed the surface of the sand and skimmed off the rocks (using air hose and siphoning) and then did a 30% water change, we left for the weekend (lights are on timers) and came home to all of our corals pulled in to themselves (mushrooms, Brain, Wood Polyps, Watermelon Zo's, Frogspawn, Kenya Tree's) with our clown dead in the corner of the tank...

We are lost and are really scared that our tank might be starting to crash or did so over the weekend the Parameters of the water we tested when we got home and are the most recent...

Any advice would be awesome...

 

[JSB]

Sorry to hear this. Did your clowns show symptoms of Brook or Ich or anything that might help diagnose? Their death might not be related to the overall tank issue. Did you use anything to treat the cyano, other than a hose? Did you use any chemicals such as paint near the tank prior to going away? Is there any way that your water change water is somehow contaminated?

I think my course of action would be assume NSW used for the water change might be the culprit (maybe mixed in a bucket with trace amounts of soap or oil or whatever). Since you don't have any delicate species, I would get a new clean brute trash can and make up 30 gallons of NSW and do either 2x50% water changes, or 3x35% water changes. If you have a power filter, put a cup of carbon in it and run it on the tank, or if not put it in a poly bag and put it in a high-flow area of the tank. BTW, ALK is a little high, I would shoot for 8-9. That is not likely related though, in my experience.

Hope this helps.

 

[pickupman66]

the OP didnt state the salinity of the tank.

 

[BPUMFREY]

Salinity is 1.025 we monitor it very closely, The bucket we use for are water changes is a bucket we purchased for our tanks and has not been around any kind of chemicals, we have not added any chemicals to the water to fight the cyano just my wife using the air tube, we run a carbon filter system on it as well as our protein skimmer our wrasse and nassarus snails as well as are crabs seem to be fine now and some of our corals are opening back up...even are Star Polyps which freak out if you look at the tank are open and seem to be happy, although are Kenya trees and a little frag of the wood polyps look beat...

 

[JSB]

So perhaps your clowns, having perished in a serial fashion, were suffering from something. The first died a bit back, the latest just recently, however, he/she was left in the tank to decompose over the weekend and raise the ammonia levels that your filtration was initially not able to efficiently process out. Everything else suffered from the elevated levels and are now recovering?

I doubt if it went down that way, but it is the best I can come up with based on the given facts. How long did you have the clowns and were they sufficiently quarantined? Or were they fairly recent additions?

 

[BPUMFREY]

Clowns were in Main tank about three weeks

 

[JSB]

I would be more concerned about overall tank health if the fish had been in for a much longer period, or had they been quarantined for an adequate amount of time before hand. Is/was the wrasse overly aggressive towards the clowns, perhaps stressing them? Also, in my experience, snails come and go, so other than just a point of consideration, I would not put a lot of weight on snail death, unless it is occurring en masse.

So, do a couple of decent water changes, keep an eye on the wrasse for stress, and proceed with care. Get you a pair of sturdy clowns (maybe even tank bred) and keep them in a q-tank for 2-4 weeks. Just go slow and don't get discouraged.

 

[WesW]

What about temperature? How much does it typically swing in a day? Do you have a controller and fans in addition to heaters? With the heat we have been having lately I wonder if your clowns were already sick and a heat spike while you were gone could have further stressed your system. Also can you get a LFS or reef buddy to test your water too? Since you are having cyano problems I wonder if any of your tests could be off. I have two sets of the exact same API nitrate test that show very different levels so those kits can have some error. Good luck!