High Calcium, High pH, High Phosphate and Ich!!

[M Alsaati]

Hello Everyone,

I have a 150G stocked with 18 fish an LPS, 3 carpets and a few mushrooms. I’ve been working on my water chemistry and just yesterday I got my alkalinity on point. Here are my parameters:
Temp: 25.9 C
pH: 8.4 - 8.5
Alk: 10 dKh
Cal: 544
Sal: 1.026
Phosphorus: 47 to 87 currently at 87

I use Red Sea powder (B) to buffer alkalinity, I’m worried it’s also increasing my pH. Although I read online that alkalinity is always 8.3 pH.

In my sump, I got live rock, crushed corals, miracle mud, a reactor running Ehiem “Phosphate out”, a skimmer and chaeto algae. I added a bio pellets reactor to help the other reactor get phosphorus under control. Unfortunately there’s no GFO where I live.

I was also running a carbon reactor but had to stop it as I’m dosing Polyplab Medic (triple dosing) to treat an ich breakout. Weird is the more I dose the more ich I see on the fish. I wonder if my other chemical filtration (phosphate out and bio pellets) is affecting the medicine performance.

Lastly, with that high phosphorus, I have brown algae growing in my display, I’m hoping with my Phosphate reduction I’ll get that under control too.

Any tips? It’s nerve wrecking trying to get so many things under control.. How can I reduce calcium? I’m not dosing anything other than Alkalinity. What is possibly causing my calcium to increase? Why is my pH high?

 

[Saltyreef]

Well im not sure about all of your issues but the title stuck out like a sore thumb to me and an incorrect salinity reading came to mind as ive ran into that personally.
Is your salinity meter properly calibrated?

Also, ive never heard or seen reef safe meds to be effective against ich especially polyp labs stuff. Most of the time its coencidence.... Ich management with proper diet, good tankmates and plenty of room is the best option without removing the fish and quarantining. Ich will still always be in the system encysted.

 

[M Alsaati]

After doing some research, I believe it’s Marine velvet. I was fooled by the few white spots, now I got fish covered all over.

 

[Saltyreef]

Youll want to pull them out immediately and treat in a copper QT at 2.5ppm for a minimum of 2 weeks if infact velvet. I do this for ich too.

 

[kireek]

Sorry for troubles .You will definitely need to separate the fish for proper treatment.
Topping of with freshwater may add small amounts of Calcium.Other than that your aquarium doesn't seem to be using Calicum right now.Do you know what your Magnesium levels are? I would personally decrease the Alkalinity dosing for now. Especially if you only have a few LPS in there. Your PH may be high from the other products you are using.I don't think that is a major concern though at this time.

How long has your tank been running and what type of test kits are you using? A photo of the algae and/or the set up woukd be helpful if you have them.

 

[M Alsaati]

Sorry for troubles .You will definitely need to separate the fish for proper treatment.
Topping of with freshwater may add small amounts of Calcium.Other than that your aquarium doesn't seem to be using Calicum right now.Do you know what your Magnesium levels are? I would personally decrease the Alkalinity dosing for now. Especially if you only have a few LPS in there. Your PH may be high from the other products you are using.I don't think that is a major concern though at this time.

How long has your tank been running and what type of test kits are you using? A photo of the algae and/or the set up woukd be helpful if you have them.

Thanks a lot!
Tank has been running for about 10 weeks, used live rock and a couple of mollies to help cycle the tank. I didn’t have any test kits to monitor cycle, relied on time and gradual stocking. Last week I got the Hanna checkers and started testing. Attached some photos, and will update my readings in a few hours.

I changed my Medic dosing method to directly dosing the crystals in the display, I was diluting in tank water prior to dosing in display. Fish seems to be responding now to Medic and recovering now from the velvet. Sadly I lost one skinny tang, I think it was sick already, it got swallowed by one of my carpets.

 

[kireek]

You tank is considered new.I would not worry about that algae at the moment.It is probably just from new tank syndrome AKA the ulgy phase.Most importantly I would evaluate the treatment method for the fish.

Quarantining: The pros & cons

Whenever you buy new livestock, you can place it in a QT (Quarantine Tank) or put it directly into your DT (Display Tank). The choice, of course, is yours, and it's important to understand that there are pros & cons no matter what you decide. We...

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I am not a expert at fish diagnoses and treatment . Perhaps post another thread in our fish diseases forum for futher advice.

Fish Disease Treatment and Diagnosis

A forum for discussing treatment and diagnosing saltwater reef fish.

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