Reef falling apart

Betta-Chetta · Apr 4, 2015

Alright guys i've been doing reef tanks for over a year now from a 2.5gallon to 120gallon. Now my question is what could have caused a wipe out in my 75 gallon reef aquarium. Now i know alot of people use sumps and refugiums on their saltwater aquariums but i use hang on filters. I run two hang on marineland filters on my 75 with two 1150 hydor korallias. I have at least 60 lbs of live rock and 90 lbs of live sand. The tank has been up for 4 months and never had problem in any of my tanks like what happened a few days ago. I currently have two black ice snowflakes, a yellow clown goby, inverts and all types of coral. Before the wipe out i had the two snowflakes, yellow eye kole tang, coral beauty angel, purple firefish goby, three cleaner shrimp and tons of other inverts and corals. The day before i bought a blue sponge my water was perfect pH 8.2, Ammonia 0, Nitrite 0, Nitrate 0 and the salinity was at 1.025. All my corals were open fish were active and feeding. Everything was fine and when i put the blue sponge in my tank my inverts got right to it and started cleaning it. Everything was perfect until the next morning. The next morning my fish were all hiding couldnt find any of them except for my tang which was freaking out. The sponge was dead and five other corals were dead. I went to work and came home to the tang, angel and goby, all my cleaner shrimp dead. Tested my water and the nitrates shot up from 0 to 80. now my questions is what could have caused my sponge to die and then for me to lose everything like that all in once.Mind you this happened on tuesday and now it is saturday and my corals have barely opened up at all and i am about to lose my long tenticale plate coral. An suggestions on what caused it and what to do to help keep what i have left alive?

alan.reef · Apr 4, 2015

1st thing to do is water change. to lower the nitrate

jent · Apr 4, 2015

Definetly sounds like the sponge died, and rotted quickly (causing a massive ammonia spike). It's possible it was dying from the start if things were picking at it when you put it in the tank.

I have never attempted to keep sponges (so take what I say with a massive bag of salt). I have heard that any exposure to air can kill them though. When you transfered it, and got it in the tank, did you pull it out of the water or did you put the bag underwater to make the transfer?

Hopefully someone more familiar with sponges can chime in.

Betta-Chetta · Apr 5, 2015

I did the water change after i did my test and did another one today and when i transffered the sponge i of course put the bag in the water to put the sponge in since it can not touch air. I also work at a LFS and gone to others to get different opinions on this and see what they suggest i need to do to help my tank get back to its original state and when i got the sponge it looked very health and picked up as soon as it came in still in the bag and brought it home.