Slow stn and at a loss

[mcarroll]

Was hitting on the coral issue, sorry i don't have a degree in snail psychology.
His GFO was unplugged close to a month before the icp & the icp having such low po4 that long after would perhaps point to that being MAYBE "the" or "part of " an issue he's got, if you got a better suggestion fire away

I Shut off the media after the triton test

And any and all suggestions are welcome as I'm trying to figure this out

Would seem to explain a lot of your issues. If your ballast starting acting up on the 16th a Nuked your Montis under it, then the bulb couldn't take being over run and blew. You've replaced multiple bulbs which are all going to have some different level of PAR until they are burnt in correctly and they keep blowing.

Seems like it would explain everything except for the snails.

Big Snail is still on pause I can see his mouth stuck to the glass tho. Other snails are moving I beleive that's what my girl said

Snails:
Typical starvation behavior. Also in kind with consumption of toxins, but not sure I see anything like dino's. Don't seen anything green either though.....so starvation is it. Turbos always starve first and worst.

Nutrients:
Ultra low PO4 is responsible (possibly along with ultra-low NO3, I didn't see that) for the lack of green as well as making your corals more susceptible to light damage AND less able to repair from it.

Carbon:
Almost surely made a big shock to the tank's nutrients. Without knowing the details, we can assume that anything big in this regard is bad. As Randy said it may have even enhanced any light damage that happened.

Timeframe:
Corals take this long to respond in many cases of stress. Timing seems about right to me.

Do Something Different?:
Short of waving a magic wand to prevent the powdered carbon (google powdered activated carbon water treatment....it's the latest thing and it's NO JOKE....your tank was pummeled on this.) and exploding bulbs there, there was very little you could have done to avoid the situation. I think it was just a terrible set of breaks.

If the system had a moderate-to-high amount of nutrients its possible that some of the damage or the extent of the damage could have been less. I do not recommend maintaining low levels of either – especially in a new or otherwise-stressed system.

I wish I had better answers that could actually change something, but at least IMO there's no mystery here.

Best thing you can do is to restore and enforce something like normal nutrient levels until you see a sign of recovery. And know that all these corals may already be too far gone.

Do not delay on the N and P though....if there is any recovery to be had, the nutrients will be crucial.

 

[justingraham]

Thanks mcarrol

So an update I think my problem was from a couple things (still can’t wrap my head around how it could have been the carbon and will not blame that)

The biggest thing I beleive my rodi water was adding some nasties into my source water even tho I had zero tds. Because once I switched out my carbon and sediment filters and did a complete water change the death stopped

Second tid bit I beleive had something to do with it was my Lights. My original Reefbrite pendant and ballast I beleive was overdriving the bulbs and the Corals were not get consistant par. The reason I think this as I have no proof what so ever is that I run and ran 14k bulbs before and after the new pendants. The old bulbs and setup were about 10x as blue as the new ones. Like standing outside my house and looking in there was a blue glow now if I am outside and look in it’s a white glow. Same k bulbs different ballast. Also would explain why the bulbs blew a bunch.

Everything is on the up and up now water is clear Corals have colors it’s nice to look at again

Thanks for the help everyone

 

[mcarroll]

Much better!!!

Blasting a tank with activated carbon is definitely associated with problems. That’s not a new concept. The problem Randy mentioned (light related) may not be the least of them.

Powdered activated carbon (PAC) has the added disadvantage of being so small as to be nearly impossible to remove, and being very possible to ingest. (vs an ordinary GAC incident...been there)

Nothing specific linked, but just to give you the idea that it’s serious (especially the removal part):
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,47&q=pac+filtration+&btnG=

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,47&q=powdered+activated+carbon+filtration+&btnG=

Very glad things are looking up!

 

[justingraham]

I’m not trying to argue but It was a month later and I went on a two week vacation in that period where the Corals almost doubled in size that last part is what I can’t wrap my head around and why I can’t bring myself to say it was the carbon.

If the Corals were the same size when I came back the polops never out the amount of dkh that was being consumed went down instead of up and then this happened yes the carbon I could say in my mind but the exact opposite happened

I will read what u linked as I would love to be proved wrong so I can actually know what happened

 

[mcarroll]

I know – the main thing is that the tank is back to normal!!

And yes, this is all putting a fine point on something that prolly doesn't need it. But...

I don't think I put the timeframes together from the original description – good points.

And it's hard to deny that there would have been an impact of some kind. Right?

In the end the impact was from carbon + lights + low nutrients....not just carbon.

Maybe if it was only the carbon release there would have been no issue. Maybe without the carbon release, there would have been less side effects from the lighting issues. Maybe with replete nutrients, corals would have been able to keep up with repairs from lighting damage better than they did. It's a lot of maybe's, but as potential stressors they do seem to add up to the results you got.

BTW, you can see other carbon threads with similar delayed results here on R2R, but it may take some digging. (Even saw one last night....wish I would have linked it for you. Tried now and can't find it though...)

To your point though, the lighting and low nutrient issues may have been sufficient to cause these problems in their own right.