Thoughts on unnexplained (and very sad) die-off

[jostafew]

I'm trying to think back to see if there were any new dosing etc. around that time, but nothing comes to mind. I started dosing kalk in Oct 2011, but that was way before this all started.

I've often wondered if I've got a copper problem in the system somehow. I've always struggled to keep snails, and while I did have a healthy population of pods for the first half of the tank's life, it's been greately reduced lately. I've tested for copper multiple times, and even went so far as to run some cuprisorb in a reactor for an extended period of time, but there was no color change whatsoever. Last copper test was Nov 2011. Will test again just for fun.

I've got a mixed reef, some easy SPS (birdsnest, red digi, green monti cap that's never been green, bird of paradise), couple LPS, branching hammer & trumpet, a big GSP colony. Certain SPS I've struggled with, pretty much anything except what I've got now so I've given up on it for the moment. Tried some green stag, yellow digi etc. but no success. The LPS has always grown quickly, but for the past year I've found it does not expand nearly as much as it used to, which is a shame as LPS is probably my favorite. I'd love to pick up a nice torch but I'm not going to bother until my current colonies start expanding like they used to.

I usually do run carbon in a reactor. Got a little lazy with changing it lately, but it does get refreshed maybe once every month or two.

I appreciate all the feedback and discussion, I would love to get to the bottom of this. While I'm somewhat green in terms of experience (only been reefing for about 2-1/2 yrs), I'd like to think of myself as being pretty well read and it's frustrating to struggle with simple things while I see others making huge mistakes and keeping all sorts of corals etc. that I've never been able to. Now to think that I can't even keep fish and hardy inverts, not very good. Thanks again.

[jostafew]

Just did a copper test on the new system, I thought I saw a reaction (color change) at the beginning of the test but giving the test time to develop yielded no measurable result. Nonetheless I've done some reading on copper and heavy metal poisoning and I think I'll go pick up a poly filter to run just as a preventative measure. The symptoms sure seem to fit.

Also, I discovered that I was breaking a bunch of rules of copper; wasn't waiting for kalk mixture to settle before allowing ATO to pump it into the system, and was not considering copper sneaking in with alk and calc additive dosing (was only concerned with preventing large chemistry swings).

[Xadieu]

What your skimmer leeching micro bubbles into the tank? Our tank at work was doing that and almost everything died, well that and the combination of ich. Also do you have any toxic inverts/fish that could release toxin into the tank? such things could cause a whole tank crash.

[jostafew]

Not sure how to answer the microbubbles question. When the ATO resevoir would emptly (and I didn't notice) and the return chamber got to a certain point then yes the return pump would shoot micro bubbles into the system. I wouldn't call that an ongoing problem though. I beleive the loc-line return pipes did leach a little bit of air into the system and blow a very small amount of micro bubbles into the system too, but pretty minimal and no more than were present back when the system was stable.

Currently I do have a micro bubble problem on ver 2.0 of the system, but I have a few things yet to do to resolve that issue.

As for toxins, I don't think there was anything exotic in terms of livestock that would emit toxins while alive, but perhaps after death? There are a few zoa & paly colonies in the tank which we know are toxic if damaged, but no major trauma to those. On the list of inverts that died and decomposed in the tank include a large pincushion urchin, smaller tuxedo urchin, two small red starfish, brittle star, numerous snails and hermit crabs. There were only four fish listed in previous posts.

Dosing is pretty minimal; IO salt, BRS Kalk (not using anymore), occasional Seachem Calcium and Reef Builder Alk supplements. Was experimenting with dosing iron and Lugol's a while back, but it had been quite a while since the last dose of those.

[howdy20012002]

I personally don't see how micro bubbles would kill anything