Approaching total coral wipe-out

[Delphinus]

FWIW I am sorry to hear this. I sympathize, there are so many frustrations in this hobby.

Apart from the above advice, I would also look to the Ca and Alk parameters in particular and have them double-checked with different test kits if possible.

Are you dosing manually or using a calcium reactor? Do you use kalk? I might also be tempted to suspend any automatic dosing for the time being until things settle out.

How new and how much gfo is there? In particular with "mysterious SPS death" PO4 plays a significant role (too much of it, too much change with it, and so on). Have you tested for PO4, and what was the value? And what test kit or tester are you using?

If you had significant nitrate, I think you would see other symptoms, so I think we can rule out NO3, but it might still be worthwhile getting a trustworthy reading of that as well in the meantime even if only for ruling it out.

[dudley moray]

That gas leak smell was likely hydrogen sulphide and probably what nuked your corals it doesn't take much

[iceman86]

Sounds like parameter swings wich new gfo will cause if adding too much. Gfo will greatly decrease your alk when freshly introduced. Happened to me recently and I lost most of my sps.

My issue was that my alk kit was reading 1.5 dkh too high and I thought I had it at 7.5 when really it was at 6 and then I introduced the gfo and it lowered it way more wich caused my corals to bleach.

Ive also had similar issues when raising calcium too fast.

Make sure your test kits are reading correctly and try to keep levels as stable as possible to prevent further damage.

[Seriak]

I lost most of my tank when I was overdosing my Alk. It got above 8 and the SPS started to get burnt tips due to my bio pellet reactor, then it approached 10-11 and the LPS receeded and the SPS all died. Then I started to lose head after head of LPS. I really watch my Alk now.

Something else may have sent your Alk through the roof, but your Alk swing probably had a big impact in the death of your corals.

[brotherd]

This scares the crap out of me. For you to be baffled is disturbing for sure. I wish I had the knowledge or experience to help you.

[jason604]

Terrible!! I can't imagine what will happen if this happened to me.

[Spyd]

Time to go old school and keep things simple as you try to get through this. Take the pellets off line completely. Run carbon and do plenty of water changes.

The ALK spike can definitely hit corals hard. Really watch your levels in the mean time. I would check for ammonia as well. When things rapidly die off nitrates and ammonia can spike. Only way to fix these levels are through large water changes.

[asylumdown]

Thanks for the responses guys.

Since I posted the last message I've pulled 4, 19 hours work days trying to get a paper finished and ready for publication, and I'm giving a talk at a conference on Friday, so my tank has had to sit there slowly dying while I try to attend to the busiest time in my life so far. Murphy's law I suppose. 6 months ago I had all the time in the world to deal with something like this.

My phosphate levels were 0.06ppm last time I measured as checked by the hanna ULR test, which was last Tuesday.

The other thing that I did shortly before this carnage began was switch salt brands to a cheaper option. I started using the fluval brand of reef salt because it was $25 cheaper.

One of the things that I've been terrified of is that I'm not 100% confident on my alk readings. Many a moon ago when I had my first tank and I knew nothing about reef chemistry, I was stupidly using seachem reef buffer without understanding what the product was or what it really did. At the time I kept getting 'normal' alk readings for a high nutrient tank of around 9, and I dosed accordingly. What I didn't realize was that 'reef buffer' is a borate salt, which contributes to total alkalinity, but is effectively useless from a coral's point of view. I had similar SPS problems then, and when I bought the Seachem test kit that allowed you to test for borate alk vs. total alk, I discovered that my carbonate alk (the only alk corals care about) was 4.5.

As far as I know, seachem doesn't make that test kit anymore. Part of me has been wondering if the fluval brand of salt has a high percentage of borate salts in it, which has been making me think my alk is normal, as the only test kits I have access to now test total alkalinity.

I went back to H2Ocean because I figure it's one less variable.

Myka - as to your question, it's not sliming, it's burnt tips one day (as in I wake up and all the tissue on the growth tips is just gone), then over the following days, more and more tissue just sloughs off. My worst hit coral now has one piece of one branch left living, the rest of the previously dinner plate sized colony is a white skeleton, with cyano starting to take hold in places. In one case a coral that never even had burnt tips looked fine, with normal polyp extension one day, then the next day literally half it's tissue was hanging off it in sheets. Other corals that have a different colour growth tip from the main body have turned monochromatic over the course of a couple of weeks, and once the whole piece is exhibiting zero signs of growth, the tissue closest to the tips starts to slough off.

Water is clear, fish are fine, snails and crabs are fine.

What I'm considering doing is taking every piece of equipment except the skimmer and water pumps offline and doing a 100% water change using H2Ocean salt. The other thing that's making me think there's some sort of contaminant in this tank (or disastrously lower alk levels than what my test kits are showing me) is that I have a 4 gallon pico tank. It has been doing fantastic with 100% water changes, but I've been using my display tank water as it's water change water. Shortly before I went out of town, as a test, I did a 'normal' 100% water change on the pico using my display tank water. 9 days later every single coral in that tank is exhibiting serious tissue recession, I'm going to lose one acan frag for sure, and probably a medium sized open brain. There's prolific brown 'slime algae' (the kind your snails would normally eat, but the mantis shrimp that tank was set up for eats all the snails) growing, so I know it's not a nutrient problem.

Ugh. The worst. I didn't even have time to type this reply.

Does anyone in calgary have rubber maid bins totalling 300 gallons that I can borrow? I don't have that much water holding capacity and I'd like to have all the new water mixed in advance.