Approaching total coral wipe-out

[Palmer]

FWIW if you do decide to start up again I can throw you some LPS and SPS frags if you want them.

[i have crabs]

On the plus side of killing my corals, they all fit into one of the 2 sides now and i can have non coral safe fish in the other side haha, about 2 weeks before i started having problems i overdid a dose of kalk but things seemd ik a couple days after so maybe not related, it also looks like possibly brown jelly disease in some of my corals but who knows, at this point im just letting it do what it wants and ill keep what lives the rest probably arnt getting replaced

[waynemah]

Not sure if this was covered, but could it be due to the snow melt and water quality? I notice my DI resin changes color within 2 weeks in the spring whereas it'll last a month any other time of the year.

[cuz]

I'm going through the exact same thing to.. burnt tips followed by stn,,, I'd say I'm close to 60% sps die-off..

I've got a few 300g brand new potable plastic tall water "cisterns" your more than welcome to borrow if you come get them or find a volunteer...

[jason604]

this thread seems so depressing. So many ppl with mass sps die off

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by i have crabs

On the plus side of killing my corals, they all fit into one of the 2 sides now and i can have non coral safe fish in the other side haha, about 2 weeks before i started having problems i overdid a dose of kalk but things seemd ik a couple days after so maybe not related, it also looks like possibly brown jelly disease in some of my corals but who knows, at this point im just letting it do what it wants and ill keep what lives the rest probably arnt getting replaced

Originally Posted by cuz

I'm going through the exact same thing to.. burnt tips followed by stn,,, I'd say I'm close to 60% sps die-off..

I've got a few 300g brand new potable plastic tall water "cisterns" your more than welcome to borrow if you come get them or find a volunteer...

Well I'm not happy it's happening to you, but I feel a little better knowing I'm not the only one. Look closely at your corals that this is happening to, the best description I can give is thus:

1. tissue at the growth tips is just gone one day. It's the worst on the side facing the lights

2. The polyps get all weak and floppy. It's like they lose their ability to retract in to the cup or hold any tension in their tissues. From far away it looks like you have the most insane polyp extension ever. Close up it looks like the polyps are just hanging out of their cups.

3. the texture of the remaining tissue gets all weird. Smooth skinned corals get rough and bumpy looking, some of them change colour drastically, darkening (but not browning) across the entire colony. It's actually quite pretty in some for a short while, until all their tissue detaches.

4. In some colonies, little blisters begin to form that look exactly like super tiny bubble-gum bubbles that are about to pop, these hang off the coral and blow about in the current. When they pop they take large chunks of tissue with them.

5. In the corals that don't form bubbles, it's like half the tissue from the outside of the polyp cup just strips off, where brown algae quickly colonizes, making the whole coral look like it's been raked over a cheese grater.

6. Finally, entire strips of tissue just slough off. Entire branches to entire colonies lose all their tissue practically over-night. This is followed within days by colonization of the skeleton by cyano. I'm pretty sure cyano can harvest the phosphate right out of the coral skeleton.

[lastlight]

I had those bubbles you're speaking of on a few of my corals when my sps were dying. when things stabilized i saw a few of them shrink and disappear.

it's actually strange but my problems started shortly after i bought all those frags from you. i have a hard time believing there's any connection though as your tank looked incredible when i was over.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by lastlight

I had those bubbles you're speaking of on a few of my corals when my sps were dying. when things stabilized i saw a few of them shrink and disappear.

it's actually strange but my problems started shortly after i bought all those frags from you. i have a hard time believing there's any connection though as your tank looked incredible when i was over.

the thought that this is some sort of pathogen has crossed my mind more than once. The fact that it's favouring acroporas, and the fact that it's happening in the whole tank all at once seems disease-esque. But after I did that major round of fragging and selling, every single coral healed over and started growing aggressively from the places I had cut them. And that was in what... December? Everything was growing like weeds until February when this started.

I have one montipora digitata colony, and one montipora capricornis colony that have continued to grow normally since this all began, while another monti cap and my forest fire digi have shut down completely, with tissue recession in a few places. None of my euphyllias or my elegance coral have been damaged, but my only colony of acans has lost a ton of tissue, so if it is a disease it's a disease with a very weird taste for coral species.

[asylumdown]

Well I think I've stopped the carnage. I was not able to do a 100% water change, but with Ronau's tub and the storage bins I had I was able to do a 60% water change. I was hoping to let things just settle with no intervention for at least a week, but it turns out that even in 375 gallons of water my surviving SPS is still consuming enough alkalinity that 48 hours without dosing would have been as fatal as whatever was just going on.

I set up the doser again and have spent the past 4 days trying to get it dialled in. I'm basically back to square one on dosing solution rates, so I started with less than half the amount I used to dose and am slowly increasing it every day based on the results from my tests. Today I had to manually dose some of the alk solution as my dKH has fallen in to the 5's and that scares me. I just need to find the new sweet spot to keep it in the neighbourhood of 7.

I have however stopped losing entire colonies, and the only new tissue loss I've seen since the 60% water change has been on patches of coral that looked like it was already too far gone to save. I have a couple acros that have started to form plate edges along the margins of where the tissue died, and on a few the dead patches are perceptibly starting to shrink. I'm still not sure if a couple of my largest colonies are going to pull through, as I think "too far gone" happens long before the tissue actually pulls away, so we'll see over the coming months whether they get normal looking texture and colour back and start growing again, or RTN in the middle of the night.

I've done HEAPS of online research, and I'm almost 100% positive now that this was the result of a biopellet overdose. I've seen similar reports from people who've OD'd their tanks on carbon (both liquid and solid), and Randy Holmes-Farley on RC found that his tank has an upper maximum dosing limit of vinegar, above which his corals start to suffer. When I fixed my biopellet reactor, I should have treated it like I was setting up a new reactor on a new system for the first time, since my bacterial population was completely wiped out when I took it apart and cleaned it, and my modification allowed for at least 10X the flow through rate. Instead, I put the same amount of pellets I'd built up to over 2 years back in the reactor (about 3L), and left the new 1" effluent gate valve open at 100%. In retrospect I'm not sure why I was so baffled as to what was happening, I basically followed a step-by-step "how to crash your tank" recipe.

With no pellet reactor nitrates have been rising fast, however. At this rate, and the rate at which I do water changes, and the amount of water that I change each time, it looks like my tank would stabilize between 10 and 15 ppm nitrate. That is about 10 to 15 times higher than it's ever been in this tank's history. I'm worried about compounding the stress of the past month and a half by allowing nutrients to sky-rocket, and I'm not thrilled with the idea of daily water changes in perpetuity, so today I put the pellet reactor back online, but with exactly 10% the recommended volume of pellets for my system. I have a gigantic pellet reactor so it looks kind of silly, but I'm going to do it right this time. I'll track the effect this has on nitrates over the next 6 weeks, and I'll only add more pellets if the nitrates don't perceptibly fall.

It's going to take a while to get all my parameters to stabilize, and until they do I'm not really going to worry about what's going on inside the tank, as I don't really expect my corals to get back to their former glory until all the major ions and the nutrient profile remains constant for a period of months. Once the chemistry has been stable for at least a month I'll start to worry about the visual effect this has had - specifically the explosion of cyano that now blankets half the tank. For now it gets a pass. For some reason my sand is cleaner than it's ever been though, so from far away it doesn't look that bad.

[brotherd]

Sorry if I missed it but what salt were you using before the event started and what are you using now?