|
|
|
#61
03-20-2014, 06:30 PM
|
|||||
|
|||||
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. 
|
|
#62
03-20-2014, 06:30 PM
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
I just realized that I haven't posted a single pic:
Feb. 23 - You can barely tell that the tissue from the tips of this stag are gone  Today (from the other side) -  Feb. 23 - This coral was one of the first to show signs of damage  Today - (it's totally dead)  Feb. 23 - The tips are all burnt, but it's hard to see in this photo  Today - Kind of hard to tell, but probably 1/3 of the tissue, all the way down each branch is gone  Feb. 23 - this used to be my favourite coral. It started with just burnt tips  Today - I don't think there's any saving it. There's no more than a couple cm anywhere on the coral that doesn't have damage  And I don't have any earlier photos of these guys but:    And finally:  You can't really tell form this pic, but the small frag in the dead centre of this pic is a Pink lemonade. It presently has several of those blisters I was mentioning. The freshly de-fleshed white skeleton next to it was a beautiful teal acro with blue tips 3 days ago. Ugh. The only glimmer of good news is that since I haven't been able to pick up the big tubs yet (I'm hoping for this weekend), I've been doing at least one 45-50 gallon water change every day since Sunday, and I *think* today I see the first possible signs of improvement. At least I haven't lost an entire colony in a couple of days anyway.
|
|
#63
03-20-2014, 06:41 PM
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
Quote:
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.
|
|
#64
03-30-2014, 11:57 PM
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
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.
|
|
#67
03-31-2014, 03:44 AM
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
Quote:
|
|
#69
04-07-2014, 10:40 PM
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
ugh, well I hated to have to do it but I didn't have much of a choice. Cyano got so unbelievably out of control I dosed the tank with chemi-clean on Friday.
Dosing a harsh chemical when things were already so out of whack was not something I wanted to do, but I was siphoning was seemed like a pound of the stuff off my corals and rocks every night, and by noon the next day it would be back plus more. I have a few corals that got severely damaged that I'm desperately trying to save by cutting away dead skeleton back to just below living tissue. It seems like it's working as anywhere I've cut (if I was able to actually get to where there was healthy tissue), corals are healing over with new tissue and teeny tiny new polyps are forming, and anywhere that exposed skeleton remained cyano free corals have built up new tissue growth edges and the dead spots are shrinking. However, about half of them are so damaged it's not possible to cut all the dead skeleton away as the pattern of necrosis looks like what you'd get if you raked the branch down the fine side of a cheese grater. Cyano got to the point where it was blanketing nearly all places where the skeletons became exposed, and I've found clear evidence that the cyano actually kills coral tissue it remains in contact with for too long. I've got one frag of millepora that never got damaged in the first wave of STN/RTN, but it's small and the rock it's on got carpeted in cyano. About 3mm of it's plate died in a ring around where it met the slime. I have another nearly dinner plate sized colony that had the cheese grater look to it, and cyano formed a continuous mat across the mid-section of the coral. Anywhere that was beneath the cyano is now bare skeleton, even though that coral seems to have stopped losing tissue days before the cyano took hold. I'll probably have to cut the entire thing in half. So it was a choice between doing nothing and risking the cyano possibly preventing recovery of my corals/killing more than what was already damaged, or dosing with a harsh chemical and hoping I can take back control of the trajectory the tank is on. Moral of the story kids - don't get lazy and think that just because something has worked great for years in spite of any neglect or ill considered decisions you might have made does not mean that will continue to be the case.
|
Linear Mode
