Approaching total coral wipe-out

[asylumdown]

Hey guys,

I know i posted about this in another thread, but I'm absolutely beside myself. My coral has been dying for weeks now, but I went out of town on Wednesday until yesterday and came home to 40-50% coral loss. I can't figure out what's happening. Fish and inverts are all fine.

The coral damage began when I fixed a malfunctioning biopellet reactor, and switched GFO and calcium brands My alk spiked, which I thought was the initial cause, but now I'm thinking the alk spike was a symptom of the corals all ceasing to grow. What started out as burnt tips has devolved to full out colony loss in many cases, and nothing is the right colour.

Has anyone in Calgary experienced problems with coral after a switch in GFO or calcium brands recently? Can nitrogen deficiency cause this? My tank has always had biopellets, it's just working better now than it has in the past. I have a cluster of halimeda growing in the tank and macro algae is still growing in the overflows where my fish can't get to it, so there's obviously enough nutrients to support them.

Randomly, a couple of millepora colonies are still growing, while their next door neighbours almost completely dead.

With a complete stop in most coral growth, my levels are obviously not exactly where they should be, I can't seem to adjust the dosing rate enough. Alk is still around 8, when I'd ideally like it to be 7.5.

If I can't figure out a way to solve this, I don't think I'm going to stick with the hobby. In the past two weeks I've watched 2 years worth of work and several thousand dollars in previously vital coral disintegrate. On top of it I'm at a critical point in my thesis and I'm working 17 hours a day to try and finish it. I barely have enough time to feed my fish every day.

Basically this is the lowest I've been in my reefing career.

[sphelps]

Explain the malfunctioning bio-pellet reactor. If left dormant and then re-fired pretty sure they'll nuke a tank pretty easily.

[asylumdown]

The effluent line of the reactor clogged for a couple of days. It's a recirculating model though so I the pellets kept tumbling and I didn't notice. The entire reactor died, when I opened it, it smelled like a major gas leak had just erupted in my house. I removed the reactor, cleaned it out completely and rinsed pellets in fresh water until they stopped smelling. I then let them stand in fresh water that I replaced a couple of time for several days. During that time I modified the effluent line of the reactor to make it bigger so that it couldn't clog up with biofilm so easily.

When I got it all set back up I used the same pellets, which had no odour of any kind by then. I dosed the reactor with MB7 to get it going again, and it was very rapidly producing mulm again. With the larger effluent line, more water can transit through the reactor now, but it still moves way less water per minute through it than a non-recirculating model would.

[monza]

Sounds rough, sorry to hear.

Maybe a pest? Flatworms, red bugs or other?

[spit.fire]

Try pulling the biopellets off for awhile until things settle down

[Myka]

Sorry to hear about your trouble.

Have you tested for stray voltage? How exactly are the corals dying? Sliming? Slowly receding? Quickly receding? Is the water or cloudy or has it been?

I would be taking both biopellets and GFO offline until the tank settles down. I would continue to run carbon. Which brands to you switch from and to?

[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.

[Wheelman76]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

I want to drill a little into this. I can't remember if you mentioned this already, so if you did sorry for asking again, but ... apart from the readings, what are you doing for PO4 control? Are you using GFO, if so, how much, and how often are you changing it out?

The reason I ask is that I use the same Hanna tester for PO4. The tested results always show nominal values for PO4 in the end (the Hanna ULR tester reports in ppb of P, to convert to PO4 you have to divide the reading by 1000 and then multiply by 3.0666) but even so, I notice problems with SPS when I let my GFO get too old.

As far as PO4 goes, I am absolutely convinced of 2 things:
1) Most SPS problems we see and especially those that we can't easily rationalize away to something else .... are usually PO4 related.
2) Testing for PO4 is just something we do to make ourselves busy but the results are meaningless. You might as well dip your finger in the tank, taste it, then emphatically state the first random number that comes to your mind. (It's important that you state it emphatically, otherwise you have to do the test again.)

It might not be THAT bad but OTOH, I think it's closer to the truth than we'd care to admit. I think it's getting into the territory of inorganic phosphate versus organic phosphate and how our test kits and testers can only give you readings of one of those (I forget which), but the SPS are inhibited by the one we can't test (we just hope that if we test for one, that the other is going to be reasonably close).

I notice a definite correlation in how well my corals are doing if I change out my GFO every week, versus at slower change out intervals. Unfortunately the cost of GFO and especially at my tank size (280g) it is quite cost prohibitive to be changing it out every week, so this is something I tend to get an "opportunity" to observe repeatedly. If I get all gung-ho and change it out every week, my SPS grows well. If I don't then .. not only do they not grow well, many will recede or let go altogether. It can be as little as letting it go one or two extra weeks between changing out my GFO.

And yet, the Hanna tester will repeatedly tell me that PO4 is not a concern because it will be 0.02 or something so low that it's in the "it can't be PO4 that is the problem" category. But like I said, I'm convinced that it probably is to blame for a large majority of otherwise-unexplainable SPS problems seen in the hobby.

Not arguing with you about po4 levels , and I change my gfo every month and my Hanna checker always reads less than 0.02. But here is an interesting article for everyone to read on the subject of po4.

http://www.reefsmagazine.com/forum/r...phosphate.html