HELP! Tank crash? Inverts dying, coral stressed

[buruskeee]

How long before this happened did you throw away the chaeto

I threw it away the same day (yesterday) I thought it was just dying but not toxic - actually tried to get it to recover first the 3 days before by turning the fuge light back on. I only turned it off because the guides on Dinos say to stop lighting the fuge. I should have setup and external tank to keep or just throw the chaeto away.

Do you have activated carbon in the tank?

Yes. Been doing 2 weeks on 1 week break for the past 3 months since Dino’s started. I just replaced it again but when I took it out it was 10 days old.

 

[buruskeee]

Do you have activated carbon in the tank?

I have done effectively 60% removal of water and 40% remaining (4x 20% water change over 3 days). Now my biggest Bimac Anthias is breathing slowly and starting to tip sideways under the rock. Other remaining anthias still eating and all 5 tangs and single melenarus wrasse still look normal (wrasse and tangs are my earliest fish).

I don’t know what to do. All my corals are also.

Do I set up my 20g and move all the fish there and drain the tank?

Edit:
Ok came out a bit very shortly to swim. Has very stringy and rocky white poop still attached to its anus.

#reefmedic

 

[buruskeee]

delete

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

#reefmedic

Just to help out here - it's #fishmedic to ping them.

 

[buruskeee]

Just to help out here - it's #fishmedic to ping them.

Thank you.

 

[MnFish1]

Just to help out here - it's #fishmedic to ping them.

They are already here. But - will ask @Jay Hemdal to review. The issue with this case is that there are multiple multiple potential causes - and it's difficult to decide which road to go down. However - just to make sure - you took out a bunch of 'rotten chaeto' - before or after this started - since you posted yesterday and removed it yesterday - and there was a pretty sudden change - I wonder if there is any relation (i.e. H2S or an ammonia spike

 

[MnFish1]

I have done effectively 60% removal of water and 40% remaining (4x 20% water change over 3 days). Now my biggest Bimac Anthias is breathing slowly and starting to tip sideways under the rock. Other remaining anthias still eating and all 5 tangs and single melenarus wrasse still look normal (wrasse and tangs are my earliest fish).

I don’t know what to do. All my corals are also.

Do I set up my 20g and move all the fish there and drain the tank?

Edit:
Ok came out a bit very shortly to swim. Has very stringy and rocky white poop still attached to its anus.

#reefmedic

PS - breathing 'slowly' is not a symptom of a parasite - per se Can you remind everyone - what if any quarantine and dates/duration did you do

 

[buruskeee]

They are already here. But - will ask @Jay Hemdal to review. The issue with this case is that there are multiple multiple potential causes - and it's difficult to decide which road to go down. However - just to make sure - you took out a bunch of 'rotten chaeto' - before or after this started - since you posted yesterday and removed it yesterday - and there was a pretty sudden change - I wonder if there is any relation (i.e. H2S or an ammonia spike

Thank you again for trying to help identify a path. I removed it after - I first attempted to revive the chaeto by turning the lights back on - did this about 3 days before the first issue happened when all the corals got severely stressed out. Removed it when the Wrasse started struggling. The chaeto was only a softball size anyways in my 150g total system volume.

I’ve been testing twice a day (on top of the seachem sticker) and no ammonia or nitrite detected. I’m hunting down a Hanna copper tester I will have in a couple hours to check that.

PS - breathing 'slowly' is not a symptom of a parasite - per se Can you remind everyone - what if any quarantine and dates/duration did you do

The wrasse was breathing 150-160 times per minute before it parished, at the same time the hiding smallest Anthias was breathing as slow as this current Largest Anthias is breathing. No visible physical differences of its skin.

I don’t QT myself. I buy all my fish from a humble fish certified QT dealer who QTs every fish in isolation (High Tide Aquatics).

The only inhabitants that did not go through a QT process are the inverts. I aggressively dip corals in CoralRx and Iodine prior to rinsing in saltwater before placing them in the DT

 

[buruskeee]

@MnFish1 I fed Mysis and it came out briefly. Not sure it ate. It’s not back in the cave remaining motionless (same behavior as smallest Anthias when it perished the same time the Wrasse perished).

Also video if you can hop on the PC.

 

[MnFish1]

@MnFish1 I fed Mysis and it came out briefly. Not sure it ate. It’s not back in the cave remaining motionless (same behavior as smallest Anthias when it perished the same time the Wrasse perished).

Also video if you can hop on the PC.

I'm always on my PC so - I can't see. Perhaps the water change helped?

 

[buruskeee]

I'm always on my PC so - I can't see. Perhaps the water change helped?

Made a video on YouTube. Last water change was late last night. I’m about to change again in 2 hours. It still goes back to the cave and it looks pretty beat up (look at the top of mouth).

 

[brandon429]

going off post 21/ the picture you have a lot of irritants in this system.

there could be fish disease coexpression too but that pic of the tank environment is associated with fish kills. I collect some of the threads where having that type of eutrophication can crash reefs.


the direct fix in my opinion is logged in these posted threads. a rip clean is the opposite of being eutrophic, it's oligotrophic environmental shift then your pics will look opposite of that one prior posted, they'll look like the after pics in the threads.

your fish disease may track independently to the tank and corals, but those will be addressed once the system is cleaned up and the lighting fixed. those shots you have are heavy white spectrum, we'd reverse that into heavy windex blues and turn down the power, after the rip clean, and we'd up the feed rates to corals to turn them around over 2 mos time. that's a crash arrest action set.

a rip clean plus a change in lighting will fix the pics and export all the potentially lethal cellular mix/lysed components etc.

more than a hundred rip clean jobs

Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread

If you are reading this thread to cure a tank invasion from a link I sent you, we do not need to identify your type of invasion here we do not need you to test anything at anytime regarding nitrate, phosphate etc Above all, we do not need to see a microscope slide picture of your invasion at...

www.reef2reef.com

the top 6 rip cleans I've seen

Algae Identification

Any opinions on what type of algae this is growing on my rocks and sand bed?

www.reef2reef.com

a thread managing crashing tank arrest biology with work examples

Reef Tank CPR - power outage biology, crash arrest, and recovery

Team Don‘t add bottled bacteria to the display during crash arrest as the cycle bacteria aren’t killed in still water. There are times where bottled bacteria can lower ammonia in fish holding containers especially if travel or transport is occurring, but by rinsing these displays out vs dosing...

www.reef2reef.com

notice we never dosed bottle bac

we never tested for ammonia, the cycle isn't in question.

we never added things, we took away things to build those threads. it's all physical, no measuring needed. it's all action based.

what you're seeing in those threads is hundreds of eutrophication arrests over and over with before and after pics.

*fish disease is the most likely issue for the fish, not the dinos accumulation although they're possible because we have fish kills from dino treatments already on file. it's simply removing variables to also rid the system of dinos at the same time you fallow out the system and quarantine fish to isolate. after all, even if we saved all the fish u still wouldn't want a dinos tank if it can be prevented. we show that it can be prevented.

 

[brandon429]

ideally we wouldn't take action rn

it's study time if you want the best chance of success, gotta learn those jobs. see how well they rinsed sand? I wouldn't even put yours back for a while, those dinos look bad. we need to fight it in the bare bottom condition. sand makes them worse. we can put rinsed sand back later when the tank is dinos controlled using the physical means shown. post an updated full tank shot if you can, it helps tremendously in planning. no form of parameter testing helps, the tank pic helps. that may sound like an extreme statement, but above is nine years of work without ever taking measurements and still fixing reefs. its all simple physical cleaning and export work we did. that's what your tank needs.

merely allowing those dinos can kill those animals. especially if they begin to die, by treatments you impart. to save your tank, stop the current trending and reverse it into complete action once you're sure of all the backup stuff needed based on the logged work flows.

 

[MnFish1]

Made a video on YouTube. Last water change was late last night. I’m about to change again in 2 hours. It still goes back to the cave and it looks pretty beat up (look at the top of mouth).

When I looked at the video I'm not sure a lot of the fish are swimming properly. Can you just post a full tank video?
Thanks! @Jay Hemdal

PS - the prior 2 posts about eutrophication etc maybe correct but neither applies to this person's problem. (edited for clarity)

 

[buruskeee]

When I looked at the video I'm not sure a lot of the fish are swimming properly. Can you just post a full tank video?
Thanks! @Jay Hemdal

PS - the prior 2 posts about eutrophication etc maybe correct but neither applies to this person's problem. (edited for clarity)

Here it is. FYI my Purple has always swam like that with its dorsal fins back when I step to the tank (excitement?). When its dorsal fins are extended it looks like the yellows (who don’t care for me like the purple).

 

[buruskeee]

@MnFish1 i finally got a copper Hanna tester. Came in at 0.03ppm. Possibly could have been 0.06ppm before the first water change. Is this enough to cause the deaths?

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

@MnFish1 i finally got a copper Hanna tester. Came in at 0.03ppm. Possibly could have been 0.06ppm before the first water change. Is this enough to cause the deaths?

Copper treatment levels for fish are about 60x that, so I wouldn’t be too worried about it. I don’t know if 0.06ppm would even hurt corals.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

@MnFish1 i finally got a copper Hanna tester. Came in at 0.03ppm. Possibly could have been 0.06ppm before the first water change. Is this enough to cause the deaths?

Assuming you're using the High Range Copper Checker, unless I'm mistaken 0.03ppm is within the margin of error, so you may not have any copper in the system.

That said, assuming the 0.03ppm is accurate (i.e. that it's really in the system), that could be enough to kill some corals and inverts, but it definitely wouldn't be killing fish:

While I do not really have a good understanding of exactly how much copper is OK, Fauna Marin says that ten fold lower values (0.02 mg/L= 20 ug/L) can kill some corals.

Copper - Fauna Marin

www.faunamarin.de

Yeah, I haven't looked into corals and copper toxicity much, but I have looked into inverts and copper toxicity a bit and 0.02 mg/L seems about right (for the first quote below, the water quality report was for Oceanside, California, and the numbers used were mg/L):

The "Report of Detected Compounds" at the bottom:

https://www.ci.oceanside.ca.us/documents/Water%20Amin/NV5_Ocean_2021CCR_OnlineVersion_v6_6.29.22_Optimized.pdf

- Looking at the copper specifically, they mention the 90th percentile for 50 homes sampled was 0.245 (this means that 90% of the 50 homes tested had copper levels of 0.245 or lower);
- The testing they use for copper is only sensitive to 0.05.
- LC50 for Copper when tested on different inverts* (a mussel species, an oyster species, a copepod species, and two urchin species - one of the urchins was the sand dollar you have; a different test** used a limpet, a crab, and a mussel) ranged from ~0.002 to 0.2 (LC50 being a toxicology term for the dose needed before half of a given population dies from the toxin); the LC50 varies from one species to the other, and it varies dependent on a number of different factors (such as the bioavailability of the form of copper in the water).

Personally, just looking at the odds of getting a damaging to lethal level of copper in your water, I wouldn't use your water without DI.

*Test Report 1

https://setac.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/etc.45

**Test Report 2

Differential sensitivity of three marine invertebrates to copper assessed using multiple biomarkers - PubMed

Understanding how biomarkers relate to each other on exposure to particular contaminants in different species is key to their widespread application in environmental management. However, few studies have systematically used multiple biomarkers in more than a single species to determine the...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[MnFish1]

@MnFish1 i finally got a copper Hanna tester. Came in at 0.03ppm. Possibly could have been 0.06ppm before the first water change. Is this enough to cause the deaths?

it is high for inverts not fish. why did you think there was copper I don't get it.

 

[vetteguy53081]

This fish has an obvious bacterial issue and with shallow breathing points to water and even low saturated oxygen. Try increasing oxygen with air stone and consider adding ruby Rally pro which is effective with anthias but will take 2-3 days to take effect.