‘Smoke’ coming out of a rock? Never seen this?

[whitecloud]

I am helping with a 60 gallon tank. This morning, she sent me a video of something I have not seen in 20 years of reefing. Something that looks like ‘smoke’ coming out of a rock!

The tank is 2 months old…small bioload, some standard cleaning crew…snail and crabs. Tank parameters has been okay except for nitrates are unexplainably high with phosphate low. Dosing a small amount of neophos to maintain phos at 0.03. Parameters are: ph=8, alk=8.3, nitrates=35, phos=0.03 (was zero before dosing).

That rock may be 20 years old…used for 10 years, stored dry for another 10 years. Washed well and dried for weeks before using.

Anyone have any ideas? Seen this before? Could this be where the hight nitrates are coming from? Also a week before, some of the rock broke off and there was ‘red stuff’ that I wrote off as Cyanobacteria.

 

[fishguy242]

snail breeding ?

 

[legionofdoon]

Snail or bristleworm spawning.

 

[kevgib67]

are there trochus snails in there! They spawn into the water column.

 

[legionofdoon]

I did a water change yesterday and it triggered my turbo snails to spawn. Looked the same but the were on the top of the rock scape. It was pretty neat they were doing it in an alternating pattern.b

 

[whitecloud]

Thanks all! It surely could be snail spawning. We did some eggs around which is new. We also took a turkey baster and we were able to blow a lot of ‘stuff’ out of it…it very well could have been anything from snail or hermit stirring up things in there with all the broken down rock we blew out of it. I am still concerned that with the amount of breakdown we are seeing in that rock if this could be the source of the nitrate. We are going to monitor and see if perhaps we blew a lot of ‘stuff’ out if it…and if in a few weeks we are still having high nitrates…we might pull that rock and see if we have any improvement.