All Zoa/Paly Mouths Open

Doom616 · Mar 16, 2013

As my title says all of my zoas/palys mouths that are in my tank are open. They are not spitting up anything as I would not be terribly concerned as I am accustomed to that. A little backstory though. About three weeks ago I had some contractors in the house staining some new kitchen cabinets. They were not using ANY form of ventilation save for one window. When my family and I returned home the entire house stank of stain. It did not matter if the door was closed with sheets stuffed under the door; every room in the house smelled extremely strongly of stain (later we determined it travelled through the vents like it was the alien from Alien). As I assumed that ventilation would be used I did not cover the tank. Looking at the tank all of the zoas/palys were closed and even the water stank of the stain. I gave them a day and some carbon to see if I could leach out some of the chemical. After a day and no improvement in the tank (and the contractors came back to finish) I brought all of my frags to a friend. I only left four frags in the tank as a form of "canary" coral. Now three weeks later the parameters have stabilized (there was a point where I questioned if the bacteria had died too; ammonia crept up to 8+ and nothing had died yet) and the "canarys" have all opened up and are regaining more and more color every day. However every single polyp on every single frag has their mouth either open or protruding from the base of the zoa when it never did that before. I'm at a loss here as I can find nothing regarding zoa mouths open short of the function I am already aware of and have seen many times. The mouths are open all day long (I assume as I cannot watch my tank all day...even if I would love to). I would not be concerned if I had not watched one frag lose a polyp recently and one frag die off completely. I have even added another inexpensive zoa to see if maybe this is a permanent thing for the ones that stayed in. Even the new one is starting to open its mouth too. My tank is a Biocube 29 by the way with stock pump, Kessil a150w Sky Blue, Tunze 9002, and is kept at a consistent 79. I will get exact parameters when I have time to later tonight (although Alk was at 9 Thursday of last week). I ask before aquiring the paramters in the off chance that someone else has had similar circumstances and can steer me in the right direction. Thanks in advance for any time or help on this matter.

kryptic601 · Mar 16, 2013

I work with furniture myself and I can tell you that unless they sprayed directly at or into your tank then that is not your problem. The smell lingers but the stain does not float around in the air. If that was the case then everything in your house would have a fine layer of stain on it.

Doom616 · Mar 17, 2013

All parameters were normal running up to this. Additionally I never told my friend the exact reason I had to extract the frags from my tank. Once I brought them to him he asked if I had been dumping stain into my water. The water itself reeked of the stain. My experience with all things is there is always a chance, however small, of something doing what it isn't supposed to. The staining was the only thing going on. I also forgot to mention the protein skimmer was on (I know I'm an idiot). The smell was so bad and ventilation was so bad that we couldn't stay in the house that night. Oh and the stain made a cool fog in the parts of the house that didn't have a door. I am still uncertain how the guys who did the staining survived. I'm betting they wanted some Funyuns and Doritos more than ever before. Back on topic though as I said before all paramters were green leading up to this. Then the staining with pretty much zero outside ventilation. Then a tank full of dying zoas with water that smelled like the stain for days.

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