My first ICP to try and diagnose a crash

[banik]

Many people who treat with cipro and amox have the same issues come back in time. Since the stuff only usually kills what is already in the corals or tank, there is no strange, dangerous pathogen that gets wiped out. The effect will likely only be temporary. I would still continue to look for the root cause.

If there were some kind of unknown pathogen, you also likely did not get it all with the cipro and amox and it will rebound too - don't worry about this since it the chances are slim to none and slim just walked out of the door.

New tanks can be hard. You likely will never know what really happened.

I appreciate the thoughts/info. I also have a UV sterilizer to plumb in to try and act as a control mechanism given my lack of precise diagnosis, in addition to a strict dipping (reef primer and KFC) and QT regimen. If it happens again, the only two things that I can think of will be to completely restart the tank after sanitizing or to do one of the genetic tests.

 

[jda]

There is nearly no chance that some strange pathogen wiped out your corals. They were likely too weak to keep themselves alive. No biomics testing (or whatever) or restarting the tank will help unless you provide them a better environment. What killed your corals are likely what was inside of them already and they were just not strong enough to fight it off.

 

[banik]

There is nearly no chance that some strange pathogen wiped out your corals. They were likely too weak to keep themselves alive. No biomics testing (or whatever) or restarting the tank will help unless you provide them a better environment. What killed your corals are likely what was inside of them already and they were just not strong enough to fight it off.

What do you see that would indicate anything was weak/unhappy? Everything was flourishing/growing/splitting/branching well until this happened. Iodine was low, but I wasn't evaluating that as critical.

 

[Pod_01]

I appreciate the thoughts/info. I also have a UV sterilizer to plumb in to try and act as a control mechanism given my lack of precise diagnosis, in addition to a strict dipping (reef primer and KFC) and QT regimen. If it happens again, the only two things that I can think of will be to completely restart the tank after sanitizing or to do one of the genetic tests.

Just an opinion or my point of view, corals do require bacteria to survive.
Using cipro and amox likely impacts the bacteria that corals need and also what detrimental bacteria/ pathogen survives will be resistant to cipro/ amox.

Dipping is also not the best solution in my opinion, it kills the bacteria on the coral and multiple dipping just weakens the coral further.

Live rock is one of the best methods to introduce diverse bacteria in your tank, yes it can bring in some pests.

 

[jda]

Because they suffered and died. This might sound harsh, but it is a pretty good indication. It is more likely something that you did not test for, could not test for or other unknown from a new tank.

If your tank was just 4 months after the cycle, then this is not long enough to have true stability and a flourishing tank. 4 months is more like an instant and most things probably were not in there right at the beginning anyway.

Low iodine did not kill your corals. Even low light could not kill them all at once like that - don't know if those lights are enough, but that is more of a long-term issue to measure and figure it out. It either was from a super fast drop in some major element that got missed, or something got overdosed and also missed. Since you likely did not do either on purpose, then you didn't know so you will never know.