My tank is dying and I don’t know why!!! I’m frustrated and sad, please help!

[Cassian]

Hey there. Sorry to hear about your tank troubles! That's scary stuff! Just spitballin' here, but did you read this article here on R2R? Might be connected to your troubles...
A disease is wiping out Caribbean corals. Coming soon to a reef tank near you?

Interesting, thank you for the link!

 

[Trueblue17]

+1 on red cyano and i agree you've likely stripped all the nutrients out of the water over time
Maybe dose coral food ?
Hopeully someone else will chime in that knows more

agreed I believe you need to feed the tank and corals heavy , the cyano and dino covered all my corals so they were not getting good light or food , all I did to fix it was stop cleaning and water changes and turned skimmer off for two weeks , and fed the corals reefroids every night and fed the fish like crazy ,in two weeks the nutrients started to finally come back up and dinos and cyano disappeared all on I own I kept my hands out of the tank for two weeks and my tanks are all spotless now , not a sign of dinos or cyano anywhere, water changes and any cleaning just makes it worse and worse , and only makes it look better for a day until the dinos come back and cover everything again and worse than before you clean , anyways that my thoughts , I had it really bad in all 3 of my tanks at same time and all 3 tanks are spotless now

 

[Cassian]

agreed I believe you need to feed the tank and corals heavy , the cyano and dino covered all my corals so they were not getting good light or food , all I did to fix it was stop cleaning and water changes and turned skimmer off for two weeks , and fed the corals reefroids every night and fed the fish like crazy ,in two weeks the nutrients started to finally come back up and dinos and cyano disappeared all on I own I kept my hands out of the tank for two weeks and my tanks are all spotless now , not a sign of dinos or cyano anywhere, water changes and any cleaning just makes it worse and worse , and only makes it look better for a day until the dinos come back and cover everything again and worse than before you clean , anyways that my thoughts , I had it really bad in all 3 of my tanks at same time and all 3 tanks are spotless now

Thanks!

 

[Sohal]

Did you get the ICP test result? Did you find out the caused of the problem? Any update would be very helpful.

 

[Cassian]

Did you get the ICP test result? Did you find out the caused of the problem? Any update would be very helpful.

Sorry for the lack of updates everyone! life has been crazy!
I got the ICP results back and Aluminum and Lithium were in dangerous level. I will be sending off another ICP very soon to verify that this problem has been solved by changing my sand out. But everything seems to be doing better with the exception of a few corals that were already long gone. Even an SPS I had started coming back after I changed the sand even though it looked dead!

 

[Sohal]

Thanks for the update. Keep it coming. I really want to know the cause.

 

[Cassian]

another update:

Well ive lost a lot of coral, but I think everything is starting to get back on track. I have some LPS that have died back, but are starting to grow again and show polyps. I have a lot of Coraline algae growing on the rocks now. My current parameters are below:
Alk: 8
Cal: 460
Mag: 1300
Salinity: 1.024
Nitrate: 50
Ammonia: 0
Phos: 0
Nitrite:0

So, heres my hypothesis about what has happened: I believe my tank went through a "maturation stage" or something of the sorts. due to the elevated nitrates, which are now falling and returning to normal, I think my tank went through a mini cycle and needed to mature before it could maintain LPS and SPS. I will continue to update on the LPS that are coming back. Thanks to all of you for your suggestions and advice!!


Also: I have changed to Red Sea salt. Im thinking maybe it will be better for my tank and help get it healthy again.

 

[2Wheelsonly]

another update:

Well ive lost a lot of coral, but I think everything is starting to get back on track. I have some LPS that have died back, but are starting to grow again and show polyps. I have a lot of Coraline algae growing on the rocks now. My current parameters are below:
Alk: 8
Cal: 460
Mag: 1300
Salinity: 1.024
Nitrate: 50
Ammonia: 0
Phos: 0
Nitrite:0

So, heres my hypothesis about what has happened: I believe my tank went through a "maturation stage" or something of the sorts. due to the elevated nitrates, which are now falling and returning to normal, I think my tank went through a mini cycle and needed to mature before it could maintain LPS and SPS. I will continue to update on the LPS that are coming back. Thanks to all of you for your suggestions and advice!!


Also: I have changed to Red Sea salt. Im thinking maybe it will be better for my tank and help get it healthy again.

Don't change salts, you have to ask yourself why would a salt company stay in business if their salt created problems? The answer is simple. Changing salts is NEVER the magic bullet...

"Phosphate: 0"

This is your problem 100%, every single new system I have setup has gone through this and corals look like yours. Take the advice of others and stop your nutrient export. Buy a bottle of po4 and dose it if you have to. I ran into this recently, in order for bacteria to break down nitrates you need to have po4, the high nitrates are causing your low po4 and vise versa. Dose po4, do water changes to help lower no3 and it will all balance out.

If you ever read something telling you to strive for 0 po4 make sure you stop reading and move on. It's just not true.

 

[92Miata]

Don't change salts, you have to ask yourself why would a salt company stay in business if their salt created problems? The answer is simple. Changing salts is NEVER the magic bullet...

"Phosphate: 0"

This is your problem 100%, every single new system I have setup has gone through this and corals look like yours. Take the advice of others and stop your nutrient export. Buy a bottle of po4 and dose it if you have to. I ran into this recently, in order for bacteria to break down nitrates you need to have po4, the high nitrates are causing your low po4 and vise versa. Dose po4, do water changes to help lower no3 and it will all balance out.

If you ever read something telling you to strive for 0 po4 make sure you stop reading and move on. It's just not true.

Agree that the phosphate is a problem.


Part of the issue in this hobby is people give advice that is specific to their tank, and think its universal. So we have people trying to strip a tank of nutrients when they should be adding more.

Early on, reef tanks don't have many nitrate/phosphate consumers - there's not enough coral mass. So pest algaes become your main consumers - so you use GFO/huge export/etc to try and stave that off. Mature tanks with big corals have a ton of consumers - so you stop having to remove significant nitrate/phosphate,and start having to feed them. That tipping point seems to get a lot of people.

 

[Miller535]

Agree that the phosphate is a problem.


Part of the issue in this hobby is people give advice that is specific to their tank, and think its universal. So we have people trying to strip a tank of nutrients when they should be adding more.

Early on, reef tanks don't have many nitrate/phosphate consumers - there's not enough coral mass. So pest algaes become your main consumers - so you use GFO/huge export/etc to try and stave that off. Mature tanks with big corals have a ton of consumers - so you stop having to remove significant nitrate/phosphate,and start having to feed them. That tipping point seems to get a lot of people.

I could not agree more with this.

 

[Cassian]

Don't change salts, you have to ask yourself why would a salt company stay in business if their salt created problems? The answer is simple. Changing salts is NEVER the magic bullet...

"Phosphate: 0"

This is your problem 100%, every single new system I have setup has gone through this and corals look like yours. Take the advice of others and stop your nutrient export. Buy a bottle of po4 and dose it if you have to. I ran into this recently, in order for bacteria to break down nitrates you need to have po4, the high nitrates are causing your low po4 and vise versa. Dose po4, do water changes to help lower no3 and it will all balance out.

If you ever read something telling you to strive for 0 po4 make sure you stop reading and move on. It's just not true.

Agree that the phosphate is a problem.


Part of the issue in this hobby is people give advice that is specific to their tank, and think its universal. So we have people trying to strip a tank of nutrients when they should be adding more.

Early on, reef tanks don't have many nitrate/phosphate consumers - there's not enough coral mass. So pest algaes become your main consumers - so you use GFO/huge export/etc to try and stave that off. Mature tanks with big corals have a ton of consumers - so you stop having to remove significant nitrate/phosphate,and start having to feed them. That tipping point seems to get a lot of people.

I could not agree more with this.

thanks everyone! I’ll be ordering some PO4 today and try that out!

 

[Miller535]

One thing I would add, that if you have 0 PO4, and are dosing, to buy something like the ultra low hanna phosphate checker. It's really difficult to accurately read the PO4 at low levels with most titration kits, IMO. For me, once I bought the hanna checker, there was no going back to a titration kit for PO4

 

[Cassian]

thank you for that suggestion! I will look into it

One thing I would add, that if you have 0 PO4, and are dosing, to buy something like the ultra low hanna phosphate checker. It's really difficult to accurately read the PO4 at low levels with most titration kits, IMO. For me, once I bought the hanna checker, there was no going back to a titration kit for PO4

 

[ReeferBean]

I will try uping my salinity, but would my low salinity be killing my coral? Everyone I have known has kept it at my levels and I have kept it that way for years. Would it kill all of a sudden?

35ppt is 1.0264 ish depending on temperature. Have you calibrated your refractometer lately?

 

[Cassian]

35ppt is 1.0264 ish depending on temperature. Have you calibrated your refractometer lately?

yes I have calibrated it. I honestly get that conversion mixed up a lot, so I may be saying it wrong, but right now my tank is 1.025

 

[Cassian]

also, what do yall recommend to raise phosphate?

 

[Aqua Man]

NeoPhos from Britghtwell is working well for me.

 

[Cassian]

NeoPhos from Britghtwell is working well for me.

thank you!

 

[Cassian]

Great news everyone!
I have now stabilized my PO4 at about 0.03 and my NO3 at 20 ppm. My coralline algae is coming back strong (almost all of it died during whatever went wrong with my tank). So here are my current parameters:

Salinity: 1.024
Ph: 8.0
Cal: 460
Mag: 1400
Alk: 8
Phos: 0.03
Nitrate: 20
Ammonia, nitrite: 0
Temp: 76-78


Only thing is I am having a bit of an algae problem on my frags. Any tips?