Nitrate Issue Turned Emergency

[ccombs]

Get an icp test done by Triton. And it sounds to me that every time you introduce a fish the parameters spike. The tank seems to be recycling. So it has to be either something has been breaking down in the tank and causing this, or chlorine or chloramine has been introduced and kicked it all off again. No algae on the rock at 6 months is for sure odd. I agree with another poster that the fish deaths look more like nitrite poisoning, but then the inverts are just rocking along...I'm perplexed, and going to have to hit my wife up for her to use that Bachelor of science with a major in chemistry we will be paying for until we retire, for some more ideas.

Thank you for your input, I am interested to get an opinion from the chemist as well! Obviously something is wrong here and there is an underlying cause, finding it has proved to be the difficult part haha.

In regards to algae, there was some of the fuzzy looking stuff, but the crabs ate it away.

The first spike came with the addition to chromis, and just kept rising. I am not sure if the fish after that caused the spike to continue, or if something set if off and it is just a coincidence. I'm sure I will laugh about it someday when I figure it out.

For now, I am just trying to make slow and methodical changes and adjustments until I can get a solution.

 

[ccombs]

Quick update. Nitrate is down to 20ppm tonight now that I am just holding my dosage at 3ml on the NoPox, wife just texted me the results.

If the chaeto does a good job keeping the nitrates low and I am able to stop the NoPox, is there a chance that the chaeto could still be hiding the underlying condition here?

In regards to the rock still being so clean, is there a chance that adding back in some beneficial bacteria would be helpful?

 

[SeaDweller]

Quick update. Nitrate is down to 20ppm tonight now that I am just holding my dosage at 3ml on the NoPox, wife just texted me the results.

If the chaeto does a good job keeping the nitrates low and I am able to stop the NoPox, is there a chance that the chaeto could still be hiding the underlying condition here?

In regards to the rock still being so clean, is there a chance that adding back in some beneficial bacteria would be helpful?

Let’s hope it stays down. Adding bacteria wouldnt hurt but add the suggested dose to avoid a bloom. I used microbacter 7 and bought some more and dr Tim’s to add to some diversity.

 

[Lasse]

First off, wow...

I am not only impressed by your knowledge, but of the fact you took so much time to try to help me sort through my issue. I really appreciate that and learned a lot just now. I did a lot of studying on the nitrogen cycle and processes involved before I started my tank, but this took a lot of that to the next level.

Just to be sure I understand what you are saying, here is what I plan on doing, correct me if I misunderstand.

1) Remove GFO
2) Continue Dosing NoPox at 3ml and continue to try to work down my dosage
3) Keep hands out of tank. I do pretty well at this but will pay special attention
4) Open window for fresh air near tank
5) Be sure there are no candles or other airborne type artifacts nears tank (I currently keep household cleaning products at a safe distance, etc.)
6) It is ok to add Chaeto

To be sure I understand your post in a sentence. I need to track down issue of rock work looking so clean because that issue is either 1) causing a false reading in my test and messing with the chemistry used, or 2) having some currently unknown side effect with something else.

In regards to some questions:

-I have used API strips for spot checks, but mostly API drop kit for marine and reef.

-I measure in KH.

-No silicon or repairs

Thank you

After a second thought – there can be a rather simple explanation to your very clean stones but maybe not to the killing of your fish. If your tap water contains some phosphorus – providing the system with some of it in the start – the combined effect of RODI water and GFO could have zeroed your P content totally – without P (PO4) – no growth at all. IMO – NoPoX can give both effects – both take away P from the system and some cases ad some to the system. It is morning here in Sweden and it is one of my job days – the explanation for this take some time to write – I will do it later on :)

I think that adding Chaeto can be a good idea – if there is any PO4 in the system. You will have one more biological indicator at least

If I wrote what I think of using test strips – I would be banned for life :)

You have got a lot of good information in this thread - your work will be to sort it out and use your common sense and see what you can apply on this certain problem. I´m sure – somewhere in the answers – you have the key – just find it

Sincerely Lasse

 

[ccombs]

Thank you

After a second thought – there can be a rather simple explanation to your very clean stones but maybe not to the killing of your fish. If your tap water contains some phosphorus – providing the system with some of it in the start – the combined effect of RODI water and GFO could have zeroed your P content totally – without P (PO4) – no growth at all. IMO – NoPoX can give both effects – both take away P from the system and some cases ad some to the system. It is morning here in Sweden and it is one of my job days – the explanation for this take some time to write – I will do it later on :)

I think that adding Chaeto can be a good idea – if there is any PO4 in the system. You will have one more biological indicator at least

If I wrote what I think of using test strips – I would be banned for life :)

You have got a lot of good information in this thread - your work will be to sort it out and use your common sense and see what you can apply on this certain problem. I´m sure – somewhere in the answers – you have the key – just find it

Sincerely Lasse

Lasse,

Thank you for the challenge and I will certainly work to correct this issue.

When I get it all figured out I will update everyone on the culprit and my progress.

 

[Dr.Xipoles]

I must commend the op for being so thorough in his explanation. You will defeat this my friend. I've also learned some about the toxicity of nitrate from reading all 11 pages of this thread and I concure with many of the comments in this thread, a rarity for both.

I will share my experience with alkalinity as i believe it can be ruled out as not being the issue with your fish deaths.

In my frag tank which is 100g with a yellow foxface, many zoas, acans, and other lps i accidently left my alk doser on and raised it to 26 dkh with kent superbuffer dkh. I freaked out cause i though my ph was though the roof but it stayed at 8.3 but i waited cause i remembered Mark Levenson said he had alk at 20 dkh more than once and his reef was fine. The next day i dropped it to 22 with a 20 percent water change and 3 weeks later im at 20 without doing anything. My foxface is happy as ever, my corals act as nothing ever happened. Maybe i was lucky or maybe alk spikes are forgiving on everything but sps. Good luck.

 

[Belgian Anthias]

Ammonia poisoning? Ammonia is a slow killer as it accumulates within the fishes cells. It may go fast when regular periods with high ammonia surpluses occur. One may measure nothing as the situation may be periodically.
The fact one can measure ammonia with a normal test kit is a bad sign. 0.1ppm in the water column may be considered as an acute dangerous situation, 0.4 ppm as an acute critical situation.

Dosing NOPOX!? How much?
Nitrate dropped from 160ppm to 40 ppm in 2 weeks! This means +- 13800 mg nitrate is gone in two weeks. Where is it!?

As micro organisms prefer ammonium as a nitrogen source nitrate will only be used for assimilation when available ammonium is used up. If this amount of nitrogen is accumulated into biomass in a small 115l ( 30 gal) aquarium one may expect problems when dosing is interrupted and or growth rate can not maintained. Adding a carbo hydrate does increase exponential growth but logarithmic growth is always followed by logarithmic die off. A cycle is created maintained by supplemental carbon hydrate availability. As exponential growth by fast growing bacteria ( r-strategists) needs a lot of other building materials, limited available, these building materials are stolen from other slower growing organisms (K-strategists), which means other microbial communities will be effected and die off providing building materials. If a high C/N ratio is maintained nitrifying communities will not be able to reduce ammonia any more as they can not win the competition for ammonia and oxygen used up by r-strategists . Showed by the high nitrate level these nitrifying communities ( biofilm) where responsible for most ammonium reduction in this system. Not any more?!
Nitrifying communities are a very complex mix of all kind of slow growing bacteria and archaea but they are able to reduce a lot of ammonium by respiration and need very little building materials.
Fast growing heterotrophs need 40x more building materials to reduce the same amount of ammonium. and as these r-strategists will steel the ammonium needed for nitrification these nitrifying communities may be removed. No or much less nitrate will be produced. To restore the lost nitrifying capacity time is needed for to reinstall the community which may take from a few days till a few weeks. During this period ammonia may accumulate ( new tank syndrome).
Ammonia my rise between doses when the doses do not follow the created needs for growth. The system may become dependable of dosing for maintaining its carrying capacity as the nitrifying carrying capacity may be lost.

It may not be advisable to use high doses of carbo hydrates to lower a high nitrate level. The nitrate level is not related directly to the daily nitrogen production. When to much is dosed daily there may be no ammonia left over for other organisms, depending of the daily production . When the dosing is not done correctly interruptions in ammonia reduction may be created ( a lot of ammonia is produced by the recycling of the cultivated biomass), ammonia which may accumulate in the tissue of fish.

Nitrate is safely stored nitrogen available for later use and its presence is very important in a closed system. Nitrate availability can easily be managed as nitrate can be removed easily when considered as not needed by closing the nitrogen cycle.

 

[Lasse]

About toxicty and fish - you must differ between the NH3 and the NH4 species of the complex some person mention as ammonia.

Sincerely Lasse

 

[Bigboned]

I feel I could sit a chemistry exam with just this thread for reference and still pass! Some amazing info here,it’s just brilliant to watch a group of people so vested in a positive outcome for the OP- I know the issue isn’t resolved yet but well done everyone

 

[DraggingTail]

When you say your rodi tests clean. does that mean 0 zero TDS?

My RODI tests 0 on TDS but shows 10 ppm nitrates when my DI resin is spent. So, I would test to see if you are dosing nitrates with top off

 

[ConnieHamers]

Is there any companies in your area that do tank services? I had a bad Green Hair Algae issue (I'm really new to the hobby too, FYI). I called a guy that comes once in a while and he has completely saved me. Algae problem is gone. He gives me great advice and he comes over once a month or two to check on everything for me. I would HIGHLY recommend this for newbies like us.

 

[Traian Boala]

I just finished reading the thread and I was thinking... what if you don't have a chemistry problem, but something else. I mean... your rock looks so clean because of your big CUC (if I remember well, you have 7 hermits in your relatively small tank) and the Chromis were not killed by some other fish, but they had Uronema. This desease looks like small red patches on the skin. Maybe you should search on the net for pictures and see if it looks like what you saw on your fish. I mean
.. You didn't quarantine the fish and few days in copper at the LFS would not cure anything. Your nitrate problem would (should) be easily solved if you just buy a Brightwell NO3 export brick and seed it with bacteria. Or any other media that you would prefer (from seachem, maxspect etc). I just like the Brightwell because it has sulfur inside and you no longer need to carbon dose.

 

[nuke 208]

I think you tank just needs time to stable out. By trying to control waist parameters it's stopping it from building bacteria to take care of it itself. Let NO PO build and u with have a algea bloom(don't worry it will die off) witch will give your rock bacteria to control it and make a stable tank. Just make sure ur rodi is clean, alk is under cotrol and let the water chemistry work itself out. The more additive and such the more posible problems IMO u could just be stopping the tank
from doing its thing with all the NOPOX.and based on how white your rocks still are. I would let the lfs hold any fish u do still have but inverts should be fine.
In saltwater u will learn to start with the basic like rodi and base parameters. Otherwise u will spend a ton of money chasing your tale

 

[Joey Merrell]

After reading all this to my wife, she said the addition of nopox isnt likely to be helping, but masking the underlying issue. She agrees the tank is recycling. And has advised not to keep dosing, but export as much as possible as often as possible. If you have to dose, she says sugar or vodka will lower the nitrates. I'd have to agree with her. Lots of great info here in this thread.

 

[Belgian Anthias]

For fish NH4 is considered to be not poisonous as NH4 may not pass the membranes .This may be true at pH below 7 and low temp.
In a marine aquarium when ammonia NH3 is used TAN will go down and ammonium NH4 will be transformed to ammonia until free ammonium is used up. In a marine aquarium pH above 8 always enough ammonia may be present to be stored in the cells of fish if the carrying capacity in the system is insufficient.

 

[Belgian Anthias]

I would not stop dosing nopox for the moment or better, replace it by vodka. To remove the ammonia present even more is needed as probably most of the nitrification capacity is removed. Stopping dosing now may kill the beast.
High daily doses should be divided over several small doses . For reinstalling sufficient nitrification capacity dosing must be decreased very gradually to prevent ammonia building up. This should take at least two weeks . A balanced system is based on a good autotrophic carrying capacity and not on daily doses of carbo hydrates cycling and producing a lot of ammonia. Adding carbon does not remove a thing. To remove nitrate- nitrogen considered not needed one just has to close the nitrogen cycle.

 

[nuke 208]

After reading all this to my wife, she said the addition of nopox isnt likely to be helping, but masking the underlying issue. She agrees the tank is recycling. And has advised not to keep dosing, but export as much as possible as often as possible. If you have to dose, she says sugar or vodka will lower the nitrates. I'd have to agree with her. Lots of great info here in this thread.

I think this tank is to young to be dosing anything I think that's more for tank with a long period of feeding and additives that gets waist built up in the rocks. ND I heard it t I cause more problems then solution unless u are really experienced at what ur doing.a go reactor would be a more stable way to keep in check.but in this case I think it just needs to balance out cause there is a less often heard of cycle phosphate cylce that happen in the first year that I think all the dosing it starving it out from pulling a full cycle so it can keep it d ok wn it self

 

[Kevin Duprey]

OK, I've been lurking here for a while, not contributing because A - there's already a lot of good advice here, and B - Most giving it are way more seasoned than I. That said, a couple recent things jumped out to me and I decided to give my 2 cents. Careful, you get what you pay for...

The point from Traian is interesting. Chromis are highly susceptible to Uronema, and there are several threads recently indicating it may be running rampant through the supply chain. Since most of your Nitrate issues started after the deaths of these fish, it's possible they died of disease rather than being attacked, and their death set in motion a cascading nutrient / DOC issue that the existing biomass was incapable of handling. The other deaths could have also been caused by the Uronema as well, and further amplified the issue. If the fish died and were not removed quickly, they're decomposition could easily set off some runaway organic reactions, especially in a small (30g), relatively new tank. I've come to learn through reading here and elsewhere that C, N and P all need to be in a rather delicate balance in a saltwater tank for everything to survive / thrive. You were mainly looking at one indicator of N, with little regard to the other 2 (C is not measurable easily), and your attempts to control the one may have really skewed the balance of the others. It sounds like things are starting to return to some normalcy, but it's still good advice to pay to have a professional lab do some testing for you. Some have mentioned Triton ICP, and that's what I use. It will not help with DOCs though. Luckily, Triton just introduced a new test kit N-DOC (https://www.bulkreefsupply.com/n-doc-organics-seawater-analysis-test-kit-triton.html) which does exactly this. I'd HIGHLY advise sending out a sample of both your RODI supply, and your tank water for ICP, as well as your tank water for N-DOC. Triton's advise on the resulting tests is also very valuable in restoring order when things are off. If the cost is prohibitive, drop the RODI test (any heavy metals in the RODI will manifest in the tank water anyway).

Good Luck resolving this, and keep up the good, patient approach. This hobby is a marathon, not a sprint.

 

[Lasse]

For fish NH4 is considered to be not poisonous as NH4 may not pass the membranes .This may be true at pH below 7 and low temp.
In a marine aquarium when ammonia NH3 is used TAN will go down and ammonium NH4 will be transformed to ammonia until free ammonium is used up. In a marine aquarium pH above 8 always enough ammonia may be present to be stored in the cells of fish if the carrying capacity in the system is insufficient.

This is not complete true because fish has special channels/ion pumps in their gills that are able to active get rid of NH4 in the bloodstream – even against a concentration gradient, hence all the time have the NH4/NH3 concentration in the blood at a certain and safe level. There is nothing like long time build up NH3/NH4 toxicity IMO.

The whole process is also depended some other circumstances – the difference between ambient pH and pH in the blood is one and the other is that fish gills is among the best organs for gas exchange that exist. This means that all gases – even NH3 - will penetrate the gills and into the bloodstream if the concentration of gas is higher in the water than in the fish blood – and the other way around. This means that NH3 will pass the gills back and forth depending on where the highest concentrations of NH3 are. NH4 – on the other hand can´t pass the gill from the outside but – with help of active ion channels/pumps - it is able to be transported from the blood into the water even if the concentration is higher at the outside. Let us say that we have 8.1 as pH in the water – normal pH in fish blood differ between 7.7 and 8. Let us say that we have trace amounts of NH3 in the water – because that the pH in the fish blood stream is probably lower – the concentration of NH3 will probably be higher in the water and some NH3 – will penetrate into the blood stream – NH3 coming into a lower pH will be partly converted into NH4 and the blood pH will rise a little if the normal regulation mechanism is not fast enough. NH4 will pe pumped out and the fish will reach homeostasis again.

However, if the amount of NH3 that´s penetrate into the bloodstream is high enough or fast enough – the fish will not be able to reach homeostasis and the fish will die. (read NH3 concentrations to high)

For the book - the amount of fre NH3 at pH 8 is around 5 % of the total NH3/NH4 - at pH 8.5 coresponding percent is around 15 %. If you read 1 ppm total NH3/NH4 at pH 8 - NH3 is 0.05 ppm (not acute deadly) If the pH is 8.5 - NH3 is 0.15 ppm - can be critcal to some species. A good calculator here

However – must of us take the values as true values – I´m rather sure that both the NO3 and NH4 readings are false in this case.

Sincerely Lasse

 

[chaoticreefer]

I personally lean towards that it might be more of a phosphates problem then a nitrates problem. Having no phosphates throws the Redfield ratio out of whack. Definitely dump the API test kits. For Phosphates, get the Hanna Checker for phosphates (ULR). I had the opposite problem then you do now. My phosphates were high, but no nitrates. The minute I started to add nitrates to my tank the phosphates went down. For 3 years I have been fighting with this tank with coral keep dying after 3-6 months in my tank, coralline being stubborn. Coralline never grew on my glass ever, after about a month of keeping nitrates at 3-5ppm, it is now exploding on my glass. Now I test my phosphates and nitrates religiously, every 3-4 days. And my nitrates do drop within that time, meaning having to add more nitrates because phosphates skyrockets when nitrates gets below 3ppm. So...my thinking is you might need to add phosphates or at least stop the GFO, if its phosphates.