Tank crashed - how do deal with the damaged and dead?

fishguy242

Cronies..... INSERT BUILD THREAD BADGE HERE !!
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Salinity is where ?? .25 or 1.025 ?
 

Tim'sReef

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Okay so I quietened down after things got heated. I didn’t want to offend anyone that had so kindly come to my rescue but I did keep reading. I’ve made up 100 litres of new seawater. That’s all the capacity I have to store it. Waiting for those to dissolve and heat up to test the salinity was HOURS. It’s cold here in the uk and I had to wait for each 25litre barrel to heat up, to test. One by one. All my spare heaters are very small as they were used in a 50litre tank.

I tested about 3 times a day. Ammonia stayed at 0 for 24 hours. Nitrates 1. Alk keeps dropping down to 6ish (I suck and making all the drops the same size). Magnesium was at 1400 but i stopped testing for it because my focus is making sure it’s safe right now not optimal, just safe. I realised I can’t take on all these problems at once, because I think I shocked my system trying to do this before.

salinity 0.25.

i started to notice in this time that my frogspawn had started to make a recovery, despite the clowns deciding to host it while it was dying. 2 of my mushrooms had also started to recover, along with my leathers. So I decided not to go with the full change as things were clearly improving and I didn’t want to shock them again. I wasn’t confident in my skills to do something like that effectively and I didn’t want to harm the fish. The fish are fine and they are my priority over corals to be honest. I have some sensitive species in there like a orange spot file fish and a mandarin who I’ve trained onto flake, pellet and frozen I really didn’t want to go back to square one with them. Especially the file fish, he was a pain in the butt to get to eat. When I first bought itit went on hunger strike for over a week.

My tank was ugly with bryopsis but everything was still healthy so I don’t even care about the bryopsis coming back right now, that’s something I will tackle naturally with macros or naturally in the future when the tank has stabilised. Any suggestions on ways to deal with this without chemicals would be greatly appreciated.

I am running carbon because those chemicals need out. Micronutrients is a risk I’m willing to take because I think chemicals are probably worse at this point. We can replace micronutrients but the chemicals are in there and they need to go.

I did a gentle 10% water change this morning. I agree this could have been more but I’m trying to avoid any shock here. I did this because the ammonia had creeped up to 0.8. I fed the fish last night so I’m assuming that’s why. Retested and it’s at 0.4 after the change. Not great, will probably do another in a few hours. Nitrate we’re at 2 before the change.

What I think has happened, again any input on this would be great, is I’ve killed my filter bacteria. Ammonia is high nitrates are low. I have filter bacteria in a bottle. Do I add some? If I do, do I turn my UV off so it can settle?

let me know what you guys think. Here’s a recovery pic
35FD0BAD-E62B-4373-9D5F-EBAD6FAA988F.jpeg

Nice job! And great call, never do something you don't feel comfortable doing. When I do, it only leads to mistakes that come to hunt me in the end.

I, too, think it would be best to focus on the fish. Don't worry about Micronutrients (trace elements) you are going to be doing a lot of water changes to keep the ammonia down, so these will get replenished by that.

Do you have a reefer or LFS near you that can provide you with a small piece of their life rock? I would help kick-start the bacteria population. On my second tank I took a small piece of rock and some spare coral frags from my nano, and it cycled very quick (so no more ammonia).

If not possible, I would do plenty of water changes since you have a bunch of fish in there and that ammonia is going to be trouble for them. (I'm not informed enough on what levels of ammonia are bad and in what timeframe they cause damage, all I know is you don't want any detectable)

The bacteria in a bottle may work, but I'm not experienced with that, same for the UV I don't have any so can't say whether you should run it or not
 

p1u5h13r4m24

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Just checked my phosphate the only test I haven’t run yet 35 ppb!! How has this happened I’ve got barely any nitrates? I use this phos guard rocks too?
You dosed a bunch of bacteria. That bacteria effect will be the same as dosing “carbon dosing” or dosing microbacter7. These are things people dose to lower nutrient levels. Typically you will see the effects on nitrate before phosphate.
 

p1u5h13r4m24

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You dosed a bunch of bacteria. That bacteria effect will be the same as dosing “carbon dosing” or dosing microbacter7. These are things people dose to lower nutrient levels. Typically you will see the effects on nitrate before
You dosed a bunch of bacteria. That bacteria effect will be the same as dosing “carbon dosing” or dosing microbacter7. These are things people dose to lower nutrient levels. Typically you will see the effects on nitrate before phosphate.
Also if you used a butt load of GAC this can filter out your dissolved organics which would without the activated carbon; normally break down into nitrates…
 
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Phoerut

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Lost a cleaner shrimp this morning. Pistol shrimp I haven’t seen but heard. Blood shrimp still okay. Any ideas? Haven’t had it long. The ammonia is sitting at about 0.2 this morning.
 

p1u5h13r4m24

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Lost a cleaner shrimp this morning. Pistol shrimp I haven’t seen but heard. Blood shrimp still okay. Any ideas? Haven’t had it long. The ammonia is sitting at about 0.2 this morning.
Shrimp are very sensitive to salinity swings. Any kind of parameter swings really.
 
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brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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Can you post a full tank shot of the system from today so we can see it’s overall presentation

it’s important to get pics so we can track systemic changes associated with the crash and compare them to recovery timeframes using alternate methods

its how we hone crashed reef repair, to compare outcomes within similar timeframes / need a pic pls they show unspoken details really well
 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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Can you post a clear full tank picture today vs zoomed in pic, wanted to see how the overall layout changed this last week
 

rmorris_14

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Hey!.. I just wanted to check in and see how it is going. Were you able to get everything stabilized? We all go through hard hiccups, so I am hoping that everything is going much better and you are back to enjoying your tank/ the friends that live in it :).
 

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