URGENT HELP...all my fish died overnight and I have no explanation PLEASE HELP!

aSaltyKlown · Sep 29, 2021

Sorry for the loss, it always is a downer when animals die.
I'm curious as to why you are running a skimmer in the first place? Seeing as how you are dosing what the skimmer is pulling out. Is there another reason for running the skimmer? IMO I'd pull the skimmer and put a HOB like the Seachem Tidal. I like this as it has a built-in surface skimmer and self primes. Can't go wrong with an Aquaclear either. A HOB will also help with oxygen exchange.

jt8791 · Sep 29, 2021

Now I’m glad that I run 3 aquaclear filters, I’ve been nervous since I had to shut off my fuge light and toss the chaeto from nitrates bottoming out. Time to switch to gracilaria and sea lettuce, maybe add a 4th fish after all.

Light bioload and chaeto don’t work well together, even without it I had to overfeed crazy amounts just to get nitrate to 5, phosphate hit 0.5. I actually gave myself a bloom in the process but had tossed my flourish nitrogen. Makes more sense to grow something I can feed to the urchins and the possible 4th fish too.

Sorry for your loss, I’m still learning myself and have ups and downs but couldn’t imagine losing all my fish in one night. Odd part is I was having dinos or diatoms before that and have yet to see them come back. Phosphate test never did read a full .25, need to get better test kits.

MaxTremors · Sep 29, 2021

davy31 said:
Hi, I woke up to the worst morning ever. All my fish in my nano reef died. 3 were on the sand bed and two were stuck to the sides of the flowheads. It was stocked with

3 - Ocellaris
1 - Blue Chromis
1 - Damsel

There are soft corals and inverts which seem ok. The parameters were all fine -

Ammonio - 0
Nitrate - 0 (I have been dosing nitrate and phosphate as my softies were shrivelling up.
Phos - 0.03
Ph - 7.8
Salinity. - 1.024
Alk - 11
Temp - 24 C

There have been. no electrical failures in the tank. The intank skimmer was shut off over night , this was done the last 2 nights in a row. I battled a a slimy gooey bacterial bloom last week and did a 50% water change and cleaned my filter material. It was really bad and I have a few previous posts about this problem. However the tank has been cleaned from the slime for the most part. I fed the fish brine shrimp yesterday around 3 times to help with increasing the nitrates.

I dose nitrates and phosphates to help the softies. In addition I dose a coralline algae starter by Microbe Lift. All my dosing is by microbe lift. The aquarium is about 8 months old and the fish seemed healthy and fine lasz evening when I fed them. They did not look stressed or oxygen deprived.

Something went horribly wrong...and I just feel utterly helpless and a horrid feeling like I killed my own fish. I am just lost for any explanations. Please help!

I’m going to guess that by turning off your skimmer and with the recent bacterial bloom, your fish asphyxiated from lack of oxygen.

davy31 · Sep 30, 2021

aSaltyKlown said:
Sorry for the loss, it always is a downer when animals die.
I'm curious as to why you are running a skimmer in the first place? Seeing as how you are dosing what the skimmer is pulling out. Is there another reason for running the skimmer? IMO I'd pull the skimmer and put a HOB like the Seachem Tidal. I like this as it has a built-in surface skimmer and self primes. Can't go wrong with an Aquaclear either. A HOB will also help with oxygen exchange.

Hi, yeah its a real ****** feeling as I was responsible for this colossal screw up! I tried the Fluval HOB in the beginning but it was quite loud for some reason and the water would just not clear up even after running carbon with it. So I decided to use a Fluval 207 external stocked with bio and mech filter media. It worked really well while the tank was settling. I decided to then use an external filter to skim the excess food as the nitrates were above 50. After that the tank just dialled in and the nitrates came down to between 10 - 20 and phos was around 0.03. Around a month and a half back I saw my softies not looking happy and saw my nutrients were at 0.

davy31 · Sep 30, 2021

jt8791 said:
Now I’m glad that I run 3 aquaclear filters, I’ve been nervous since I had to shut off my fuge light and toss the chaeto from nitrates bottoming out. Time to switch to gracilaria and sea lettuce, maybe add a 4th fish after all.

Light bioload and chaeto don’t work well together, even without it I had to overfeed crazy amounts just to get nitrate to 5, phosphate hit 0.5. I actually gave myself a bloom in the process but had tossed my flourish nitrogen. Makes more sense to grow something I can feed to the urchins and the possible 4th fish too.

Sorry for your loss, I’m still learning myself and have ups and downs but couldn’t imagine losing all my fish in one night. Odd part is I was having dinos or diatoms before that and have yet to see them come back. Phosphate test never did read a full .25, need to get better test kits.

Yeah I think tests can be off sometimes. I use the red sea kit and also test with a brand called colombo from my LFS. I'd like to get hanna checkers in the future when my budget opens up a bit and I think they are quite accurate.