Will my tank recover

[blazedbeef]

Hi everyone I kinda have an emergency I did a water change yesterday and noticed all my corals very unhappy today I noticed my heater never kicked on I guess and my tank temperature was 74 it slowly got back up to 77 degrees which is what my tank is always at. I got home from being gone all day to a very cloudy tank and some tissue loss on my frogspawn. Do yall think there’s any chance of my frogspawn coming back from this? I’d appreciate any help on what to do

 

[Tahoe61]

You should do the basic chemistry.
Double check the water source.
How old and size of tank?

 

[blazedbeef]

You should do the basic chemistry.
Double check the water source.
How old and size of tank?

The tank is about 4 years old and it’s a 24g I haven’t tested water in about the last 2 years because my parameters were stable with water changes every weekend I did 2 water changes that day one on another 20g tank that is doing perfectly fine using the same 5 gallon jug of saltwater I got from my local fish store.

 

[Tahoe61]

To nail down a cause without chemistry is difficult. Since the other system is fine it's not the water source.
If it were my tank I would run some new charcoal, check to makes sure filtration is running at it should. Check for dead members of the cuc.

 

[Shirak]

pictures in white light please. Can't see much in these.

Drop of 3 degrees will not cause whatever is going on here.

The frogspawn looks to have lost LOTS of tissue on all the heads. This is not something that happened over night. Looks like your stony corals have grown quite a bit. Water changes will work in the beginning to keep up with alk and mineral demands but only when demand is low. Not testing for 2 years is not a good plan. With corals that size in a tank your size you should be monitoring and dosing at bare minimum Alk supplements.

Test everything and post your parameters. Especially Alk, phosphate, nitrate, calcium, salinity

 

[Lavey29]

Temp drop won't do anything but that cloudy water and lack of testing will.

 

[blazedbeef]

To nail down a cause without chemistry is difficult. Since the other system is fine it's not the water source.
If it were my tank I would run some new charcoal, check to makes sure filtration is running at it should. Check for dead members of the cuc.

pictures in white light please. Can't see much in these.

Drop of 3 degrees will not cause whatever is going on here.

The frogspawn looks to have lost LOTS of tissue on all the heads. This is not something that happened over night. Looks like your stony corals have grown quite a bit. Water changes will work in the beginning to keep up with alk and mineral demands but only when demand is low. Not testing for 2 years is not a good plan. With corals that size in a tank your size you should be monitoring and dosing at bare minimum Alk supplements.

Test everything and post your parameters. Especially Alk, phosphate, nitrate, calcium, salinity

Found out it was due to a faulty heater my controller read my tank temperature was dropping by the second once I dropped an actual thermometer in there it read my tank was about 85 degrees I currently have an ice pack in there trying to cool things off

 

[blazedbeef]

Temp drop won't do anything but that cloudy water and lack of testing will.

Turns out the tank was at about 85-86 degrees my hygger heater and controller failed I guess

 

[Lavey29]

Turns out the tank was at about 85-86 degrees my hygger heater and controller failed I guess

Pretty hot but mine got to 82 with no issues.

 

[DanyL]

Pretty hot but mine got to 82 with no issues.

85-86F is a whole different story, especially if it was raising rapidly.
It would most definitely cause casualties.

 

[blazedbeef]

85-86F is a whole different story, especially if it was raising rapidly.
It would most definitely cause casualties.

Yeah unfortunately it seems like the the only thing that died was my frogspawn colony

 

[Shirak]

ugh :(( 85-86 not good especially if it was for a prolonged period which it sounds like it was. Pick up some test kits too for alk, PO4, NO3 at least and maybe calcium. You should be testing regularly. Salifert are good for Alk, Ca I prefer Hanna for the other two since I don't like reading color gradient tests.

 

[Lavey29]

85-86F is a whole different story, especially if it was raising rapidly.
It would most definitely cause casualties.

Could be but if it was not prolonged I doubt much complete damage will occur however OP said he hasn't tested water in 2 years so there could be much worse problems then water temp going on.

 

[DanyL]

Could be but if it was not prolonged I doubt much complete damage will occur however OP said he hasn't tested water in 2 years so there could be much worse problems then water temp going on.

I live in a country with a hot climate, and thus chillers are the norm here.
Over my 17 years in the hobby, I’ve observed quite a few chiller failures that sometimes led to disastrous results, the exposure wasn’t prolonged, but the increase was rapid.

I also have first hand experience with heater failure myself, I had set up a coral QT for some new acros, the thermostat failed and the heater stuck on, increasing the water rapidly to around 30c. I discovered this a couple of hours after the accident, and the first acro died the same day. And while I was able the keep some tissue from the other two acros alive for around week, they eventually all died.

Obviously not all corals will react this badly, but most SPS and many common LPS corals are quite susceptible to a rapid temperature increase and it often ends up with mortalities.

Even softies, which are quite hardy and can tolerate higher temperatures may react badly to a rapid increase like this.

So I’m not saying it’s a total loss, it most likely isn’t. But mortalities are expected.

 

[Lavey29]

I live in a country with a hot climate, and thus chillers are the norm here.
Over my 17 years in the hobby, I’ve observed quite a few chiller failures that sometimes led to disastrous results, the exposure wasn’t prolonged, but the increase was rapid.

I also have first hand experience with heater failure myself, I had set up a coral QT for some new acros, the thermostat failed and the heater stuck on, increasing the water rapidly to around 30c. I discovered this a couple of hours after the accident, and the first acro died the same day. And while I was able the keep some tissue from the other two acros alive for around week, they eventually all died.

Obviously not all corals will react this badly, but most SPS and many common LPS corals are quite susceptible to a rapid temperature increase and it often ends up with mortalities.

Even softies, which are quite hardy and can tolerate higher temperatures may react badly to a rapid increase like this.

So I’m not saying it’s a total loss, it most likely isn’t. But mortalities are expected.

I have only one experience with power outage and water temp rising to 82 degrees for 13 hours. Nothing happened to any corals even SPS so it appears there may be a terminal temperature probably in the mid 80s that starts harming corals at some point. I have also had water temp down to 67 with nonissues.

 

[ChrisfromBrick]

Turns out the tank was at about 85-86 degrees my hygger heater and controller failed I guess

sorry to hear. I keep 2 new heaters in stock always because I am paranoid. Even still, these things can happen within a few hours tops. I do like having the inkbird hooked up to the brs titanium’s or eheim heaters