All my coral are dying after holiday vacation! Help please

adubson

adubson

New member
Unfortunately, the worst has happened to my tank while being out of town. All my coral look like crap, after only 6 days! I left for about week for the holidays, and a friend house sat for me. My tank, maintenance-wise has been pretty stable for awhile now and I figured there shouldn't be too much to worry about for a somewhat short trip. I had him feeding flakes since all my fish eat them, and I didn't want to put him in over his head with frozen foods.

Three days in, he lets me know that my return pump is running dry and blowing a ton of bubbles into my tank. This has never happened to me before, but that's how these things go. I assume by JBJ ATO had timed out and stopped turning on the Aqualifter. So he manually raised the water level with RO/DI water. The next day, he says my coral aren't looking too good. He described the bubble coral looking not as extended as before; I figured it wasn't anything too big and maybe a fish bothered it. Finally, I get home a couple days ago, and all my SPS are completely white. My LPS have very minimal polyp extension. Most of my CUC looks to have bitten the dust. Things are not looking good. Did a quick test for ammonia, and it was up to 0.25 ppm.

To add to the stress, I was leaving the next morning for another 2 nights, so I instantly prepped for as large of a water change as I could do in the short time. I managed to do a 40% water change before walking out the door. I came home this afternoon, and now all the coral that was white has turning a reddish-brown (cyano-like) color. There seems to be a minor increase in polyp extension. I've tested for all that I can test, and the results are listed below. I'm planning to do another large water change now. I also ordered some Microbacter7 in case my bacteria population died off for some reason.


Ammonia: 0.25 ppm
Nitrite: 0
Nitrate: 20 (probably a little less due to the poor color discrimination of API Test Kit)
Phosphate: 0

pH: 8.4
Salinity: 1.025
Calcium: 480
dKH: 8

Temp: 80.4

Lights are 2x 120W Chinese LEDs (50% blues, and about 40% whites currently)
Passively run BRS carbon and GFO in a media bag in sump.

What has happened? Are the coral recoverable? What should I do?

First set of pictures is what I initially saw, followed by how they currently look (iPhone takes terrible pictures of the tank with LEDs now).








Currently:




This is how some of them used to look :(

 
Wow. That's horrible and every reefers worst nightmare. I wish I had some helpful advice, but I haven't been through something like this before. I would think the ammonia could be the cause of your coral problems, but where did the ammonia come from? Anything big die? It seems like a cycled tank would keep up with a small death without noticeable increase in ammonia.

I would keep up with water changes and use some type of ammonia neutralizer to help protect whatever is still alive. Some of your livestock may recover, but not with ammonia in the water.
 
Same thing happened to my tank when I was gone for a week. Came back to white SPS, LPS receded, zoas melting. I can only recommend water changes and carbon.
 
Any recommendation on an ammonia neutralizer? That's why I ordered the MB7, not sure if that would be the best thing to use for that task though.

No big deaths, apart from a lot of snails. But since I wasn't here, I don't know if their deaths caused the spike or if they died due to the spike.

All the fish are still looking great, active, and eating well.
 
I have Prime ammonia neutralizer, but you are far. Your tank was probably overfed while you were gone. Most of your sPS probably gone. Keep doing water changes and find Ammonia neutralizer.


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Yeah, I'm pretty positive the tank was over fed. Especially with all the flakes in the filter sock.
 
ColaAddict said:
I have Prime ammonia neutralizer, but you are far. Your tank was probably overfed while you were gone. Most of your sPS probably gone. Keep doing water changes and find Ammonia neutralizer.


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Click to expand...
Good call! Never thought about the sitter overfeeding.
 
I started a thread of my issues this past November when I had someone with no experience watch my tank. I was so lucky and now in hindsight, good thing I had her give the tank just one cube a day. Will continue that next time; hard to mess that up.
 
That sucks i dont have anyone feed just let fish starve they fat enough to last a week without food lol last thing i need someone killing my tank
 
I fill small plastic cup with frozen cubes ( usually 2 ) put lid on each cup and label Monday , Tuesday , Wednesday etc...keep in the freezer until ready to feed. I'm petrified to leave my tank for more than a few days.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk rich.
 
Do you know any other close by reefers you can move your stuff to? Until you can get your tank stabil again?
 
Things seem to be already looking a bit better. Fish are still doing great and the ammonia is all gone. Did a 60% WC yesterday, added some Prime, and dosed some bacteria.

All the sps are probably toast, except for a montipora undata. Still waiting for the original polyp extension to return to all my lps though. Hopefully it's just taking a while and they're not deteriorating.
 
I dunno if anyone else has seen the new gel food system that Dr. Tim is working on but it will allow you to make custom sized feeding pucks and will last multiple days in water. The gel/food is supposed to come out early 2015 so hopefully it's good stuff because it might solve feeding during absence issues.

5:30 into the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWxOHPObrFc
 
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