I just want to clarify - I in no way think it's the bulk chems that are responsible, I know tons of other people who are using the exact same ones from the exact same batches without problems, but I also know that I changed a lot of things in a short amount of time before this all began, which if this is a 'syncopated event' of a bunch of small changes working together to cause a serious problem, returning to the brands I was using before this all began is (at least I hope) a way to eliminate one avenue of stress.

In any case I got some more advice today and a 100% water change really does seem like the best way forward. I resisted it because I'm sooooo not set up to do that, but tomorrow I'm going to try and track down 6 more of the 55 gallon rain barrels to start making water.

Stick with it Adam :smile: We're rootin' for ya !!!
I know it's depressing but I can't imagine not running my tank now ...

Somebody on here local to you must be able to loan you a tank large enough to hold your WC water for a week

Stick with it and you'll be happy you got through it :biggrin:

How much water do you need to hold to do a 100% WC ?
300g ? 350G ?

Put a post up looking for loaner tanks ...

If I was in your town I'd be there to help you stay in the hobby

A 50g from this guy, and a 100g from that guy, and another here and there is all it takes to do the job !!!

or buy a 300g plastic trough. then you can store it somehwere in case you need it again. easy enough to move alone.

I have a new Laguna PT795 (51"x32"x18") basin and a couple 32 gallon brutes you can borrow.

Do you know where to pick one of those up in Calgary?

Thanks man, I'll PM you.

Dude, I just totally remembered that I bought a 150g trough last summer to house my Koi temporarily. I still have it and am not using it at the moment if you want to borrow it.

Also, I got mine at UCA up by Airdrie. They sell farm stuffs.

I would try UFA if Kien's suggestion doesn't pan out.

Right, UFA, not UCA. They had big 300g ones there for sure, but they are expensive !

Well I'm hoping to avoid having to spend hundreds on a single use item, so kien if I can borrow yours I can make up the balance with garbage bins that homedepot will hopefully let me return. I'll pm you. This will not be a small undertaking.

I think I have a 24-30ish g rubbermaid brute that I somehow inherited off a Canreefer. It has also been used for waterchanges in its life and whilst in my custody it has really only taken up space. You can have or borrow this if you want.

Ive been losing close to 70% of my sps over the last 1-2 months, too like a stn type of death with no apparent reason, dont think i swithched anything that i can think of but at this point im gonna have a fowler in notime

Wow.. So this is a trend, apparently. I wonder if there is any commonality. We need a club. Also, sorry to hear of your issues too.

FWIW if you do decide to start up again I can throw you some LPS and SPS frags if you want them.

On the plus side of killing my corals, they all fit into one of the 2 sides now and i can have non coral safe fish in the other side haha, about 2 weeks before i started having problems i overdid a dose of kalk but things seemd ik a couple days after so maybe not related, it also looks like possibly brown jelly disease in some of my corals but who knows, at this point im just letting it do what it wants and ill keep what lives the rest probably arnt getting replaced

Not sure if this was covered, but could it be due to the snow melt and water quality? I notice my DI resin changes color within 2 weeks in the spring whereas it'll last a month any other time of the year.

I'm going through the exact same thing to.. burnt tips followed by stn,,, I'd say I'm close to 60% sps die-off..

I've got a few 300g brand new potable plastic tall water "cisterns" your more than welcome to borrow if you come get them or find a volunteer...

this thread seems so depressing. So many ppl with mass sps die off

Well I'm not happy it's happening to you, but I feel a little better knowing I'm not the only one. Look closely at your corals that this is happening to, the best description I can give is thus:

1. tissue at the growth tips is just gone one day. It's the worst on the side facing the lights

2. The polyps get all weak and floppy. It's like they lose their ability to retract in to the cup or hold any tension in their tissues. From far away it looks like you have the most insane polyp extension ever. Close up it looks like the polyps are just hanging out of their cups.

3. the texture of the remaining tissue gets all weird. Smooth skinned corals get rough and bumpy looking, some of them change colour drastically, darkening (but not browning) across the entire colony. It's actually quite pretty in some for a short while, until all their tissue detaches.

4. In some colonies, little blisters begin to form that look exactly like super tiny bubble-gum bubbles that are about to pop, these hang off the coral and blow about in the current. When they pop they take large chunks of tissue with them.

5. In the corals that don't form bubbles, it's like half the tissue from the outside of the polyp cup just strips off, where brown algae quickly colonizes, making the whole coral look like it's been raked over a cheese grater.

6. Finally, entire strips of tissue just slough off. Entire branches to entire colonies lose all their tissue practically over-night. This is followed within days by colonization of the skeleton by cyano. I'm pretty sure cyano can harvest the phosphate right out of the coral skeleton.

I had those bubbles you're speaking of on a few of my corals when my sps were dying. when things stabilized i saw a few of them shrink and disappear.

it's actually strange but my problems started shortly after i bought all those frags from you. i have a hard time believing there's any connection though as your tank looked incredible when i was over.

I just realized that I haven't posted a single pic:

Feb. 23 - You can barely tell that the tissue from the tips of this stag are gone
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps35267a05.jpg

Today (from the other side) -
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psc76a5261.jpg

Feb. 23 - This coral was one of the first to show signs of damage
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0570125c.jpg

Today - (it's totally dead)
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psc8ac17cb.jpg

Feb. 23 - The tips are all burnt, but it's hard to see in this photo
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...pse2e255de.jpg

Today - Kind of hard to tell, but probably 1/3 of the tissue, all the way down each branch is gone
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psfef96112.jpg

Feb. 23 - this used to be my favourite coral. It started with just burnt tips
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps1e7ab53b.jpg

Today - I don't think there's any saving it. There's no more than a couple cm anywhere on the coral that doesn't have damage
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps822250b8.jpg


And I don't have any earlier photos of these guys but:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps80dd7ff0.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps164648a6.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psc250b5d6.jpg

And finally:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps482a61b3.jpg
You can't really tell form this pic, but the small frag in the dead centre of this pic is a Pink lemonade. It presently has several of those blisters I was mentioning. The freshly de-fleshed white skeleton next to it was a beautiful teal acro with blue tips 3 days ago.

Ugh.

The only glimmer of good news is that since I haven't been able to pick up the big tubs yet (I'm hoping for this weekend), I've been doing at least one 45-50 gallon water change every day since Sunday, and I *think* today I see the first possible signs of improvement. At least I haven't lost an entire colony in a couple of days anyway.

the thought that this is some sort of pathogen has crossed my mind more than once. The fact that it's favouring acroporas, and the fact that it's happening in the whole tank all at once seems disease-esque. But after I did that major round of fragging and selling, every single coral healed over and started growing aggressively from the places I had cut them. And that was in what... December? Everything was growing like weeds until February when this started.

I have one montipora digitata colony, and one montipora capricornis colony that have continued to grow normally since this all began, while another monti cap and my forest fire digi have shut down completely, with tissue recession in a few places. None of my euphyllias or my elegance coral have been damaged, but my only colony of acans has lost a ton of tissue, so if it is a disease it's a disease with a very weird taste for coral species.

Well I think I've stopped the carnage. I was not able to do a 100% water change, but with Ronau's tub and the storage bins I had I was able to do a 60% water change. I was hoping to let things just settle with no intervention for at least a week, but it turns out that even in 375 gallons of water my surviving SPS is still consuming enough alkalinity that 48 hours without dosing would have been as fatal as whatever was just going on.

I set up the doser again and have spent the past 4 days trying to get it dialled in. I'm basically back to square one on dosing solution rates, so I started with less than half the amount I used to dose and am slowly increasing it every day based on the results from my tests. Today I had to manually dose some of the alk solution as my dKH has fallen in to the 5's and that scares me. I just need to find the new sweet spot to keep it in the neighbourhood of 7.

I have however stopped losing entire colonies, and the only new tissue loss I've seen since the 60% water change has been on patches of coral that looked like it was already too far gone to save. I have a couple acros that have started to form plate edges along the margins of where the tissue died, and on a few the dead patches are perceptibly starting to shrink. I'm still not sure if a couple of my largest colonies are going to pull through, as I think "too far gone" happens long before the tissue actually pulls away, so we'll see over the coming months whether they get normal looking texture and colour back and start growing again, or RTN in the middle of the night.

I've done HEAPS of online research, and I'm almost 100% positive now that this was the result of a biopellet overdose. I've seen similar reports from people who've OD'd their tanks on carbon (both liquid and solid), and Randy Holmes-Farley on RC found that his tank has an upper maximum dosing limit of vinegar, above which his corals start to suffer. When I fixed my biopellet reactor, I should have treated it like I was setting up a new reactor on a new system for the first time, since my bacterial population was completely wiped out when I took it apart and cleaned it, and my modification allowed for at least 10X the flow through rate. Instead, I put the same amount of pellets I'd built up to over 2 years back in the reactor (about 3L), and left the new 1" effluent gate valve open at 100%. In retrospect I'm not sure why I was so baffled as to what was happening, I basically followed a step-by-step "how to crash your tank" recipe.

With no pellet reactor nitrates have been rising fast, however. At this rate, and the rate at which I do water changes, and the amount of water that I change each time, it looks like my tank would stabilize between 10 and 15 ppm nitrate. That is about 10 to 15 times higher than it's ever been in this tank's history. I'm worried about compounding the stress of the past month and a half by allowing nutrients to sky-rocket, and I'm not thrilled with the idea of daily water changes in perpetuity, so today I put the pellet reactor back online, but with exactly 10% the recommended volume of pellets for my system. I have a gigantic pellet reactor so it looks kind of silly, but I'm going to do it right this time. I'll track the effect this has on nitrates over the next 6 weeks, and I'll only add more pellets if the nitrates don't perceptibly fall.

It's going to take a while to get all my parameters to stabilize, and until they do I'm not really going to worry about what's going on inside the tank, as I don't really expect my corals to get back to their former glory until all the major ions and the nutrient profile remains constant for a period of months. Once the chemistry has been stable for at least a month I'll start to worry about the visual effect this has had - specifically the explosion of cyano that now blankets half the tank. For now it gets a pass. For some reason my sand is cleaner than it's ever been though, so from far away it doesn't look that bad.

Sorry if I missed it but what salt were you using before the event started and what are you using now?

Glad Ur tank is slowly recovering. Wish u the best of luck on getting as close as u can to 100%

I've used H2Ocean for the lifetime of the tank. Right before this all started I switched to Fluval's new salt as it was a little cheaper, but when things started going south I switched back to H2Ocean. There's plenty of people who use that salt so I'm not sure if I think it was a real contributing factor or not, but it was one wild card I could easily take out of the equation.

Good to hear things are getting under control. I hate to see a big beautiful system die off like that.

Good luck with the rest of the recovery.

ugh, well I hated to have to do it but I didn't have much of a choice. Cyano got so unbelievably out of control I dosed the tank with chemi-clean on Friday.

Dosing a harsh chemical when things were already so out of whack was not something I wanted to do, but I was siphoning was seemed like a pound of the stuff off my corals and rocks every night, and by noon the next day it would be back plus more.

I have a few corals that got severely damaged that I'm desperately trying to save by cutting away dead skeleton back to just below living tissue. It seems like it's working as anywhere I've cut (if I was able to actually get to where there was healthy tissue), corals are healing over with new tissue and teeny tiny new polyps are forming, and anywhere that exposed skeleton remained cyano free corals have built up new tissue growth edges and the dead spots are shrinking. However, about half of them are so damaged it's not possible to cut all the dead skeleton away as the pattern of necrosis looks like what you'd get if you raked the branch down the fine side of a cheese grater. Cyano got to the point where it was blanketing nearly all places where the skeletons became exposed, and I've found clear evidence that the cyano actually kills coral tissue it remains in contact with for too long. I've got one frag of millepora that never got damaged in the first wave of STN/RTN, but it's small and the rock it's on got carpeted in cyano. About 3mm of it's plate died in a ring around where it met the slime. I have another nearly dinner plate sized colony that had the cheese grater look to it, and cyano formed a continuous mat across the mid-section of the coral. Anywhere that was beneath the cyano is now bare skeleton, even though that coral seems to have stopped losing tissue days before the cyano took hold. I'll probably have to cut the entire thing in half.

So it was a choice between doing nothing and risking the cyano possibly preventing recovery of my corals/killing more than what was already damaged, or dosing with a harsh chemical and hoping I can take back control of the trajectory the tank is on.

Moral of the story kids - don't get lazy and think that just because something has worked great for years in spite of any neglect or ill considered decisions you might have made does not mean that will continue to be the case.

Brutal. Do you still have hope at this point?

Actually yes. I have my own theories about cyanobacteria but my experience with it is that once it's given the opportunity to proliferate it's very tenacious. It took advantage of an opportunity and became a threat in its own right, even though I seem to have corrected whatever it was that started this in the first place (I think it was biopellets, but who's to say really)

I left the chemi-clean in the water a day longer than recommended before doing the water change and I'm letting my skimmer do what is essentially another slow motion water change right now, but even in just three days of the the 'drugs' working their magic, corals that were continuing to decline under advancing sheets of cyano seem to be forming hard lines in the spots where the tissue had been dying. That's generally the precursor to new growth plates IME, so I'm optimistic.

Whether this will have long term effects on stability in other areas I can't say, but as a short term solution it seems to have helped

I remember you battling cyano a while ago. Do you run a refugium? I'm wondering if the Chemiclean dose would be more effective if it was spread out over the major chambers of the system rather than dosing all of it into just the display or sump? Your situation is very unnerving.

yah that was in November. I've wondered if something 'broke' in the bacterial chain of my tank when I did that that somehow lead to all of this 4 months later, but I have had a hard time convincing myself of that. Namely, after I did the chemi-clean dose in November, the tank was pristine for 3 months. The coral colours were banging, I sold TONS of frags, things were growing like crazy. The only problem I was having was with my BP reactor clogging after I started dosing with MB7, something that had never been an issue for almost 2 years prior.

The onset of things falling apart when they did was incredibly sudden. It was literally like someone had poured a cup of poison in the tank one day. It also coincided within a matter of days of me re-setting and modifying my pellet reactor, and changing brands on a bunch of products. I've now talked to a bunch of people who are using the same products I have with zero issues, and what happened to my tank follows the general description of what people who've OD'd on organic carbon have seen.

I'll always be more inclined to think it was the obvious, temporally linked event rather than some unknown, slow acting time bomb whose fuse was lit months before but left no evidence until all of a sudden everything coincidentally just fell apart the same week I flooded the tank with an unprecedented amount of carbon polymers, species of which have been shown to be toxic to SPS corals in high concentrations. However, I'll never really know. I changed too many things too quickly and wasn't (/couldn't) test all the relevant parameters that could have been affecting things.

In any case, as of today, the corals are growing again and the cyano is gone. Whether that's a permanent thing or false ray of hope I'll figure out in the coming weeks.

So are you still using pellets?

yes, but I'm looking in to replacements. I don't think it's pellets that are the problem per se, but how they get used and how little their mode of action is understood. There are definite red flags about them - first and foremost of which being that no one has even the slightest clue about how much of the polymer makes it in to the water column, or even where the majority of the nitrate reducing activity is taking place (in the reactor, or in the tank using the carbon that dissolves/breaks off the pellets?). The fact that people report it takes weeks to see a reduction in nitrates has always made me suspicious - I've run the reactor at a slow tumble with not a lot of water pass through, and the bacterial mats that form inside of them grow lightning quick. The entire column of pellets can be fused in a thick, white, microbial mass in as little as 48 hours. Alternatively, when the pellets are tumbling fast enough to prevent clumping, there is usually zero build up of bacterial mulm anywhere in the reactor. Also, it's not uncommon for people to add pellets to their system and within days see the entire tank turn in to a lush cyano garden. I've always wondered if that means that the bulk of the 'work' pellets do is actually taking place inside the water column using carbon that's sloughed off, but you'd need to do some really sophisticated organic carbon analysis (that to my knowledge no one has ever done) to know for sure.

If I could find a nitrate control method that made sense with my setup that was not pellets I'd switch, but my tank is too heavily fed to not have some sort of intentional nitrate control system in place. Adding a gigantic refugium or remote DSB is physically not an option and I don't really have any space for something huge and bulky like a sulphur denitrator or an ATS. The only other 'proven' method is liquid carbon dosing, which is basically the same thing with a different delivery method but I don't know I'm ready to commit to switching. Dosing it in liquid form has the benefit of giving you precise and immediate control over how much carbon you're adding, but at the end of the day no one really understands the full spectrum biochemistry of carbon dosing anyway. I might end up switching to vinegar or vodka/vinegar dosing at some point.

In the meantime, I'm running my modified reactor with 10% the pellets it used to have before I increased the effluent pipe diameter, and I've restricted the flow through it significantly. I'm also monitoring my nitrates and will only add small amounts of pellets if the nitrates continue to climb over a period of weeks. This seems to be a safe level, but then again maybe pellets had nothing at to do with the what happened in the first place.