Hey Tony just saw this, bummer. It does sound like cuke killer toxins to me too. I had mine start to puke out the creamy slime awhile back, luckily I noticed it doing the deed and yanked it out and through it in the trash. Wierd thing is it was gone 2 days later when I looked so either a cat or our nieghbourhood racoons ate it.....yuck! Anyway let me know if I can be of help. My RO unit can put out 300 gal per day if you need some quick water. I also have a spare skimmer if you need to borrow one.

Clams are weenies. I hope they pull through for you. Why do they have to be sooooooooooooo perdy when they are such a pain in the butt??? :mrgreen:

So sorry to hear about this Tony :( I hope what's left pulls through. You've been a real inspiration to many of us (including me) so I'm really rooting for you to stay in the hobby.

Tony, you were here when I started my crazy reef tank adventure many many years ago. You're still here. Don't do what I did... faced a little adversity and I quit (broke my 320g dream tank). Since the day I tore down the 120g and 90g, I've been looking to get into another tank.

I regret my decision to give up those two tanks nearly every day. I've since moved to a newer house with much less room to keep tanks and am searching for ways to fit in a new tank.

You do not want to be me! Although, I do not want to be you right now :)

Then again, I don't think you need a pep talk.

Good luck though.

Thanks. :) To be honest the sheer logistics of pulling out are daunting enough to keep me to press on. I'm also too far along on my inwall (despite the running joke of how long it's taking to put water in it) to really abort that, the whole basement has been drawn up around it so .. so I guess that's that. Just have to find a way to make it work is all.

If this isn't an argument to consider BB tanks though and forgo the need to have cucumbers in the tank, I'm not sure what is. Although it's weird, if it was the hitchhiker cucumber, I thought it was a garden variety tiger-tail, and I thought these were reasonably safe to keep. Although I suppose if something happened like it went into the overflow pipe or a pump intake, who knows, maybe in that case still, "anything goes."

You don't need cucumbers in the tank. I have never put one in any of my tanks simply because I think they are disasters waiting. Plus, there are other critters that do the job just as well - particularly conches and sand sifting gobies.

YOU may be convinced but others may not be. I was just speaking some idle thoughts here in retrospect. After all, there is a certain appeal to a creature that eats dirty sand and poops clean sand. I didn't buy the tigertail, it was a hitchhiker. I guess I could have torn apart the whole tank to get at him but I didn't, for reason #1 the sand cleaning thing didn't hurt, but #2, what exactly do I do with it? Condemn it to death because of what it is, or pass it along to another reefer, who may not know the risks? Not really comfortable with either option there.

Is it what it is now though. I lost two fish, so it could have been worse, but the sting of losing a 6 year old fish to something seemingly with no forewarning for still disappoints me.

Damn, sorry to hear Tony. Hope everything turns out well.
My condolences. It sucks to lose a pet youve cared for so long.
Good luck.

I sort of debated with myself about bringing this thread back up but have decided to add this footnote to this story.

In the end, I lost 4 fish in this event, one of my doliatus rabbitfish, my flame hawk, my raccoon butterfly and my sixline wrasse. Some of these fish were longtime keepers, the sixline was in fact my oldest fish (bought in 2001), the flame hawk in 2004.

One night earlier this week I was doing some fish spotting at night (some new fish, thought I'd see where they were hiding). Anyhow, I spotted the cucumber: alive and well.

So, that means that whatever this was, it wasn't "cuke nuke" after all. Unless maybe the cucumber had split and one of it's offspring or clones had kicked off, but now I'll never really know. My first theory that it was clam spawn just doesn't seem to fit the pattern: I have had clams spawn before on me, and there are usually two distinct telltales: 1) you know who is doing the spawning. Even afterwards, they will have a "I'm spent" look to them for up to days afterwards. None of my clams ever had this look at the time. 2) There is a distinct smell usually. While this event had a smell, it's wasn't the smell of .. um, how can I put this delicately, it wasn't the smell of spawn.

I do think that whatever it was did cause the brittle stars to spawn, but the initial thing is still the mystery. And there is the issue of the mystery substance that looked like fried eggs covering the entire sump, no idea what that was. Weird, just weird, weird weird weird. I've been doing saltwater now for close to 12 years and this is the first time I've had an incident of this nature that I cannot conclusively determine what the actual cause was (just to be clear - I've had many incidents: but I can always trace it back to a "the ultimate cause was 'X'". Where 'X' might be equipment failure, power failure, human error, livestock issue, etc.)

It really does irk me to have to walk away from this incident and not have a "lesson learned" aspect to it. No idea what went wrong, so no idea what to change to prevent or lessen the likelihood of a reoccurence. :neutral:

On another note though, for the record, I am not quitting (the initial theme of this post was that I was deciding whether to continue on or not, and the decision is to make the best of things and forge ahead.) I have some progress on my tank build that I should probably post about at some point in my build thread, and some new livestock that has rekindled some of the excitement I have about this hobby. :)

I was a little scared to open this thread.

Bad news about the unsolved reef mystery but I'm glad you're making progress on the new tank. Can't wait to see some new pictures. Of course I know I'm not going to find that your sump has moved or anything TOO crazy because I'd remember having met you!

Thanks Brett. I'm thinking maybe this weekend for grunting that sump over. It would be nice to have it outside of the middle of the basement where I have to step over it (it's like a magnet for other junk: I don't know where to put this spare 30g, so I'll put it in the pile. Hmmm, a bucket full of heaters that I should check to make sure still work. One day when I have time. In the meantime, I'll just leave it next to the sump. What's this Home Depot bag full of? Screws? Why did I buy a bag of screws again? Hmmm, ok, I'll just leave it here until I remember what they're for...)

I forget where I was going with this. Oh right, the sump. Yes, the sump. I'm thinking of maybe moving it into the stand this weekend. Right now it's in the middle of my basement and it's like it's a magnet of distraction and other things that I don't know what to do with, so it ends up in a big pile, and.....

Lol. Saturday might work out for me...

I am not sure if it has been brought up before, but is is possible that something was accidentally dumped in the tank?

The thought did occur to me. I don't think so. No evidence of anything spilled or dumped, and even though I have small kids, they aren't in the basement without me, so I know it wasn't them. I also checked the ceiling to see if something could have been spilled from above that seeped through the floor, but I couldn't find any evidence of anything like that.

Another theory I had was that a pump failed and released oil but that too wasn't it. I don't have any oiled pumps anyhow. Heater was fine too.

The cats... :surprise: