I'm sorry for your loss :sad:
I had something eerily similiar happen, last fall:
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/sh...hreadid=433454
~Tamara

Isnt when the fins are out on the fish its from a ammonia shock i believe ..

I'm so sorry too BEv , I wish i was there to help out with your troubles. hope for a speedy recovery


Mike

Tamara,

Thanks for the link. We have all our tanks on GFI outlets, so if the problem was electrical, the tank would have shut down.

Michael,

I suppose the fish deaths could have resulted from ammonia, though I estimate only .5 ppm could have been in the tank before the water change. The ammonia would have not instantly occurred, I don't think. It would have taken awhile for it to build up, right, especially with all that macroa algae in the tank? And even at .5 ppm, that wouldn't be enough to kill so quickly, would it? After the 40% w/c there was .5 ppm ammonia in the tank. Tested water from the RO/Di unit this morning and it was .5 ppm :evil:

Bev when i was starting my 280 i received a clown and a green brittle star and a six line. I was bringing up the salinity and the next morning the clown was like it looked at medusa it was flared out on the fins..


mike

p.s checked the water and had a ammonia spike

:cry:

Michael,

How high was your ammonia? How low was your salinity? Could both ammonia and low salinity have caused your fish death?

Although most that responded to that thread thought it was electrical, I tested out my equipment and it seemed fine (still using it all without probs).
I'm still not convinced that I didn't release something into the water column, when I cleaned off the algae/cyano from the glass. The fish seemed to be affected within minutes, and also died "flared out" :eek:
Mouths were stretched wide open, and they almost seemed to be convulsing...
Anyways, I hope you get to the bottom of it!
~Tamara

the ammonia was at 1 so i think that may of been that. Bev i also had GFI on the tank and found out after that it was not grounded. If you have a GFI plug and it's not ground it will still not work..


Mike

Just did a quick siphoning of the crud in the 120g and replaced the carbon with foam. Found 17 dead snails, many of which were the new ones I had shipped from J&L last Monday :cry: There were also several dead snails among the ones we'd had around for awhile :cry: One good thing is that the two strange hitchhiker snails are still around :smile:

The snails that were shipped came in bags full of snail poop and with very low pH. Didn't test the shipping water for ammonia, but I'll bet it was relatively high with all that poop. All the snails that were shipped were alive when they got here and after I put them into the tank, so I'm tending to rule out ammonia as a cause of death in my disaster :neutral:

He has a point are you sure that your GFCI actually has a ground in it....Cause if it doesn't then it won't trip out!!!

I once had a electrical current going through my tank but nothing died, some of the fish seemed to be stressed but never actually died I found out when I tried to syphon the water and got hit with 120 through my mouth, shortly after my heater exploded.

If you want I can stop by and check to make sure that your GFCI and all your equiment is in perfect working order!!!

Not to worry :smile: Chris has a pretty good knowledge of electrical stuff. He assures me that the GFIs our tanks are plugged into are grounded.