uh oh
 

i managed to kill off every fish in my tank in 3 hours and not damage any inverts or coral. i dont understand what happened all of my testing shows normal. the only recent change was i added 2 koralia 2 powerheads to my tank to replace the powersweep p.o.s i had running. too much flow wouldnt kill fish that quick would it. on the plus side i have a reason to get the 110 up and running quicker.

hMM
 

Need a little more info to diagnose your problem, how many fish, how big is the tank, how long has it been up for, how deep is your sand bed, any large water changes , what do you dose with, when you say normal perameters what do you mean, what are your Nitrates, Nitrites, NH3, Phosphate, pH, Temp, Salinity...
Levi

the tank is a 55 gallon, been up and running for approx. a year and a half. sand bed is 4" deep. i change 10 gallons every 2 weeks ( instant ocean). i dose with iodine, coral accel, strontium and molybdenum, purple up, liquid reactor, i stick to dosing instructions on the bottles. i lost a regal tang, yellow tang, 6 line wrasse, 2 chromis, blue devil, yellow damsel, domino damsel, saddled toby puffer, diadiem dottyback, black percula and salarias blenny. parameters are salinity 1.023, ammonia 0, nitrites 0, nitrates 5, ph 8.2, temp 80

Whoaa dude, killed all livestock??? Dayum. Hope you find the cause, I havnt gto any ideas

Come to think, you added 2 powerheads. Wonder if there was anything on them? Oil or plastic mold release residue? Params seem ok. 4 year old tank so pretty stable I presume

Sure you want more Zoo's right now?

i cleaned the koralias pretty well first. i just dont understand what would kill the fish and not even phase the corals or inverts. definately want the zoos

well personally i think it was overstocked, but that probably wasn't the reason. at least not directly. Did you notice any parasites or disease symptoms? overstocking stress might have made them more vulnerable to a fast acting pathogen of some sort.

do you test for what you dose (and my, what a list you have there) or just follow directions on the bottle? what do you test your salinity with? hydrometer? refractometer?

What inverts do you have?

Really Zero Nitrates with all that fish.
Have you ever tested your tank for the levels of the addatives you are adding? Most of them contain trace elements of something else you where adding. I would imagine your trace elements are over the safe levels.

Sorry to hear your losses


J

With a 4" sand bed and adding the power heads how much did you disturb the sand. When did you do your testing? before the lose or after? If it was before how long before you added the new power heads? My guess is you release a lot of stuff in the sand bed.

Keith

Is it possible you had a nitrate spike? you have a reading of 5 is this normal for your tank?

When you changed your power heads did the flow increase disturb the sand bed?

i think i found the problem. i was focusing on the fish and inverts and missed something obvious. my magnificent anemone was missing. found him chewed up in the pump. dont know why the testing didnt show anything wierd though. time for a new test kit im thinking. thanks for all the suggestions im hoping that was the problem. the powerheads dont seem to be disturbing the sandbed noticeably

Anemone chewed in pump, darn. Glad I went closed loop, no powerheads in my tank. I hope thats the cause. Sure is alot of fish$$$ to lose all at once

it was a painful loss but i was way overstocked though now i can work more on my corals without the fish in the way. turns out there are 4 fish left. a percula, a scooter blenny, a yellow spotted tilefish and a citron goby. hopefully they make it to the new tank

If ya had to many fish, I woulda taken some LOL. :mrgreen:

Got any pictures of your tank?

Too bad about the fish.

Bandit, important to guard your intakes even with a CL.

My guess is that your ammonia/nitrite test kits weren't showing you what was there. When the anemone died, it could have produced a good spike in those parameters.

Would fish actually be MORE sensitive to ammonia than corals? I'm thinking...yes.

I have heard that if water quality is the issue, the first thing to go is the inverts. Is this not true?

When an anemone, sea hare or something else gets sucked in, is it the ammonia or nitrites that cause the crash? Sort of thought it would have been some other toxin (and therefore not something we would normally be testing for).

You must test trace levels if you're going to be dosing!

That's a lot of trace elements you're dosing. You're LFS must be happy - ;)

While I do agree it was probably an ammonia spike from the anemone dieing, certain trace elements can be toxic in elevated levels. Others are correct: you shouldn't dose if you aren't testing for that specific thing regardless of what the bottles say.

You should have to dose half the periodic table in any event if you are doing regular water changes.