6AM emergency water changes suck
 

Woke up to a milky tank, could hardly see fish. Changed 50g, kinda scared to go home after work :)

Ooh.. Any clue what's going on?

None. Just cloudy. Some corals sliming, but nothing dead that I can see.

Changed water, cleaned skimmer, and hoping I have a tank when I get home.

Got clams? My guess is you've had a spawn...

One small one, not sure it's enough to cloud 200g of water. I guess it's possible. I thought maybe snails, but again, it's a lot of water for the amount of snails I have.

Eeeek!:neutral:.... I hope all is well for ya when you get home man....

Brutal mang. Hope everything works out. Good to hear nothing is dying though.

The biggest thing I hate in this hobby is when something like that happens, and you never find out why. lol.

Do you run a doser or anything?

Do you have a bubble tip anemone?
 

perhaps purging?? Mine did, and the tank was back to normal after a day.

In the past, I have had a couple scares with very cloudy water, after cleaning sand and rearranging rock work. My solution was to dump in a couple cap fulls of MB7, and it cleared up completely within 2 hours.

Yikes, that is scary! Hope everything is ok when you get home :sad:

Quick add the bacter & coral snow!

Ditto! That sucks. One of my worst fears...

Anemones would be my second suspect after clams. At least based on my experience, cloudy tanks have been caused by spawns of clams and anemones.

Anemones easily a few times per year. It's visually disturbing because it's all white but a water change and carbon changeout usually has it cleared up within a few hours to a day or so, and nobody seems worse for wear other than the anemones are smaller and tired looking for the next few days. So hopefully this is the case for you too.

Clam spawns on the other hand scare me, I had livestock losses a few year ago, but it might have been worse because it was a significant spawning event of several clams at once including two very large (football sized) squamosas. 1 or 2 smaller individuals spawning may be more like the anemones spawning - more of a nuisance to be forced into a water change but overall everything ends up OK.

Anyhow good luck with things!

I would go home Brad just a extended Lunch break.. hope all is well bro

Had a major clam spawn in my main system a while back that wreaked havoc on the reef. Ended up doing 100g water changes for several days (about 300g total for a 165g). What made things worse is that the clam spawn polluted waters caused a big toadstool to droop over and fall into my HK Mag8 powerhead. Sticky, nasty stuff to wake up to, that's for sure. Good luck with the water changes and hope you figure out exactly what happened.

Anthony

All the best

Good Luck Brad! I hope everything works out.

Hope everything goes well...

Hopefully you didn't bring home rich's bad luck home with you.

Ultimately it's just a bunch of coral, so no point stressing about it. It will be good when I get home, or it won't.

Might make a difference on whether I'm having beef or fish for dinner tho :razz:

Haha...for someone who could be stressed, you have an amazingly healthy attitude towards it. Hope you're having beef for dinner though. Makes me re-think items in my reef that can spawn though.

I should think you'd need to supplement your fish dinner with the beef anyways :biggrin:

Speaking as someone who needs some frags from said tank (just kidding...sorta), I hope all is well when you get home.

Well, some things you have control over, some, not so much. I did what I can do with what I had, and now I wait and see. The tank is healthy, the fish are in good shape, and everything looked good when I left at 7. Not that I could see much, but all corals had tissue and fish were just hanging out as usual.

In the end, it's just a hobby, and there are too many more important things to worry about than an aquarium.

I usually do :) Don't worry, I'm sure there will be frags for you. You might need to come get them tonight, but there will be frags -lol

well hopefully they're not those ultra rare tonga white acropora mortas, I've had enough of those

Happen to me once at 2:30am when anemone got caught in my power head.

hope things are well with your tank. Do you have any caulerpa? when they go sexual it can create quite a fog. I had this a few times but it never had a negative impact.

I would use a bit of coral snow and zeobac if you have any. Coral snow clear a tank quite fast with a good skimmer.

No, the only things that could spawn are the 3" clam and astrea snails. I'm sure it will be fine when I get home. Pretty sure, anyway :)

alright, tank upgrade! :mrgreen: just kidding.

:hug:

Hopefully everything is fine Brad, guess you will be finding out in a few hrs.

Looks like everything is back to normal. I can see things in the tank. Always a good sign :)

good to here mang.....would be nice to figure out what it was tho....

I'm going to guess the clam, who set off the snails, maybe?? Not sure, just hope it doesn't happen again. Glad I had 50g of new water on hand this morning though :)

Glad to hear the tank is ok. Do you have any urchins? I have a few short spine pincushion and tuxedo urchins which can cause 600g to turn white when they spawn at the same time. Thankfully it only happened once, usually they are nice enough to take turns :lol: I did a water change when it happened and all was well thankfully.

Good news. I kind of wish I'd checked this thread yesterday evening when I had a bta turn my tank all milky!

At least you got to see who or what did it :) If I'd seen the clam doing it, I would have removed it to a bucket while it spawned, then return it afterwards. But waking up to it kind of leaves you wondering. I guess an anemone would be tougher to move, hopefully you had some water made up for a quick change.

Yes, once I saw the mess I observed for about 10 minutes & saw the anemone spewing bursts of the milky stuff. As far as removing the culprit, unlikely with the nem & apt to cause further problems if I tried. It took me 15-20 minutes to remove one from the rock a couple of weeks ago when I put it up for sale.

http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/sho...threadid=98221

I did not have water ready for a change though! At any rate, system looks fine this morning & although I was going to do some water tests this morning, I may forego that. What would I test for, pH?, nitrates?, ammonia? I've had the tank running long enough now that my best test is a good visual this morning. Water is crystal clear again, critters all behaving normally.

Ya, agreed, not sure what to test for. If it passes visual, it's likely good enough. I didn't test anything.

Glad to hear everything is ok. Guess when one starts they all get excited eh? :wink:

reef orgy... :mrgreen: sooo just ewwwwwwwwww