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.
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.
