Approaching total coral wipe-out

[asylumdown]

yah that was in November. I've wondered if something 'broke' in the bacterial chain of my tank when I did that that somehow lead to all of this 4 months later, but I have had a hard time convincing myself of that. Namely, after I did the chemi-clean dose in November, the tank was pristine for 3 months. The coral colours were banging, I sold TONS of frags, things were growing like crazy. The only problem I was having was with my BP reactor clogging after I started dosing with MB7, something that had never been an issue for almost 2 years prior.

The onset of things falling apart when they did was incredibly sudden. It was literally like someone had poured a cup of poison in the tank one day. It also coincided within a matter of days of me re-setting and modifying my pellet reactor, and changing brands on a bunch of products. I've now talked to a bunch of people who are using the same products I have with zero issues, and what happened to my tank follows the general description of what people who've OD'd on organic carbon have seen.

I'll always be more inclined to think it was the obvious, temporally linked event rather than some unknown, slow acting time bomb whose fuse was lit months before but left no evidence until all of a sudden everything coincidentally just fell apart the same week I flooded the tank with an unprecedented amount of carbon polymers, species of which have been shown to be toxic to SPS corals in high concentrations. However, I'll never really know. I changed too many things too quickly and wasn't (/couldn't) test all the relevant parameters that could have been affecting things.

In any case, as of today, the corals are growing again and the cyano is gone. Whether that's a permanent thing or false ray of hope I'll figure out in the coming weeks.