Guys I'm so discouraged, P***** Off, ready to give up

[ScubaSteve]

Originally Posted by mandyplo

Hi tank is a year old in January. Should I keep the clams in and let someone babysit my corals? Also I am running the octopus BH-2000 skimmer.

That skimmer should suffice for now but in the future you should try looking for something more powerful like a Vertex, SWc, etc (I know, more money, right?)

I was going to say that if you're good at matching the temperature and salinity of the tank when doing water changes then you could leave the corals and clams in when doing big changes but I'd feel better saying just get someone to just look after them for a couple weeks while the battle rages on. I do 50% water changes in an SPS tank every once in a while without issue (taking great care to match parameters) but I've got a better feel for my own tank and feel comfortable enough hitting the reset button in the tank (and the possible consequences).

My biggest concern with leaving the clams in when doing this is that you might stress them out and they spawn as a result (weird stress reaction mechanism, eh? Such a reaction would make exam time far more exciting... errrr... awkward...). The resulting spawn would just exacerbate the current issue (in fact when I first looked at your tank I thought the clams had spawned until you said the water was green).

[Aquattro]

Originally Posted by ScubaSteve

My biggest concern with leaving the clams in when doing this is that you might stress them out and they spawn as a result (weird stress reaction mechanism, eh? Such a reaction would make exam time far more exciting... errrr... awkward...). The resulting spawn would just exacerbate the current issue (in fact when I first looked at your tank I thought the clams had spawned until you said the water was green).

Yes, and I would move the clam to another tank. Maybe the LFS can watch it or I'm sure you can get a raise of hands here.

[asylumdown]

The water in that tank is what my 40 gallon QT started to look like when I had 7 large fish in it and was feeding heavily every day. It would take 70% water changed to get it to clear up, though with that many fish it would look like that 4 days later again.

I'm not suggesting that you do such huge water changes, but what I am wondering is along the same line as Daniella, it looks like a bacterial bloom caused by an overload in nutrients in the water column without enough robust benthic processes to process/lock them up. I can't find it on the boards, when did you move the tank? Depending on what happened during the move, a tank move can be like re-setting the clock on your live rock, if it got too cold, too dry, or was out of water for too long. It might be re-curing right now. From what I can see, you've got enough biological activity going on in the tank to be masking out of whack nutrient profiles, as your test kits can only test what's free and available in the water, not what's bound up in the cells of bacteria and algae. It's not uncommon for tanks with the worst algae problems to test the 'cleanest' for nutrients.

If you can find a temporary home for the things you're worried about losing, I would also have to agree with Brad and Skimmer King. Bacterial blooms/pelagic algae outbreaks are a stage you see in the early months of a tank's life-cycle, but they're almost always stages that start out small, build to a peak, and then subside. The worst thing you can do is suddenly go and change a whole bunch of other parameters in a knee jerk reaction which will only confound a process that is likely going to work itself out in time anyway. If you've got all the elements that normally keep a tank running - heat, rocks, flow, lights, and a nutrient export system that matches the level of input, eventually this will work itself out. I know the tank was almost a year old, but considering what you're seeing since the move, it honestly looks to me like you should be thinking about this as though it's a new system, and 99 times out of 100, all you need to do for a new system is wait.