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#1
03-31-2014, 03:44 AM
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#3
04-07-2014, 10:40 PM
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ugh, well I hated to have to do it but I didn't have much of a choice. Cyano got so unbelievably out of control I dosed the tank with chemi-clean on Friday.
Dosing a harsh chemical when things were already so out of whack was not something I wanted to do, but I was siphoning was seemed like a pound of the stuff off my corals and rocks every night, and by noon the next day it would be back plus more. I have a few corals that got severely damaged that I'm desperately trying to save by cutting away dead skeleton back to just below living tissue. It seems like it's working as anywhere I've cut (if I was able to actually get to where there was healthy tissue), corals are healing over with new tissue and teeny tiny new polyps are forming, and anywhere that exposed skeleton remained cyano free corals have built up new tissue growth edges and the dead spots are shrinking. However, about half of them are so damaged it's not possible to cut all the dead skeleton away as the pattern of necrosis looks like what you'd get if you raked the branch down the fine side of a cheese grater. Cyano got to the point where it was blanketing nearly all places where the skeletons became exposed, and I've found clear evidence that the cyano actually kills coral tissue it remains in contact with for too long. I've got one frag of millepora that never got damaged in the first wave of STN/RTN, but it's small and the rock it's on got carpeted in cyano. About 3mm of it's plate died in a ring around where it met the slime. I have another nearly dinner plate sized colony that had the cheese grater look to it, and cyano formed a continuous mat across the mid-section of the coral. Anywhere that was beneath the cyano is now bare skeleton, even though that coral seems to have stopped losing tissue days before the cyano took hold. I'll probably have to cut the entire thing in half. So it was a choice between doing nothing and risking the cyano possibly preventing recovery of my corals/killing more than what was already damaged, or dosing with a harsh chemical and hoping I can take back control of the trajectory the tank is on. Moral of the story kids - don't get lazy and think that just because something has worked great for years in spite of any neglect or ill considered decisions you might have made does not mean that will continue to be the case.
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#5
04-08-2014, 02:23 AM
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Actually yes. I have my own theories about cyanobacteria but my experience with it is that once it's given the opportunity to proliferate it's very tenacious. It took advantage of an opportunity and became a threat in its own right, even though I seem to have corrected whatever it was that started this in the first place (I think it was biopellets, but who's to say really)
I left the chemi-clean in the water a day longer than recommended before doing the water change and I'm letting my skimmer do what is essentially another slow motion water change right now, but even in just three days of the the 'drugs' working their magic, corals that were continuing to decline under advancing sheets of cyano seem to be forming hard lines in the spots where the tissue had been dying. That's generally the precursor to new growth plates IME, so I'm optimistic. Whether this will have long term effects on stability in other areas I can't say, but as a short term solution it seems to have helped
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#6
04-08-2014, 02:49 AM
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I remember you battling cyano a while ago. Do you run a refugium? I'm wondering if the Chemiclean dose would be more effective if it was spread out over the major chambers of the system rather than dosing all of it into just the display or sump? Your situation is very unnerving.
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#7
04-08-2014, 05:10 AM
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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.
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