Only have a pajama cardinal, clownfish, flame angel, and green clown goby. Don’t feed a ton and typically once a day. Doing 15% water changes biweekly. I have a refugium and run the curve 5 skimmer 24/7
How much junk is your skimmer pulling?
What is your flow like?
Try to get your flow where it is hitting the whole tank You want all the junk to be up in the water column. So your skimmer can pull it out.
Maybe at least for a little while try feeding only three days a week/every other day.
Maybe Turkey baste the rock a bit just before the water changes to get more junk out. And step it up to every week. If you do that you should see it start to lower in a few weeks, that will give the bacteria a chance to catch up to you load too.
Do yo have macro in the five? That should help use some of the nitrates too.
Do yo have macro in the five?*fuge
My turnover is around 40x without the flow to the sump. I have one section cordoned off as the refugium below with calperula and chaeto both. I’ve also been brushing the rock regularly to get rid of any detritus and algae buildup. My skimmer definitely pulls some dark brown skimmate, but I wonder if a better skimmer could pull more.
Where did your rock come from and how did you prep it for your tank? That’s a fairly small bioload and you should be able to keep up with that. It’s likely you are leaching from your rocks. You’d be best served by something like carbon dosing more so than a bigger skimmer.
I got 40 lbs of live rock from some rando on Craigslist and then 80 lbs of dry rock from somewhere that I can’t remember offhand. It was dry rock that was quarried. Supposedly ‘nitrate and phosphate free’.
I’d go with carbon dosing to see if you can get your nitrates under control that way. The carbon source feeds the nitrifying bacteria and helps grow their population.
I think I would start carbon dosing also. That dry rock is orobably leaching some of its old death into the water column and playing with it doesn’t help. Here’s a good link for carbon dosing. Just remember buy the cheapest non flavored vodka.
saltwater-conversion.com/pages/carbon-dosing
I went through a phase not to long ago no matter what I did nitrates wouldn’t drop and I had a diatom bloom. It eventually just took time. Though I did add a algae reactor( didn’t produce any results for me), then I added a dual reactor gfo and carbon, changed out all of my filters on my rodi and the house filter. I eventually got one of those marine pure blocks that claim to have the surface area to handle the bioload of the tank alone. I do like it I have since removed rock from my main tank. My tank was over a year old when I fought diatoms lost a couple high end frags unfortunately but luckily that was it.
Well, in the last two days I’ve made some mistakes… I saw what looked to be ich on a green clown goby that was in my tank, and ran to the LFS. At the store I was advised to buy Hikari Ich-X and that it was reef safe. He stated people use it in reef tanks all the time. And there’s a seal on the bottle that says ‘reef tested’. So I, like a newb, assumed that he knew what he was talking about. Less than half an hour after I dosed it, I noticed almost all the corals had retracted their polyps and were looking majorly depressed. Assuming it was the medicine, I did a 10% WC since that was all I had on hand, and put in a ton of fresh carbon to hopefully remove the chemicals. It’s been two days now and my Scripps Green Tip Acro, Tri-Color Valida, Oregon Tort (both from John), Radioactive Dragon Eyes all look like death still. It even looks like it killed pulsing xenia in my tank. Thankfully all the other corals look like they’ll pull through ok. Lesson learned on taking advice from LFS person! #@$^ verdict_in
I also did a 30 gallon water change yesterday and have definitely noticed some improvement today. Guess it could’ve been worse…
On a slightly more positive note, my hair algae problem seems to be receding, and the red slime I’ve got is practically gone after that massive water change and gravel vac.
Sorry to hear. Hope everything pulls through for you. I don’t know about the medication you used but anything using any copper base is toxic to invertebrates and corals. Could be that the sps is stressed and not showing polyps so don’t give up all hope.
Sorry you got such bad advice. How’s the fish doing?
It’s definitely copper free, I knew that much lol. I haven’t seen the green goby since I pulled him from my overflow
Sounds like you’ll pull through. Good thing you were paying close attention.
Yeah it seems like most will pull through… I’ll be minus somewhere between 3-6 corals unless there’s some major improvements. Guess it’s better than it could’ve been. Lesson learned
Some post near apocalyptic event pictures
Yikes…
Yeah, that’s the worst of it. What do you think the prognosis is?
Unfortunately I believe everything pictured did not make it ::hitsthefan::
Once the algae takes place on the bleached area that means the tissue has died.