Can Anybody Help?

[PRW1988]

Alright, so heres the story, my once glorious and beautiful reef tank has now become a catostrophy with only about 6-8 of the original 18 corals left.

We don't know what's happened, originally we were told that the water changes we were doing were incorrect as we were just mixing the salt that day, making sure it was the right SG and then dumping it in at room temperature. We were told that the salts may not have fully dissolved within the 3 hours we left the bucket for (with a dechlorinator in it), so we changed the method to making the water atleast a day in advance.

We don't have RO water, and the tank is a 72gallon bowfront. All of the fish have survived except one (a long nosed hawkfish) that jumped shipped.

What can we do? the temperature of the tank is 79F, all the perameters check out and we've even had our saltwater fish "expert" come in and he can't tell us. He's had 30year experience with saltwater fish and corals.

The only conclusion that I can come up is that on our maintainance day I found a bristle worm about 5" long, I did some research and found out that bristle worms can eat corals. So mabye we have more of them in the tank??


Our once glourious reef tank...

This is my favorite picture that I took of my pair of clowns in a gondioporious. The Gondio is still living however some of it is dead. But it's come back to life.

Please guys, anything you guys/gals could think of would be greatly helpful.

 

[littleme1969]

I have to say that I wouldnt try to run a reef tank witout RO water. There is way too much TDS to keep healthy corals and this could also effect the fish. Not to mention things like chlorine etc that are present and will effect everything in the tank.
Mixing salt the day before is best, but to be honest if your only doing 10% water changes mixing the same day won cause too much problems as long as all the salt as disolved and the water is clear.

 

[SkiFletch]

Agree with Littleme, your water source may be the problem here. Don't go blaming the bristleworm, 99% of the ones found in reef aquaria are fine towards the corals you have/had in your tank. Bristleworms themselves are not corallivores, but their cousins, fireworms, can be. Trust me, you can't mistake the two. Fireworms are obnoxiously bright red with crisp white spines while bristleworms are much duller in coloration.

Did these corals all die quickly or did they slowly languish, deteriorate and die? I can think of a few possibilities here (in no particular order):

Your flowrate seems low to me... Looks like just a few maxijets which is not really enough for a tank that big. A 72g with lots of LPS like yours should be aiming for ~20times tank turnover per hour. In this case ~1400-1500gph. Something 3 or even 4 maxijets can't accomplish. I'd consider looking into a Hydor Koralia or a Tunze Nanostream to add to your current pumps for some additional flowrate.

Could have been coral aggression as well. You've got some seriously aggressive corals in relatively close proximity (most notably the bubbles, hammer, elegance, and torch corals). It's quite possible that one of those guys stung their neighbor to death (depending on the neighbor).

And I know this may seem nitpicky, but what were your water stats exactly? Saying that everything "checks out" is great and all, but what are the actual numbers? Could be something out of whack or something not tested for that we're just not seeing.

Which corals actually died, perhaps there's a pattern here which might lead me to predation?

And bingo, just noticed, you have a coral beauty angelfish in the tank... Dwarf angels can become coral nippers and may have been responsible for the deaths (or at least a major contributing factor) as well...

 

[PRW1988]

Agree with Littleme, your water source may be the problem here. Don't go blaming the bristleworm, 99% of the ones found in reef aquaria are fine towards the corals you have/had in your tank. Bristleworms themselves are not corallivores, but their cousins, fireworms, can be. Trust me, you can't mistake the two. Fireworms are obnoxiously bright red with crisp white spines while bristleworms are much duller in coloration.

Did these corals all die quickly or did they slowly languish, deteriorate and die? I can think of a few possibilities here (in no particular order):

Your flowrate seems low to me... Looks like just a few maxijets which is not really enough for a tank that big. A 72g with lots of LPS like yours should be aiming for ~20times tank turnover per hour. In this case ~1400-1500gph. Something 3 or even 4 maxijets can't accomplish. I'd consider looking into a Hydor Koralia or a Tunze Nanostream to add to your current pumps for some additional flowrate.

Could have been coral aggression as well. You've got some seriously aggressive corals in relatively close proximity (most notably the bubbles, hammer, elegance, and torch corals). It's quite possible that one of those guys stung their neighbor to death (depending on the neighbor).

And I know this may seem nitpicky, but what were your water stats exactly? Saying that everything "checks out" is great and all, but what are the actual numbers? Could be something out of whack or something not tested for that we're just not seeing.

Which corals actually died, perhaps there's a pattern here which might lead me to predation?

And bingo, just noticed, you have a coral beauty angelfish in the tank... Dwarf angels can become coral nippers and may have been responsible for the deaths (or at least a major contributing factor) as well...

I'm not sure exaclty what the numbers were. But if I remember correctly the phosphates were 0, nitrate 20, nitrite 0, ammonia 0, carbonate hardness was I think like 10degrees, and Ph was 8.1.

Thanks for the coral beauty tip, I'll remove him later on to an Isolation tank and we'll see how things go. The torch and elegance were the first to die and they usually die slowly except for the bubble coral which just seemed to dissapear overnight.

I'll take some updated pics to show you how bad the tank looks now.

 

[SkiFletch]

When the elegance coral died, did it bleach out, shrink it's tentacles, and inflate it's oral disks before it died?

 

[PRW1988]

No... it just started to kind of... wear away...

 

[Musho3210]

do you dose anything?