Cali Kid Corals

Cloudy Tank (and Cuttlefish Eggs)

Bad news. The dominos continue to fall. I woke up this morning and the main return pump had failed during the night. It got all gunked up from all of the dead bacteria in the water. The cuttles seem OK, but the corals were not. I had to remove a few that looked expired and smelled funky. Not sure where things will be when I get home tonight.
 
OK, here is my assessment of what happened. I can't say for sure, but this seems reasonable:

1) This all started with me feeding 6 cuttles a fair amount of large shrimp.
2) Everything was fine a couple of months, but this feeding regiment used up the biopellets more quickly than I was accustom to, so I did not notice they had depleted quickly (I was used to check the biopellet reactor every 3 months).
3) A contributing factor is that my biopellet reactor is somewhat opaque (to protect the pellets from algae growth), but it means I cannot casually notice the biopellet level and must use a flashlight to check it
4) This caused the nitrate spike (40ppm)
5) This caused the Xenia to wither in a couple of days
6) I noticed the low biopellets and topped them off
7) With the Xenia nutrients in the tank, this caused the bacterial bloom
8) In the past, these cleared up quickly, but this bloom cause the Anthelia to also start to decay which kept the bloom active for 12 days
9) I finally added the UV filter to kill the bloom
10) All of the dead bacteria gunked up the return pump which frozen during the night at some point.
11) This finally got me to admit the Anthelia was not going to bounce back, so I removed it from the tank (and it smelled very bad).
12) Now the tank is clear again and everything seems almost back to normal, but I will need to keep and eye on it. (I have been changing the carbon every couple of days and the skimmer is still over active).

I still will stay with the biopellets as it is a very low maintenance way of dosing carbon and keeping nitrates and phosphates in check. The moral of this story is the same advice anyone who has been in the hobby for any length of time will tell you: stay on top of your parameters and don't get behind in preventative maintenance. If I had just been keeping the biopellet level where it needed to be, none of this would have happened.
 
Uber bad news. I woke up this morning and 5 of the 6 cuttles were dead. The six one looks OK, but he won't eat. Tank was tinted dark with ink. Not sure what happened. The corals, the clown fish pair and the yellow headed sleeper goby (plumped into the same system) seem fine. The snails and hermits all seem OK. But 3 cuttles in the display tank and the 2 in the back tank were dead. I checked ammonia and it is 0, so not sure was caused the die off. I checked all of the parameters the other day and they all seemed Ok.

I want to say it was related to the bacterial bloom issues but the tank seems to have been better the past couple of days, but it could have been something else. Maybe some of the shrimp I fed them were bad or contaminated? This would explain why all of the other life is OK. Anyway, very frustrating. Total bummer.
 
Yes, I did a 50G water change on 5/20 when I first saw the issue (which did not reduce the cloudiness) and a 30G water change on 5/26 and 6/2 and I have a 75G scheduled for tomorrow (but that's going to be a day late). And I had replaced the carbon reactor GAC on 5/26 and I have been using 1.75 cups of new ROX 0.8 carbon every other day since 6/2. More changes would have probably helped, but this was a crazy busy week and I just did not have the time.
 
Thanks guys. Despite the bad news, I do have several hatchlings that seems fine despite all of the drama. You would think ft there was a water quality problem that it would kill the hatchings too?
 
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