Tragedy

[AlienAnchovies]

Tragedy!
well after having my tank moderetly stocked for almost 8 months it seems my nano has crashed, all my acro's and my little brian seem to have melted away, the past month sucked, i had 1 bta melt away and die, 2 nice neon green acro frags bleach and all my shrooms seemed to have wilted into oblivion, i was super stoked when my zoo's started spreading and i wake up today to murky white water with the only survivers being a punk condy and an urhcin, what i need to know is why the hell my tank went from amazingly great to **** poor, i cant belive i spent so much **** money on this thing only to have it fail
every thing was great, the water was perfect and my salinity was around 1.024 :(

[RedDragon]

I had almost the same thing happen too me, :( I had went out to town with my tank under the care of my mother and when I came back all my fisk were dead but a few, my blue tang, yellow tang, foxface, lion fish, Pj, saddle back clown, and my water was white too, I ran extra Oxegen to get rid of white over night it was gone, my coral's only lost a part of there color there not as bright as they were but no coral died, and a lot of un wanted algea with hair algea too, so am just getting back on hand and taking care of it now, the only fish that lived throw the die off were my dragon wrasse and my 4 percula clown fish, all my fish were put in another tank as soon as I got home, so I could get them out of the stress they had been throw, I have been real depressed about this I never plan to do this same mistake again I will get old Jim D to watch it next time,lol,

[matt]

Hey Alien;

Sorry to hear about your loss, man. Why don't you post details about your tank, and we can speculate about what might have happened. I ran a very successful nano for 2 1/2 years, so I know something about them. Figuring out what went wrong won't help you out now, but could be good when you're ready to try again. From your post, it kind of sounds like things went south for the past month, right?

Matt

[AlienAnchovies]

well OK, i have a mini bow 7 lighted by a 19watt jbj power compact, cpr bakpak 10lbs of lr and rougly a quarter inch of sand,i had 1 yellow bellied damsel, 2 turbo snails
7 nas. snails, a xenia i fraged 3 times, a small misc brain a few feather dusters the zoo's the acro's the condy and 3 bright blue shrooms and a sponge
i did notice these tiny yellowish balls floating around but that happened when i had my old 20 long once a year or so (algea ?)
like i said all the water peramiters were in check, i toped off the tank with r/o water almost every 2 days from alamo aquatics

when i added the shrooms last month (bought at texas tropical) every thing seemed to go nutty, my ph would drop, and the amonia would sky rocket

after about two weeks every thing seemed to back to normal although id still get the random drop in ph every few days
then the acro's bleached and thats when the **** hit the preverbial fan, i would get wicked algea blooms snails and hermits would magicly die after 1 day or so in the tank, after a few days the acro's got some color back and i noticed that they would shoot out this crap, white crap which im assuming is what made the water all murky and killed the tank, could this white crap have been a weird disease introduced into the tank by my adding the said shrooms?
well a week ago every thing seem normal again then bam! i wake up and every thing is dead and/or dying i take a look at the skimmer and see this huge plume of foam

id love to go into more detail but its time for me to go to bed

[OldSalty]

Just A thought,

Wondering if your setup was doing so well that some of the corals u had spwaned? I've read that if this happens in a small system it will wipeout the entire tank. This could explain the white milky water.

Again, Just a thought

[matt]

When I read your first post, I also thought of spawning, but after your description, I'd say your tank was overstocked and probably the sight of a serious chemical battlefield, especially between the condi and any number of other cnidarians. Remember, this is a tiny tank, and so all the corals are in close proximity and much more likely to fight. When that happens in such a small amount of water, the toxicity will spike. The close proximity of stony corals and soft corals, especially, could trigger this.

Even under the best of circumstances, nano reefs are really touchy. Mine was a 10 with an external sump/refugium, and only really stabilized after I found corals that would happily share the same space. This turned out to be a couple of mushrooms, a monti (super low aggression), a capnella (one of the few soft corals with a low toxicity to stony corals) and an E quad anemone.

I could be wrong about all this, but it seems the most likely scenario. One other thing, in my nano, temp control was a *****. Do you know how much your temp fluctuated?

[AlienAnchovies]

i was reading up and i think the corals probably spawned, that might explain the little yellow balls floating around
the tank wasnt over stocked seeing as how all the specimins were really small exept the xenia which i reduced to three 4inch stocks
is there a way to keep corals from spawning?

my temp never luctuated more than then 2 degrees
i doubt my condy did anything because he isolated him self in the farther left hand corner away from every thing exept a lone featherduster
well anyway today i took my set up apart and decided to start again, i found a few zoo's stuck to a rock and the seemed to be ok, so now its just them the condy and the urchin

[COBRA201]

i think it was the spawning during this months alot of people have there acros spawn. since it was a small tank it threw all the water off balance.