hello everyone im new to your forum and appreciate all the info i have been looking through... i have been in the fish hobby for about a year now. a year ago i set up a semi aggressive tropical tank in my office and learned a lot about fish from the. yes the hard way but learned. the setup a nice african cichlid tank and have not had any issues on that at all. then in feb of this year the wife gave me the green light on a salt tank.
the tank is a 56g column rr tank plumbed with a wet dry filter, current usa fission skimmer, aqueon power heads, heater, i have 40-50 pounds of sand and some crushed coral substrate and like 50 lbs of live rock. i feed with mysis and brine shrimp, occasionally flake food. water was always salinity 1.026 alk 11-13 calcium 400-450 ph 8.0 nitrite and ammonia 0 nitrates-were 20 now 5-10 (with algae growing) phosphates-.5 my stock list was 5 chromis, 2 firefish, 1 helfrich fire fish, 2 clowns, 6 line wrasse, tail spot blenny, engineer goby, small powder blue tang(for 3 weeks) i struggled to keep zoas but the rest of my corals look great corals were orange palys, green torch purple indo torch, purple hammer green tip hammer, neon green cloves, tri color cloves, regular cloves, gsp, birds nest, a few small frags of misc zoas. my lighting started with a 6 bulb t5 the converted to a diy led 28 3 watt steves led kit 14 royal blue 14 10k white
well about a week after the p.b tang was in the tank he got ich, within a few days the spots were almost all gone(didnt do anything just wait and see) the like a week to the day from first spot he was dead. along with him was the helfrich fire fish. i immediately test my water everything was as above. look for ich on other fish nothing ok well maybe that was it. the next day tail spot blenny was dead, then 2 days later the goby has fuzz on him and swimming at the top of the tank(was fine the day before) and tail spot was dead. again check parameters and all was fine. immediately start treating the tank with kardon reef safe ich treatment. the other fish were clearly stressed but upon treatment all went back to normal during treatment all my bubble type corals looks AWESOME fully extended puffed up look amazing. i didn't run my skimmer during the treatment from directions on medication. i figured since i lost almost all of my fish and everything settled back down and before i add more fish i should take this time to convert my wet dry to to a fuge. i removed the bio balls , to most of the display sand and put in section where bioballs were to make a dsb about 7"high the filled the rest with live rock rubble, i tried an under water scrubber didn't grow ANYTHING. im trying a new type algae scrubber now, and put chateo in the same section then the last section i have my skimmer and return pump. everything has been fine for the past few weeks. checking parameters and everything seemed in check no ammonia or nitrite spike from the "reconstruction" i did change my substrate to black indo which looks like black and white mixed. this was all from 4th of july to 2 weeks ago. the last change i did was add more leds to my fixture making it from 28 to 49 per steves led so i could try more demanding corals and clams.
for 2 weeks everything was fine now my torches, hammers, and frogspawn all retracted. i lost a few new zoa frags (no shock to me). thursday i lost a green hammer today i lost my purple torch. my purple hammer is almost fully retracted maybe 1/2 inch of heads sticking out. my green torch is fully extended and looks great my frogspawn like somewhat retracted but like 1" out. on friday i purchased coral smoothie thinking the corals weren't getting enough food. didn't help well didn't immediately help, i purchased iodine test kit and magnesium test kit since i never tested for them and they were mag-1600 and iodine was slightly higher than 6 . i did starting yesterday add liquid calcium to get my calcium levels up they are about 400 now trying to get it up to 450.
i do have some hair algae growing in the tank. not crazy but definitely growing. i dunno what i should do if i should just let whatever going on run its course of try to combat it, but i dont know what im combating. any ideas thanks.
the tank is a 56g column rr tank plumbed with a wet dry filter, current usa fission skimmer, aqueon power heads, heater, i have 40-50 pounds of sand and some crushed coral substrate and like 50 lbs of live rock. i feed with mysis and brine shrimp, occasionally flake food. water was always salinity 1.026 alk 11-13 calcium 400-450 ph 8.0 nitrite and ammonia 0 nitrates-were 20 now 5-10 (with algae growing) phosphates-.5 my stock list was 5 chromis, 2 firefish, 1 helfrich fire fish, 2 clowns, 6 line wrasse, tail spot blenny, engineer goby, small powder blue tang(for 3 weeks) i struggled to keep zoas but the rest of my corals look great corals were orange palys, green torch purple indo torch, purple hammer green tip hammer, neon green cloves, tri color cloves, regular cloves, gsp, birds nest, a few small frags of misc zoas. my lighting started with a 6 bulb t5 the converted to a diy led 28 3 watt steves led kit 14 royal blue 14 10k white
well about a week after the p.b tang was in the tank he got ich, within a few days the spots were almost all gone(didnt do anything just wait and see) the like a week to the day from first spot he was dead. along with him was the helfrich fire fish. i immediately test my water everything was as above. look for ich on other fish nothing ok well maybe that was it. the next day tail spot blenny was dead, then 2 days later the goby has fuzz on him and swimming at the top of the tank(was fine the day before) and tail spot was dead. again check parameters and all was fine. immediately start treating the tank with kardon reef safe ich treatment. the other fish were clearly stressed but upon treatment all went back to normal during treatment all my bubble type corals looks AWESOME fully extended puffed up look amazing. i didn't run my skimmer during the treatment from directions on medication. i figured since i lost almost all of my fish and everything settled back down and before i add more fish i should take this time to convert my wet dry to to a fuge. i removed the bio balls , to most of the display sand and put in section where bioballs were to make a dsb about 7"high the filled the rest with live rock rubble, i tried an under water scrubber didn't grow ANYTHING. im trying a new type algae scrubber now, and put chateo in the same section then the last section i have my skimmer and return pump. everything has been fine for the past few weeks. checking parameters and everything seemed in check no ammonia or nitrite spike from the "reconstruction" i did change my substrate to black indo which looks like black and white mixed. this was all from 4th of july to 2 weeks ago. the last change i did was add more leds to my fixture making it from 28 to 49 per steves led so i could try more demanding corals and clams.
for 2 weeks everything was fine now my torches, hammers, and frogspawn all retracted. i lost a few new zoa frags (no shock to me). thursday i lost a green hammer today i lost my purple torch. my purple hammer is almost fully retracted maybe 1/2 inch of heads sticking out. my green torch is fully extended and looks great my frogspawn like somewhat retracted but like 1" out. on friday i purchased coral smoothie thinking the corals weren't getting enough food. didn't help well didn't immediately help, i purchased iodine test kit and magnesium test kit since i never tested for them and they were mag-1600 and iodine was slightly higher than 6 . i did starting yesterday add liquid calcium to get my calcium levels up they are about 400 now trying to get it up to 450.
i do have some hair algae growing in the tank. not crazy but definitely growing. i dunno what i should do if i should just let whatever going on run its course of try to combat it, but i dont know what im combating. any ideas thanks.
