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Milk water, fish dead, coral ok
- Thread starter ecoreefguy
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Dang, sorry to hear that. Perhaps something died, bacteria bloomed, and oxygen was depleted? Does this tank have a skimmer?
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Tank does not, it has an a surface wave maker. There’s not much bio load. A shrimp and 3 small fish
PH doesn't look right.
Are you dosing anything?
Are you dosing anything?
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No I changed water yesterday. Reef crystal as always. Usually it’s be coral that kick the bucket first right?
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I did clean my power heads in citric acid . Would that cause any issues? I throughly rinse them afterwards tho like always
Never had a problem with citric acid even after soaking an entire skimmer in it in a 5g bucket.
The low pH + drop in ORP + the fact that fish and shrimp died first still has me leaning towards a gas exchange issue. Seems like O2 is low and CO2 is high. Corals can tolerate this for a while but fish cannot. Would be easy to test the theory by aerating heavily for a while. Could just position a wavemaker such that it churns some air at the surface. See if the pH returns to a more normal range.
The low pH + drop in ORP + the fact that fish and shrimp died first still has me leaning towards a gas exchange issue. Seems like O2 is low and CO2 is high. Corals can tolerate this for a while but fish cannot. Would be easy to test the theory by aerating heavily for a while. Could just position a wavemaker such that it churns some air at the surface. See if the pH returns to a more normal range.
I clean my pumps in citric acid and just a simple rinse after. I don't think that's the issue.
At first I thought it could be something like overdose of alk or kalk that caused the cloudiness, but your alk showing at 10.78 is normal for reef crystals. Also, your PH at 7.17 and even lower leads me to believe you have low o2 in your tank that could be the contributing factor that killed off your fish and shrimp. It looks like your PH was down to 6.41 overnight, which is very odd.
I agree with what @chaples55 suggested with a bacteria bloom after the die off?
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Assuming it is an o2 issue. Any suggestion? Just odd that it happened all of a sudden
It could definitely tank the pH since it's a fairly strong acid, but if you rinsed everything well you should be ok.
I also suspect low DO due to either a bacterial bloom or spawn. Do you carbon dose? Overdosing can lead to bacterial blooms. Parameter shifts from water change can cause things like snails or sea urchins to spawn. I would heavily aerate and perform water changes.
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Spawning wouldn’t kill all of my fish
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The only thing I dose is aminos
Agree.
Huh? Spawning and subsequent drop in DO can absolutely cloud a tank and kill all higher BOD organisms like fish.
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I mean I’ve had spawning previously, milky water and such I experience. Never did it killed fish before tho
True. It will feed the corals most of the time. Big sea urchin or clam spawns (probably more likely than snails) can kill fish through decreased DO (resulting bacterial bloom from decomposition) or elevated NH3. It is the equivalent of having a kid dump a container of food in your aquarium. Weeks or months worth of energy is stored in the gametes, all released into your aquarium at once. Low pH from high CO2 (assuming reading was accurate) and decreased O2 from bacterial bloom were likely at play regardless of bacterial bloom cause.
