Fish doing great, everything else dying!!!! Help!

can you post your water test results?

If you're doing 50% water changes each week you're basically starting your cycle again each week and the tank can't handle the bioload. I'm guessing your water parameters are way off....and inverts hate that. They need super water quality. Give us all the test results from your test kits.

How are you acclimating?

Could you list some of the specifics on your tank as well? You listed general equipment but would you list brand & model?

What kind of water do you use? Tap, well, ro/di?

What are you testing for? Do you have your own test kits?

And like grins said, how are you acclimating them?

I bought 2 cleaner shrimp yesterday....it took me about 3 hours till I actually put them in the tank. I just kept adding a little of my water to their water, an ounce or so at a time, all afternoon, and then introduced them.

Inverts are really sensative to salinity changes. If your tank is at 1.026 and the petstore has theirs at 1.019 (as an example), that's a lot of change for the little guys.

Yeah, same thing here except I have a drip acclimate. I start them out on one drop per second for the next half hour, then 5 or so drops for the next half/to hour. I then dump half that water out and keep them at a steady drip rate for another hour. I go through well over a gallon acclimating.

i agree that the acclimation (or lack thereof) may be the cause. the only other thing i could think of would be if your nitrates are high but i wouldn't think that would kill them so quickly. do you know exactly what your specific gravity (salinity) is at?

this person asked for help, but won't give us what we ask. i don't think that he is interested anymore, he is letting a store to take care of the problem, but i just really wonder who gave him an idea to change all his live rock. acclimation possibly is not only a problem here. i brought snails and corals from someone else's house to mine and it was very hot in the car and the water heated by the time i got home, and i had no choice but throw them in my tank. they all are still alive few months later. with an improper acclimation something should make it through, unless it's a clam, which something in fact did. but if something like anemone isn't acclimated properly, it doesn't die that fast. i want to know what his corals and snails look like before he throws them away thinking that they are dead. shrimps do die withing few hours for whatever the reason because they are easy to stress. he depends on the store for testing, but my store was using dip sticks and was telling about my parameters that weren't true. their specific gravity was the highest you can go and hardness was off the chart, and so were their nitrates.
proper testing and letting us know the reasults is a must for us to go on in helping to figure out what is going on.

homie bought all tho goodies for a 300 gal reef, but has no test kits?

how can you expect to monitor a cycle w/o test kits?

unless you spending like a half hour every day at the lfs checkin all your levels...


Bobs guess is metals in the water.

id suggest a RO/DI unit, and test kits. monitor daily. (but like make sure thats the problem)
i tested every day for the first 3 months with my 18 gallon.no2, no3, amonia, calk, alk, metal, phos, Sg etc.
quit depending on the lfs. the only thing you can assure youself about an lfs thats been around for awhile, is that, its like, profitable.

take yourself on a tour of ac and any other forums you want to. were all here to help. no $$ needed.

good luck

Interesting Bob.. You thinking copper?