URGENT: Catastrophic (fatal) tank problem -- need some advice

[zar]

Hi folks -- :help:

In the interest of brevity, I'll put my "how this happened" section at the end of this message for those who are interested. This way I can get right to the important questions and hopefully some advice and answers from this esteemed crowd.

Basics: due to an overfeeding issue while I was away on vacation, ammonia levels rose to critical points and killed everything in my tank. Came home last night and all the fish were dead, all crabs of any variety were dead, all inverts were dead, most snails were dead (conch seemed to have survived, which is odd) and virtually all soft corals are dead. Very little activity in the bug department, and the tank is milky-white with ammonia levels > 1.0. Clearly, my tank is pretty much toast. The high ammonia cooked everything in the tank. I do know for a fact that the fish and most critters were still alive between 24-48 hours ago, so this happened very recently.

Question: is there anything worth saving here? I mean, I see several courses of action here, but some of them depend on knowledge I don't have. I'm wondering if the high ammonia levels TRULY killed everything, including all of my live rock, the bugs and critters underneath the 4" of sand, etc? If it DID kill everything, I might just hang it up and give up this hobby. I'm very depressed about this, as you can tell :(

My questions:

1) Is there anything I can do RIGHT NOW to drop the ammonia levels quickly to save anything that might still be alive? Perhaps a 3/4 tank water change? Pure ROS water swap? Extra filtering? Chemicals? As soon as I got home, I fished out everything that was decaying, cleaned the skimmer, replaced all filter pads and did a 1/4 water exchange, but that didn't seem to help, even 12 hours later.

2) If the live rock is still alive, or saveable, how should I go about ensuring that it remains good? Just pull it all out and dump it into a bucket of 1.024 salt water?

3) What about the corals? I have mostly soft corals, with some hard corals. Are any of them likely to survive this? I have a leather that's been huge and very healthy, and even though I moved it immediately to a emergency tank, it's been sliming and doesn't appear well. Many of the polyops have closed up tightly, but look somewhat firm. How do they do? The mushrooms have completely slimed away. I can't tell any difference on the brains or hard corals.

4) What about the live sand bed? Should I try to save it, or is it toast?

I mean, bottom line here, I'm wondering if I have ANYTHING I can work with to set up a new tank or resurrect this one. If everything is dead, then clearly there's no point and I'll just drain the tank, clean it and then decide what to do later. On the other hand, if I can save something from this nightmare (the more the better), then I'm more amenable to trying to make heroic efforts right now and see what I can do.

I just don't know enough about what the typical tank is like after a mess like this to know which road to head down. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,
bruce


How This Happened:

I had a long business trip planned and knew I'd be away for 8 days. My wife was also going out of town. My friend who usually looks after my pets was unavailable, so I decided to chance an autofeeder. This one has a rotating wheel that dumps an adjustable amount of Spectrum food out every 12 hours. I have used it in a pinch before on weekend trips and it has been okay, so I crossed my fingers and left. Three days after my trip started, my friend came back and checked on the tank and said the autofeeder was empty (it should have had about 24 feedings if everything went right). Not good, but I was so caught up in work that I don't think I truly realized what had happened. It had dumped the entire bin of food in the first day or so, and it promptly sank to the bottom. I suspect the ammonia levels just started rising at that point, and it took a few days to get lethal.

My wife came home on Wednesday (it's Friday today) and said the tank glass looked pretty algae-covered, but fish were accounted for. She saw a quantity of food on the sand, but didn't think it was scary. I came home last night, about 24 hours after my wife last saw the tank in a "okay" condition, and when I got there, it was in the condition mentioned at the top of this message. I immediately checked the ammonia levels and found them off the scale at > 1.0 (the max my test kit goes up to). SG was at 1.022, PH was okay, but low, temp was right on, and I didn't check anything else.

I know the way ammonia works, it builds up slowly until it reaches a critical point for some critters, and then they start dying, adding to the ammonia levels, which increase higher and faster, and that cycle continues. So the longer that went on, it sped up exponentially until everything was cooked.

I hoped that by removing as much decaying matter as I could, the cycle could stabalize or reduce, but I don't think it is. I need to measure again tonight.

--end--

[OrionGirl]

1) Is there anything I can do RIGHT NOW to drop the ammonia levels quickly to save anything that might still be alive? Perhaps a 3/4 tank water change? Pure ROS water swap? Extra filtering? Chemicals? As soon as I got home, I fished out everything that was decaying, cleaned the skimmer, replaced all filter pads and did a 1/4 water exchange, but that didn't seem to help, even 12 hours later.

Big water changes. I would do 3 50% changes, one every 2 hours. This removes almost all the original water, but gives everything a little time to acclimate if the water parameters vary (obviously, you want to have them be as close as poosible).

2) If the live rock is still alive, or saveable, how should I go about ensuring that it remains good? Just pull it all out and dump it into a bucket of 1.024 salt water?

The bacteria are likely still there and alive, just overwhelmed. Like anything, too much food being available doesn't give them the ability to use it.

3) What about the corals? I have mostly soft corals, with some hard corals. Are any of them likely to survive this? I have a leather that's been huge and very healthy, and even though I moved it immediately to a emergency tank, it's been sliming and doesn't appear well. Many of the polyops have closed up tightly, but look somewhat firm. How do they do? The mushrooms have completely slimed away. I can't tell any difference on the brains or hard corals.

I'd give them the benefit of at least trying. Running a skimmer, and potentially some carbon, will help keep the water quality up for them, and they might recover. For the leather, you can carve away obviously dead spots, and in clean water, they will often recover.

) What about the live sand bed? Should I try to save it, or is it toast?

Like the rock, the bacteria are probably still alive, as will be many of the cleaners, which have a much higher tolerance for ammonia than strict herbivores (hence the conch's survival). Once you get the water stabilized, add some more cleaners/detrivores to remove whatever waste is left that you can't get to, and see how they do. You can rebuild the system, but you'll want to go slowly to avoid a sudden spike.

Pretty rough--but, it happens. I know several people who've lost tanks to various accidents while they traveled (from split seams to fried lighting, floods to salinity spikes). My best advice--for less than a week, most tanks will be fine with no feeding. Have only someone you're trained and trusted feed--they are better going without for a few extra days than with the consequences of overfeeding, as well you know. Lacking someone trustworthy to feed, just have someone who can stop in and topoff FW, make sure everything looks right.

[Max]

Sorry to hear this but, O.G is 100 % correct.

[zar]

Thanks foo, I appreciate the suggestions.

I decided to play hooky from work at lunch and drove all the way down to the LFS and sheepishly told them my story. I brought a sample of the water and we talked it through. Here's their post-mortem.

- The excess food didn't, in itself, raise the ammonia levels. The excess food was agressively attacked by the nites in the tank, including the sand bed. They were trying to process all of it and break it down.

- The massive attempt by the tank ecosystem to handle all the excess food led to the nites basically taking all the oxygen out of the water. This was backed up by an O2 analysis of the water which showed it was incredibly low. Evidently they burn up food by processing it with O2, turning it into waste as it is processed.

- The animals started, essentially, suffocating from lack of oxygen in the water, and ultimately died. This explains why the tank looked somewhat normal (in terms of animal activity) and 24 hours later everything was dead. If it had been ammonia poisoning up-front, then the process would have looked slightly different, and there would have been more decay of over critters. Had I just made it home 12 hours earlier and aerated the water (along with a 50% change), they might have made it. Oh well.

- The lack of O2 also explains why all the critters came up from the sand bed, and why so many of the bugs were up at the water line -- everyone was trying to get more air.

- Once a few of the fish suffocated and died, they started decaying, causing the ammonia to increase. Etc.

Interesting. You definitely have to understand the cycle to really know what the heck is going on. ;)

In any case, they recommend something very similar to your suggestion, Onion Girl. Immediate replacement of 75% of the water, and a couple more water changes on a daily basis. They recommended mixing the salt content slightly lower than normal, and suggested fresh carbon, in quantity, and a lot of water agitation. They said the LR and LS should be fine once the tank gets back to some better water qualities (their estimate: around 4 weeks).

They said that since the leather was sliming, to toss it. The polyops should be fine if rinsed and housed separately from everything else. I did that first thing and already two of the buds have opened. All remaining conch's but one have died, so I saved the survivor and put it in with the polyops. No other coral made it through the night. :( The hard corals should be okay, so I'm going to leave them and see what happens.

They also gave me some nitrifier and a oxygenator liquid, and told me to put it into the tank to help speed up a return to normal. Everyone was very sad for me and they gave me the liquid chemicals for free as a "pat on the back". (This LFS is incredibly awesome, in every sense...).

The good news is that I may not have to completely start over. The bad news is that it was a painful and depressing learning experience.

If anyone else has suggestions, I'd love to hear them. I'll keep y'all apprised of how the tank is recovering from time to time.

thanks,
bruce

[zar]

Update: the polyops and the conch did not survive. The tank is starting to clear, but still milky-ish. I'll be doing a 50% change tomorrow.

[mogurnda]

- The excess food didn't, in itself, raise the ammonia levels. The excess food was agressively attacked by the nites in the tank, including the sand bed. They were trying to process all of it and break it down. I think they meant nitrifying bacteria, not nitrites. The protein in the food was broken down to ammonia by the bacteria. That process does not consume oxygen. As other bacteria oxidized the ammonia to nitrite and then nitrate, they consumed oxygen, reducing the levels. The ammonia spike would probably have preceded the decreased oxygen.

In the end, you have a tank full of dead organisms, which will indeed result in high ammonia levels and low oxygen. Because you weren't there to witness it, I'd say it's impossible to know which actually killed your livestock.

Always frustrates me when people say things with such certainty, whether it's on a message board or in a LFS.

In the end, it doesn't matter. I'm just really sorry that it happened. Good luck getting it going again.

[Gealcath]

If the high nitrites/nitrate didnt do the ammonia would have, they where basically sitting in a big tank of acid.