Large tank HELP-Hide and go seek with the dead

[jloventh]

I have a 200 gal peaceful reef tank, 30 or so fish, 15 Coral, 3 anenomes, many inverts (stars, crabs, snails). The tank is 7 months old and is running well. in the
last 3 weeks my ammonia has risen ever so slightly. (.25 ppm on my Marine lab kit). I have done normal maintainence (water change, filter bags change). I assume something has died that I can't see...could be 1 of 2 large sandsifter stars that I haven't seen for 2-3 weeks. The tank is thriving...anenomes (which typically look crappy when ammonia spike) look great Corals are looking good also. I am assuming the ammonia spike will eventually drop off...but I was wondering what other large tank owners do when an death occurs and it would require dismantling the tank to find it. Also, since I never register any ammonia I'm not sure if I am over reacting to .25 ppm ammonia.
Thanks

 

[OrionGirl]

I keep enough cleaners in the system to handle small fatalities, and do a daily check to be sure all the larger denizens are present and accounted for. If one of them is missing, I have no problem tearing into the tank for recovery.

Other thing to consider--any changes to the water source? If your water source started using chloramines, and you do not use RO, this could result in false positives with some types of tests.

 

[rayjay]

First off, not knowing what you have for filtration (mechanical and biological) and not knowing what fish you are keeping, I would be concerned about having 30 fish in a 200g tank. If they were all small fish (inch or so) then that would be no problem, but most people have a mixture of large and small.
Without knowing more, I would hazard a guess that your system is overloaded and can't handle to total amount of waste produced.
You would have to have a REALLY outstanding system to handle that kind of load.
While I tend to keep a few less fish than many, I only have a mandarin, a copperband, a scopus tang, a flame angel, and a cleaner wrasse in my main 90g tank.
In my fish only tank I have a cleaner wrasse, a naso, and three butterflies.
Both my 75's have only four fish each.