Every coral Retracted and all SPS bleaching

[alp5747]

I really need some help all my corals where perfectly fine 2 weeks ago then I accidentally dosed 10x natural sea water iron which caused algae to take over the algae bottomed out nitrate and phosphate that was about 1 week ago 2 days ago after i am starting to dose nitrate and feed more some of my sps where starting to loss skin. Now today the water is a bit cloudy I suspect due some coral die off. All sps is retracted and starting to die. The past 4 days after the iron dose I have a dino outbreak.

Also the PH has been dropping every day for the past 3 days I suspect due to bacterial bloom

Parameters are:
Nitrate 3 ppm
Phosphate 0,06 ppm
Calcium 420 ppm
Magnesium 1400 ppm
Alkalinity 8 dkh

I really need some advice on what to do.

 

[skey44]

20-30% water change, making sure salinity and temperature are right on. Add a bacteria source for a week (mb7, stability, etc) . Run a bag of carbon. Make frags of your pretty staghorn. That’s where I would start personally, though I know a lot of folks in this site will opt for more slow/waiting/specific measures.
When my tanks have crashed in the past major water changes and activated carbon have always been my go to for a reset.

 

[alp5747]

20-30% water change, making sure salinity and temperature are right on. Add a bacteria source for a week (mb7, stability, etc) . Run a bag of carbon. Make frags of your pretty staghorn. That’s where I would start personally, though I know a lot of folks in this site will opt for more slow/waiting/specific measures.
When my tanks have crashed in the past major water changes and activated carbon have always been my go to for a reset.

The thing is everything looked fine 3 days ago apart from PE but the suddenly every sps and some lps like cyphastrea starting loosing zooxanthellae my acropora are not receding they are just losing zooxanthellae and color. Looks like peeling I suspect due to the high light and bottoming of nutrients

 

[Dom]

The thing is everything looked fine 3 days ago apart from PE but the suddenly every sps and some lps like cyphastrea starting loosing zooxanthellae my acropora are not receding they are just losing zooxanthellae and color. Looks like peeling I suspect due to the high light and bottoming of nutrients

It is more likely that the decline has been happening for weeks. Its only become noticeable in the last three days.

I would do faithful 20% water changes weekly over the next few weeks and monitor. Stop dosing product until you see things bouncing back.

 

[Reefering1]

If corals were perfectly fine, why were you dosing iron?

 

[alp5747]

If corals were perfectly fine, why were you dosing iron?

I meant to dose 1x natural sea water level but I miss calculated and accidentally dosed 10x. Which caused a green hair algae outbreak which bottomed out nutrients which caused corals to bleach due to high light and low nutrients coupled with Dino outbreak due to low phosphate. The die off of corals has now caused a bacterial outbreak.

 

[alp5747]

It is more likely that the decline has been happening for weeks. Its only become noticeable in the last three days.

I would do faithful 20% water changes weekly over the next few weeks and monitor. Stop dosing product until you see things bouncing back.

The decline happened when I over dosed iron about 7 or 8 days ago this caused a green hair algae outbreak which bottomed out nutrients which caused corals to bleach due to high light and low nutrients coupled with Dino outbreak due to low phosphate. The die off of corals has now caused a bacterial outbreak.

 

[Reefering1]

I meant to dose 1x natural sea water level but I miss calculated and accidentally dosed 10x. Which caused a green hair algae outbreak which bottomed out nutrients which caused corals to bleach due to high light and low nutrients coupled with Dino outbreak due to low phosphate. The die off of corals has now caused a bacterial outbreak.

I understand, but why? Did you have a struggling refugium or something? Either way. Harvest/ remove as much algea as possible and do some water changes seems to be warranted. Probably won't help the dinos but should help stuff stop dying.

 

[billyocean]

The effect on acros sometimes takes a week or two to be seen. So..when you overdosed iron I would think the problem started there and now your seeing the result. When all else fails...water change is the go to as mentioned. Iron depletes pretty quick on its own but 10x overdose I'm not sure.

 

[alp5747]

The effect on acros sometimes takes a week or two to be seen. So..when you overdosed iron I would think the problem started there and now your seeing the result. When all else fails...water change is the go to as mentioned. Iron depletes pretty quick on its own but 10x overdose I'm not sure.

Thanks for the reply.
Due to the corals not receding rather bleaching i believe the decline was due to the nutrients being depletion due to the raised iron.
This caused a light to nutrients imbalance where high light coupled with nutrients being depleted and consumed by algae and not buffed up by fish (due to the tank being fallow) made the corals bleach.
Bleaching only happened in coral that received high light. For example the top part of an over 1 foot montipora.

It is a bummer to have large colonies bleached but I learned some valuable lessons.

1: keeping a constant supply of nitrogen and phosphorus to the tank. either invertebrates converting algae back into NO3 and PO4. Or fish doing the same.

2: not letting algae get out off hand due to the herbivores fish being gone there was no grazing being done due to me never needing grazing invertebrates.

I truly believe that if I had a few urchins in the tank eating the green hair algae In the tank. No coral mortality would have happened.

I am not a complete beginner but when new variables get introduced that you had not thought about like no fish grazing on algae thinks can go wrong.

Tank before fallow period.

 

[billyocean]

If you have to dose n03 ammonium bicarb may worth looking Into intead of Just plain n03. Of course..do the research if you don't know or haven't already. Sounds like you have a good idea of what happened and sorry to hear....great looking tank!

 

[alp5747]

If you have to dose n03 ammonium bicarb may worth looking Into intead of Just plain n03. Of course..do the research if you don't know or haven't already. Sounds like you have a good idea of what happened and sorry to hear....great looking tank!

Thanks. I had already prepared a 10750 mg/L solution of Ammonium bicarbonate and was dosing 0,1 mg/L ammonia equivalent of 0,34 mg/L nitrate per day after detecting the low nitrate.

 

[NanoNana]

I’m going to go back to the question of why you were dosing iron? Was it something you had tested and determined to be depleted?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I’ll just add that, IMO, there is zero chance the iron itself is any issue. Many folks intentionally dose far, far more iron. Red Sea even recommends 0.1 ppm, though I suspect that is just that high so that their kit can detect it.

I’m not sure what value you are using for natural iron, but I certainly dosed and recommend far more than natural surface seawater values.

I do agree the bottoming out nutrients might be the issue.

 

[alp5747]

I’ll just add that, IMO, there is zero chance the iron itself is any issue. Many folks intentionally dose far, far more iron. Red Sea even recommends 0.1 ppm, though I suspect that is just that high so that their kit can detect it.

I’m not sure what value you are using for natural iron, but I certainly dosed and recommend far more than natural surface seawater values.

I do agree the bottoming out nutrients might be the issue.

It was certainty not the Iron concentration itself that caused the issue. It was simply due to the nutrient to light imbalance that occurred as the nutrients bottomed out. As I now increased the nitrate with ammonia bicarbonate solution and dosing some ReefRoids to increase phosphate the sps bleaching has stopped I call it bleaching but, people usually refer bleaching as when the zooxanthellae gets stressed and leave the coral. But in this case the nutrient to light imbalance simply what I can best describe as burned and the zooxanthellae melting from the tissue. It is very interesting to observe where the Acropora where being shadowed there was very little zooxanthellae in the tissue and over 1 week the zooxanthellae slowly spread out to the entire colony again and where the zooxanthellae was more dense there was color. Not much information is present on the nutrient to light balance as it is very hard to measure.