HELPP ALL CORALS DEAD!

[FishyFriend88]

So I had left to go camping two days ago and when I got back all my fish, corals, and even spaghetti worms died. Literally everything! The water had a weird smell to it and the water was extremely cloudy, the zoas seemed to alright but I didn't have a qt tank so I did a %60 water change and changed all the filtration, I continued to run a ton of filter floss and switched it out every few hours then did a big water change the next day. The zoas now look like they are dead! I tested the water before the first water change and it was clean so I really don't know what caused all of this.

Thank specs:
Fluval 13.5
Fluval mini protein skimmer
Charcoal pad and phosphate pad
Seachem matrix and purigen
Filter floss
10 watt UV sterilizer
Two current orbit marine pros
And a small off brand heater from big Al's

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[Jon Fishman]

Maybe something died and nuked the whole tank......

 

[Brett S]

Unfortunately with a small tank like that when one thing dies it can often set off a chain reaction that creates a lot of ammonia which starts killing other things and soon everything is dead.

Frankly, no matter how you got there it is very unlikely that your ammonia level was 0... once you get that much die off and such cloudy water the ammonia almost always spikes, so I question your 0ppm ammonia test result.

It’s hard to tell what initially triggered it. If you left the air conditioning off when you were gone it’s possible that the house and then the tank got overheated or it’s possible that the power failed and the lack of water movement caused low oxygen levels in the water, or it’s possible that a fish died a natural death.

But like I said above, unfortunate once something dies it can start a chain reaction that can kill everything else.