Question about my QT with Ammonia & Nitrites being consistently high-- Pls help

[#1Fellowreefer]

Hello there,
I have setup my DT about 2 months and 5 days and then I used the water from my DT to setup my QT with 70% water from my DT and added 30% freshly mixed salt water. All was okay until the past four days. My QT has been running since 1 month and 16 days. I added my black storm and orange storms along with my CUC snails, feather dusters, and couple of shrimps to the QT. All was okay until the last four days where I had 2 bumble bees, 2 asteria snails, 2 nasariaus snails and one Turbo snail died due to ammonia and nitrites spiked. I have only been feeding the fish about 6 to 8 marine pellets and all the food is consumed by them two almost all of it. There are a few that will sink before they can eat and the shrimps will clean that up. I added the fishes on 10-6-2019 and the CUC were added on 9-26-2019. All the parameters have been spot on where the temp: 78.2 to 78.6, pH: 8.4 consistently, dkH: 9.1, Salinity: 35 ppt, the ammonia for the past four days have been 0.80 ppm and nitrites also for the past four days have been at 0.20 ppm, I have been doing 40% to 50% water change for last three days and I even added prime last night to detoxify ammonia and then performed a 50% water change. I think on Monday when I noticed the spike in ammonia and nitrites I changed the filter and the poly filter pad at the same time and maybe have taken most of the beneficial bacteria out by changing both the filter media. I am going to change 50% water again today and I have ordered FritzZyme TurboStart to seed the QT and added 90 grams MarinePure GEMs so that the beneficial bacteria can colonize again for it to fight and convert the ammonia and nitrites. Now the question is will these fishes and the remainder CUC survive another 36 hours?? My DT seems to have a heavy diatom bloom and the ammonia and nitrites are at 0 ppm and nitrates are at 8 ppm. Should I move the fishes there or leave them in the QT and let the DT complete what it needs to do. Its been 2 plus months as I started the DT with RedSea Reef Mature Kit and then a month later the tank stand was not safe so had to undo all and restart all again and that's been about 6 days now and the only thing about all this is I have used 70% of the water from the original cycle that I started with RedSea Reef Mature Kit and added 30% freshly mixed water. I have added FritzZyme TurboStart six days ago with the skimmer being off and let the tank do what it needs to do to complete the cycle and have been testing the water from the next day after adding TurboStart and the ammonia and nitrites spiked and then the Nitrates showed up so seems like all that was working the way it is suppose to. Now I have a heavy diatom bloom with some signs of hair algae as I mentioned earlier

I hope I am making sense here. I have tried to explain my situation for both DT and QT that I have setup and needs help. NEW to this hobby and willing to learn from all you PRO's out there. Any help and suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

 

[reef lover]

Too much for the qt. Sounds like the dt is ready... move remaining cuc over.
Were the fish treated at all? Captive bred right? Should be a very low chance for internal parasites if so.
If they show no signs of disease i would move them over as well...they have a better chance.

 

[Auquanut]

I agree 100% with @reef lover. Sounds like you restarted the cycle in the QT. Best chance for your livestock is in the DT in my opinion.

 

[#1Fellowreefer]

Yes both the clowns are captive bred and didn’t have to treat them at all. I really appreciate your response I will transfer them to the DT today as soon as I get home in the evening. Appreciate both of your help @Auquanut @reef lover

 

[Marco S]

Whether they are captive bred or not, the chances that they were in a system that shares water with wild caught fish and or fish with disease from the time they were born to the time they made it to your QT is pretty high. I treat everything that goes into my DT as if it was infected and putting anything in without a proper QT would negate all the time effort and money I spent. So I would not do it and would not recommend it to anyone determined to eliminate any chance of adding infected livestock into their DT.

That being said, it sounds like you are not using medications, (since you have fish and cuc in the same QT) so as long as the fish and cuc look fine to you and are eating and healthy then you probably wont be hurting anything to transfer them now. Just know that you will have a much higher chance of transferring something infected into your DT by not medicating your fish and keeping all inverts fish-less for 76 days. Nothing wrong with that if that's what you choose and many people here have successful tanks that do not QT at all and I'm not judging...just letting you know.

 

[brandon429]

one clue in the description stands out. a QT lacking core surface area, the requirement to have system design-caused free ammonia, would've killed all the bioload over nite on the first nite.

This qt tank has enough surface area for ammonia handling since the fish have lived past the first ten hours. ergo, you have a loss cascade causing your overages and not some design aspect lacking a completed cycle. any snail(s) that may kick the bucket in a surface area-restricted system such as QT tank make for a fast cascade. change your water its still cycled ok.

adding prime causes misreads for ammonia and nitrite, so dont factor the ongoing readings of that water table.

 

[j.falk]

The snails could be dying from lack of food since they primarily feed on algae. Dead snails = ammonia = broken down into nitrite = tank problems. You could be dealing with a domino effect. I too would recommend moving them to your display tank.

 

[#1Fellowreefer]

Whether they are captive bred or not, the chances that they were in a system that shares water with wild caught fish and or fish with disease from the time they were born to the time they made it to your QT is pretty high. I treat everything that goes into my DT as if it was infected and putting anything in without a proper QT would negate all the time effort and money I spent. So I would not do it and would not recommend it to anyone determined to eliminate any chance of adding infected livestock into their DT.

That being said, it sounds like you are not using medications, (since you have fish and cuc in the same QT) so as long as the fish and cuc look fine to you and are eating and healthy then you probably wont be hurting anything to transfer them now. Just know that you will have a much higher chance of transferring something infected into your DT by not medicating your fish and keeping all inverts fish-less for 76 days. Nothing wrong with that if that's what you choose and many people here have successful tanks that do not QT at all and I'm not judging...just letting you know.

So I did use the safety stop bath before adding the clowns to the QT and before I love them from QT ATO DT I will use safety stop again to make sure that if there is any infection or unwanted things on the fish will mostly drop off. The reminder of the CUC and the clowns both are doing very well in fact while doing the water changes for the past few days the clowns wound nibble on my hands if it got close to the surface of the water. But I will check the water once again tonight when I get home from work and make sure all is okay. I will keep you all posted which ever route I take. Maybe share some pictures as well, all the help and support is much appreciated. Thanks guys you all are #rockstars #happyreefing

 

[#1Fellowreefer]

The snails could be dying from lack of food since they primarily feed on algae. Dead snails = ammonia = broken down into nitrite = tank problems. You could be dealing with a domino effect. I too would recommend moving them to your display tank.

Yes I think that’s the problem. Will fix this hopefully tonight.

 

[BeejReef]

Did you throw out the old filters?
If you want to keep the qt going, you need to add back some biological filtration. Those filters were doing it. Any rock or ceramic media you can move over from the DT?

 

[#1Fellowreefer]

Did you throw out the old filters?
If you want to keep the qt going, you need to add back some biological filtration. Those filters were doing it. Any rock or ceramic media you can move over from the DT?

Yes I did throw both the carbon filter and the poly filter pad both, however I did add 90 grams of marine pure GEMs now and will add TurboStart tomorrow as soon as I get it delivered from www.algaebarn.com in the meantime I can certainly move a medium size rock that’s been sitting in my sump for the entire time will that help?? It has a large amount of diatoms on it.

 

[BeejReef]

I'm not an expert, but yeah, it should help a lot, if not outright solve your problem. Anything... rocks, filters, sand, ceramics.. that has been in your DT and is fully cycled will do the same job of ammonia removal in your QT. The general rule of thumb is that once it goes into the QT, it never goes back into the DT though.

You're in a put out the fire mode though, so that's less of a concern if you've already evacuated some of your creatures to the DT.

 

[Marco S]

Yes I did throw both the carbon filter and the poly filter pad both, however I did add 90 grams of marine pure GEMs now and will add TurboStart tomorrow as soon as I get it delivered from www.algaebarn.com in the meantime I can certainly move a medium size rock that’s been sitting in my sump for the entire time will that help?? It has a large amount of diatoms on it.

You may want to keep some of those Marine Pure Gems in your sump for future QT use. I keep a couple boxes of Marine Pure Balls in my sump and use several balls to start up my QT each time since I tear them down and sanitize them with bleach between treatments. I always throw out the old balls and use the ones from my sump then replace the ones I used with new ones that will be seeded with bacteria by the time of the next QT. And the cycle goes on and on until one day sometime next year when I will finally be done with QT!!!

 

[#1Fellowreefer]

I'm not an expert, but yeah, it should help a lot, if not outright solve your problem. Anything... rocks, filters, sand, ceramics.. that has been in your DT and is fully cycled will do the same job of ammonia removal in your QT. The general rule of thumb is that once it goes into the QT, it never goes back into the DT though.

You're in a put out the fire mode though, so that's less of a concern if you've already evacuated some of your creatures to the DT.

Got it thanks

 

[#1Fellowreefer]

You may want to keep some of those Marine Pure Gems in your sump for future QT use. I keep a couple boxes of Marine Pure Balls in my sump and use several balls to start up my QT each time since I tear them down and sanitize them with bleach between treatments. I always throw out the old balls and use the ones from my sump then replace the ones I used with new ones that will be seeded with bacteria by the time of the next QT. And the cycle goes on and on until one day sometime next year when I will finally be done with QT!!!

I think that’s a great idea I will invest in those marine pure balls and keep them on hand for future use and keep extras in the sump to get them seeded.

 

[#1Fellowreefer]

Alight guys, so here is what I did and you can see the clowns are just fine and are loving their new home along with the feather dusters and all the CUC in the DT. Thank you all once again for all the help and support and responses and comments. Love this hobby and all the people that are so so kind and supportive in this hobby.. #reeflove #blackstorm #orangestorm #lovereefing