Starting Over

Flyangler33 · Jun 2, 2024

Well I just got back from vacation and learned a hard lesson about power. A tornado hit my town while I was gone, thankfully my house is ok, and we were without power for a day or so. My neighbors are MVPs and got my tank hooked up to a generator some how all of my fish survived, however, every single coral is dead.

I plan on doing a water change and checking all the parameters later today and getting the tank back in order. My question is while doing the water change should I pull all of the dead coral out? It is 100% dead they are all bright white and just skeletons at this point. Im assuming I should wait a few weeks on the coral game to let the tank balance out. Any thoughts or input is greatly appreciated.

Naekuh · Jun 2, 2024

How bad is the die off?
How large of a tank we looking at?

IS there anything left salvagable that you can put in a smaller tank while you do a reboot?

Problem is with that much die off, i think it would be best in your shoes to do a reboot, and yes remove all the dead corals, as they will just collect nasty algae and look ugly as your rebooting.

Flyangler33 · Jun 3, 2024

100% of the coral is dead dead. Pure white skeleton. 50 gallon tank. All of my fish are still alive and eating/doing well as it seems. I have a 17 gallon QT tank I could set up, I just dont know if that would stress the fish out more than just doing clean up on the big tank with them in there.

Naekuh · Jun 3, 2024

Flyangler33 said:
100% of the coral is dead dead. Pure white skeleton. 50 gallon tank. All of my fish are still alive and eating/doing well as it seems. I have a 17 gallon QT tank I could set up, I just dont know if that would stress the fish out more than just doing clean up on the big tank with them in there.

problem is when your cleaning up, chances are your going to polute the water even more..

How many fish we talking about and what fish?

You would need to have them in a bin for about a day while you rince with lots of effort though the sand, and possibly even give your rocks a light scrub.

You will need to do a mini cycle all over again, but it wont be too bad.
You can probably drop in a something like Macrobacter 7, and help speed it up.

Also i would suggest as large of a water change as possible, as you have no idea what chemicals the corals nuked as they were dying.

Flyangler33 · Jun 3, 2024

Naekuh said:
problem is when your cleaning up, chances are your going to polute the water even more..

How many fish we talking about and what fish?

You would need to have them in a bin for about a day while you rince with lots of effort though the sand, and possibly even give your rocks a light scrub.

You will need to do a mini cycle all over again, but it wont be too bad.
You can probably drop in a something like Macrobacter 7, and help speed it up.

Also i would suggest as large of a water change as possible, as you have no idea what chemicals the corals nuked as they were dying.

I have 2 maroon clowns, yellow tang, purple fire fish, spotted gobby, 6 line wrasse.

If i do reset the tank, would these be an ideal time to swap substrates? I want to utilize a different grain size sand in the bottom. Not to mention the sand in there is fairly dirty.

Naekuh · Jun 3, 2024

Flyangler33 said:
I have 2 maroon clowns, yellow tang, purple fire fish, spotted gobby, 6 line wrasse.

If i do reset the tank, would these be an ideal time to swap substrates? I want to utilize a different grain size sand in the bottom. Not to mention the sand in there is fairly dirty.

That would be even more ideal... a lot of people do not like recycling substrate because its too risky unless you had a small sand bed, and something like a sleeper goby which sifted though it non stop.

Just make sure you clean the new sand very well, otherwise your gonna sit though the "my fish tank is white" stage, where it can take a few days to clear out.

You can use a mix of live sand and dry sand also... but yeah... i would suggest a internal filter with sponge or a cheap amazon/petco HOB, to filter out the sand particulate faster, and help you get your stuff back into the tank as soon as possible.

You can store the HOB away after don somewhere incase you need a fast way to drop carbon in temporarly into your tank.

I always have a HOB in a "incase" scenario.
You can drop a LOT of things in that bucket, and swaping things out, and removing the HOB takes not even 5 min tops.

glb · Jun 3, 2024

I’m so sorry about your tank! I’m glad some of the fish survived. If you’re sure there’s no living tissue, I’d go ahead and pull them out. But look closely. I’ve had corals I thought were goners that were actually retracted because of stress. Good luck!

Flyangler33 · Jun 3, 2024

So my 2 cleaner shrimp, 2 tiger conchs, a few hermits made it as far as inverts go. All fish are accounted for. Firefish, 2 maroon clowns, yellow tang, spotted gobby, 6line wrasse.

The tank is EXTREMELY dirty covered in algea I think only 1 coral is salvageable. Everything else is bone white and all the tissue is gone gone. I just fished out a bunch of dead inverts and took some parameters before i perform this water change: