Caretaker

Near disaster struck my aquarium this past weekend. The tank did not experience a total crash, but the cycle to total destruction did begin. I think the spiral of death has been halted, although I removed what I hope is the last dead victim this morning from my tank.

I returned home on Saturday around noon to discover an over flowing piece of equipment (called a protein skimmer -- it pulls dissolved organics from the water using foam fractionization: the gunk sticks to the tension of a trillion little bubbles and then collects in a cup as the foam rises in a column of water). It was overflowing (back into the tank -- it is thus designed) because there was clearly an over abundance of something in the water so it over produced foam. The tank water was quite cloudy. And in overflowing, a week's worth of gunk in aforementioned cup had been thrown back into the tank.

Three fish were already dead and the others were clearly stressed. The coral and invertebrates looked fine (and continue to look great).

I won't bore you with the technical details but those things one can test for in an aquarium came back well within acceptable limits.

I was almost certain that what had occurred was that a type of algae (of which I have lots -- seaweeds, really) reproduces by "going sexual" (as it's called) and in doing so it basically dies, expelling all its nutrients back into the water. This dramatically reduces the oxygen saturation of the water and fish begin to die, further polluting the water, further reducing the oxygen levels. Luckily, if this is what happened, it was not enough to begin to kill corals or the downward spiral would have been accelerated.

I also believe my giant clams may have spawned -- all those gamettes in the water would produce the same effect on the oxygen levels. I think this because on Sunday when the water was much clearer than the previous day, in a matter of looking at the tank one minute and then turning back to it, the water had become very milky.

In the end I changed about 40 gallons of the water -- a LONG process at 5 gallons at a time. (The water has to be "made" -- using RO water, which takes forever to be filtered, then the artificial sea salt mix added and then the water heated to tank temperature and left long enough so that things like pH are equalized). As wel, I've got twice the amount of activated carbon running in the tank at the moment to help scrub the water. It would have been nice to have 50 gallons of pre-made water on hand, but I live in a small apartment and where the hell am I going to keep such a thing...

But the disheartening thing, the thing that continues to make me sick to my stomach is the loss of 6 fish -- incredibly beautiful and interesting creatures each of them. And they died under my care. If only I'd researched and realized the type of algae that went sexual was a type that was prone to doing just that (I've been removing another two in the same family, that I know are famous for the "act"), I would have been aggressively harvesting the culprit, as well, to prevent such an occurrence. Anyway, I failed my little closed biological system as its caregiver and the fish died -- fish that despite being extremely sensitive to care for in captivity HAD been doing exceptionally well. That one was of a type rarely successfully kept...

They were also the fish that provided most of the movement in the tank -- being schooling fish -- so the ocean reef in my living room is looking a little "bare" today.

Steve