It’s been a little while since I did a tank update video.
Back in March I reported that my tank was having trouble, and it’s May now - and there’s
still trouble… but we know what’s going on and there’s a plan in place to solve
it!
With that, I’m ReefMan, and let’s find out what’s going on with my reef tank.
So, back in early March of 2021 I noticed some of my corals were not doing well.
My Acropora’s polyp extension was gone, they didn’t look quite right, a lot of them
had burnt tips on their branches.
I thought it was due to alkalinity - but in fact, it was due to heavy metal contamination!
This continued to worsen and my coral is pretty banged up now and really just hanging on.
I lost my really cool little Strawberry Shortcake Acropora colony.
Luckily that’s the only colony to completely die.
A lot of them are suffering from STN though - that's slow tissue necrosis - but for now
that seems to have paused.
I did several water changes - 30 or so gallons at a time, and then watched to see what would
happen.
At this point, I still thought it was just an alk swing event - but things were still
getting worse!
I started going though equipment looking for anything that might be broken or otherwise
not working at 100%.
This is when I found the actual problem!
The source of all this trouble was not an alkalinity swing as I had suspected, but the
corrosion of a Sicce pump in my sump.
A pump that was powering my PaxBellum Chaetomorpha reactor.
I had noticed a few times that this pump was hard to start after turning it off for maintenance
- but it eventually started up and seemed to be running fine.
Finally, as I was going through equipment, I took it out to give it a good cleaning and
to see if I could get it running better.
What I found would make any reef keeper’s heart sink - the unmistakable signs of metal
corrosion.
You can see that the pump’s seal has broken, and that water has been reaching the copper
windings of the pump’s motor.
Sicce is generally a pretty good company, so I think this was just a freak incident,
but it’s still not something you want to have happen in your tank.
Their support team says the pump must have ran dry at some point, though given its placement
in my sump I’m not sure how that could have happened.
After finding the corroding pump I ordered a replacement - another Sicce - and added
a filter bag full of CupriSorb to my sump where it would get a lot of water flowing
through it.
The next day I sent out a Triton ICP water test to find out the true damage so I could
better form a plan of action.
In retrospect this would have been better to do up front - but as I thought it was an
alk swing, and since Triton doesn’t test for alk in their usual test kits, I didn’t
think to do it.
Lesson learned, if you’re using ICP tests, or even if you’re not, when you start to
see unexplainable changes you should break out the test suite.
Something has changed, usually coral doesn’t go from healthy and growing to dying for no
reason.
So here are the results - you can see that Copper is higher than it should be.
It should be zero basically in every test you do.
Note, this test is after doing a few water changes, after removing the pump that was
corroding in the tank, and after adding CupriSorb as a countermeasure - so the Copper was probably
much higher when all this started.
If you want to check out the test result yourself, there’s a link down in the description to
it.
The damage to my Acropora has somewhat leveled off in my tank for now.
It’s really sad to see my coral struggling like this - it went from doing so well to
really just barely hanging on.
The tips of some of my acropora are all burnt, and some of my LPS is also dying back.
It seems like my Montipora are particularly hard hit.
In particular, Montipora capricornis seems to be very sensitive to copper.
Both my big colonies have large dead spots in their centers now.
The death has stopped, so I’m curious to see if they’ll regrow over this skeleton.
I think they probably will over time.
The trick will be keeping algae from growing on the dead parts.
Even amongst Acropora, not everything was equally affected.
Some Acropora in my reef tank completely died - my Strawberry Shortcake Acropora colony
is gone - others died at their tips and haven’t had any polyp extension - and still others
are mostly unaffected.
The spike in nutrients from all these corals dying back has caused a little outbreak of
dinoflagellates.
I try to blow these off the coral from time to time, but they don’t really seem to be
the type that kills coral so I think they’ll go away over time as the tank recovers.
Either way, we’ll find out!
For now, treatment is just water changes and CupriSorb.
Beyond that, I’m just trying to make sure that nothing collects too much on the coral
that remains so that it gets good water flow.
I’m still adding AcroPower amino acids, and I’m still feeding my fish the same.
I have backed off on feeding the coral though, as without their polyps out I’m not sure
they’d catch much of anything.
I do spot feed some of the Acros that still have polyp extension.
In the future, I’d like to reduce my exposure to this sort of risk.
I have a lot of little pumps in my sump powering various things - if I reworked the sump around
a larger return pump I could manifold off all the various reactors and such that I use.
This way I’d have just one potential pump to worry about rather than several.
There’s always something to do in reefkeeping!
Once things stabilize and the coral starts growing back I want to pick up some new frags.
I’ve been looking at some of the stuff Battle Corals is offering, and I’m pretty excited
to place an order with them sometime over the summer.
I hope you enjoyed this little update.
I think it’s important to share our troubles as we can all learn from each other.
Now you know what copper damage looks like, so you might recognize it in your future tank
before it gets too bad.
Subscribe if you liked the update.
Take a moment to relax, enjoy the rest of your day!
See you next week!
Bye!