Reptile & Amphibian Forums

One day my reef tank which includes a tang,pair of clowns,royal gramma,orchid dottyback, yellow wrasse,2 bangi cardinals tree corals, mushrooms, disk corals and about 200 pounds of live rock with great growth all died in 24 hours. I tested my water and nothing was wrong my nitrates were reading 5ppm but everything else was fine. I dont know what happened but it sucks really and im considering going back to freshwater. I volunteer for my local zoo and i had them test my water and they got the same results i did the only thing they said might have done it was a bacteria bloom. I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas what happened.

Thanks Patrick

This happened to me a few years back (and pretty much killed my interest in keeping saltwater). Things were going perfect, every tested fine, and all inhabitants seemed to be in perfect health. Then one day literally everything died. I had no idea what was going on or what to do... my tests did come back as high ammonia and what not, but I was baffled - it was negative the night before. I gave up in frustration and let the tank sit (wasn't sure what I wanted to do at the time). A few weeks later, I was sitting in the basement when I noticed what appeared that one of my pieces of live rock had split open. On closer inspection it was a dead razor clam that I had no idea was even in the tank and man was he HUGE the biggest I've ever seen them. I'll bet you anything that this guy died for some reason and poisoned the tank. As I said I didn't know that it was in my tank, let alone dead and rotting other wise I might have been able to salvage at least something. I don't know that the story helps, but its something you may want to keep an eye out for.