Undetectable toxin?

[cheryl jordan]

I would definitely start there, and remove the decorations, change out all water with ro/di, run carbon, give it a week and try another cheap fish.

 

 

[farkwar]

When you find out what it is can you let me know.

 

I have a damsel ive been trying to kill since January.

[kory]

ok good well i have a great LFS where i buy premixed ro/di. they told me if anything dies or is not doing great with there water. they will replace it. so far i have been very pleased i would look around. mine is 79 cents a gallon. i go through less than 5 gal. a week on my two tanks.

[kory]

good luck.

[thefishingone]

good luck.

 

Thanks. I'll probably begin my first 50% wtr chg tomorrow, and I'll take out the decorations in case they have any part in this problem. I've never used them before and have never experienced this before, I guess it was a bad idea.

[thefishingone]

Well, here's a question. This just popped in my head. How long is salt good for? I purchased salt a couple of years ago when I had purchased a 100 gallon aquarium with the intentions of starting a SW aquarium. Due to finances, I never got it going. But, I purchased the salt when it was on sale and buy one get one free. Could the problem be the salt was old?????

[farkwar]

No.

Old salt is harder to dissolve.

And if a high Ca reef salt, it will react to form calcium carbonate solid in the bag, which won't mix or dissolve in normal salt water. That won't kill damsels.

 

Most of the salt in a bag of salt is a million years old, at least 100,000 years old.

[brandon429]

+1 on the full water change and carbon CJ

 

ammonia directly attacks gill physiology first in fish and is easily spotted by labored breathing or flapping of the operculum (gill covers) along with test kits that indicate it at the same time...

 

I had asked about the feeding because that could build up the organics for H2SO4 leaking and some people choose to feed the pods (wisely so, I do) when starting up a tank, so they don't decline...their numbers can start building as soon as you put live rock in the tank. now you know there are 30 ways to cycle a tank and instead of me downing anyone's method I just want to say this is only one way that works, and that feed also trains up more bacteria in the exact same way adding a coctail shrimp, a small fish, etc, just things to seed the tank.

 

Pure sterility is the wrong approach in cycling, but then again for the way I do it there's never any bad algae at any time whatsoever...the tank looks better every day with no setbacks and the way I achieve that is with physical removal at all times and increased water changes. A lot of people will tell you algae are an acceptable part of cycling and that's ok, but I'll tell you why would anyone want to accept the presence of a primary producer, your number one enemy, especially one that reproduces via sporulation and fragmentation, both of which can and will exist in your rocks ready to pounce again someday. What I do is universal prevention of algae, so my tanks never get it along with cyano and this is also repeatable to anyone who wants to keep a tank long term instead of using conventional methods that create an average lifespan for all nano reefs at 2-3 years, shown by the number of threads documenting longer runs vs shorter ones.

 

that being said I still have no idea what caused your issues I just read copper isn't deadly lethal to these fish and several others, whereas invertebrates would succumb faster than damsels which are reef bullets. the death of the fish I cannot even guess, only ask follow up questions to hone what's been posed. totally interested to see how this pans out...people dose copper derivatives all the time in fish only tanks so Cu is another head scratcher for me...

 

also regarding algae, SantaMonica would disagree with me he'd say set up an isolation chamber and I know that works for him and all the people who post up great proof threads I enjoy reading. so if you want to set up a screen filter that's totally one way too, heck that's one of the oldest known reef filter methods (Adey) so how can something that stands the test of time be discounted...what I meant was unless you plan to harness it, eradicate it, mid ground gets you a mid-lifespan reef everytime really just trying to help you out

B