CharlesFoxtrot Posted July 24, 2019 Share Posted July 24, 2019 Please forgive the text wall. I probably should have started this thread days ago, but the problem always seemed to be just about solved. I suppose the TL;DR question is: where do you get massive amounts of ammonia in a macroalgae tank with only snails, shrimp, and crabs? The back story: I started a 6 gallon nano cube a little over 2 years back. The plan was to put in a clown, some working inverts, some fun inverts, and some softies or easy LPS. That went okay for a while. Eventually, Dearly Beloved tells me that the tank looks very boring and unattractive, and I realize she's right: we have just a few tiny frags in there, not a lot of color, and buying a lot of coral just isn't in the budget. Coming up to the present: I do some research, and I decide to try a macroalgae tank instead of the reef tank. It seems like a good idea: compared to corals, macros are definitely in budget, they come in some nice colors, they grow fairly quickly, and they are apparently pretty forgiving. Also they consume and process nitrates, and I'm kind of a science geek and having a full nitrogen cycle makes me giddy. So, I get ready to do this. I take the opportunity to give my live rock a toothbrushing, a little at a time, keeping it wet, as I have done before and no problem. I rearrange it to provide more horizontal space. Apparently this stressed out my big feather duster worm, who threw his crown (that'll be important), but other than that, things went smoothly. I watched the ammonia and nitrates for a few days, all was well, so I ordered some macros and planted them in there. This would be the 19th, just a few days ago. So I had a codium, a blue hypnea, a gracilaria, and a halimeda in there. Coral survivors were a little blasto and some GSP. No fish, but 5 sexy shrimp, a couple of blue porc crabs, and a CUC of mostly nassarius and a scarlet hermit. A few "historical snails" as well: members of past CUC's who have lingered beyond their contemporaries. On the morning of the 20th, the GSP didn't open up, and stayed fully closed all day. I thought, "hm, that's weird," and went for the ammonia test first. I got 2ppm, which was rather a shock, but I did a quick water change and put in some ammo lock, and figured I'd just shaken things up and made a baby cycle by adding the macros. No big problem, I thought. All will be fine in the morning. Now it's the morning of the 21st, and the morning ammonia tests at 4ppm. I figure something must be dead in there, and the only guy big enough to put out that much decay would be that worm. Oh well, all things must pass, so I pull him up and out, figure that will solve it. Except the worm wasn't actually dead. He had to come out anyway at that point, so I felt bad for killing him needlessly for a few hours, changed the water again, and went about my day. Side note: I had probably been overfeeding to try to coax the worm back to health, but that was all pre-macros. Anyway, researched the ammo lock, heard that you probably can't OD your tank on it, added a little more. Now it's the evening of the 21st. The ammonia is now showing upwards of 4ppm, maybe 6ppm or even 8 (which is where my test kit maxes out). I do another water change, which I didn't really want to do since I had already done one that morning, but I also wanted to be able to monitor the ammonia increase, and the only way to do that was to get the ammonia level below the max for the test. At this point I start checking everything for ammonia: my RO water from the tap, the RO in my ATO reservoir, the SW I had already mixed for the water changes. All clean. Morning of the 22nd. Ammonia test is maxed out, and I'm running out of options. I'm researching everything I can find about macros and ammonia, with an eye to seeing if they might survive. Turns out that macros will actually eat NH3 and NH4, which is confusing, but sort of a moot point, because they certainly don't seem to be doing it now. I start thinking biofilter, and that gets me thinking about live rock, and I start to wonder if I have enough in the tank anymore. I started it with about 5.5lbs, but pieces have been removed occasionally. I head out to the LFS to buy some more rock and see if that will do any good. LFS is closed on Monday. Crap. So I do an experiment. I pull out the macros, except the gracilaria which was a nightmare to get attached. I put each in about a quart of SW, wait half an hour, and then ammonia test the individual tubs. Surprise! All three were putting out ammonia, especially the hypnea. In the meantime, the main tank is maxed out on the ammonia test. I do a water change, toss in a little more ammo lock (apparently each dose is good to handle 3ppm, after which you have to add more) and rig up a little surface bubbler for the macro tubs, just enough to create a ripple for gas exchange at the surface. I also put clean SW in the macro tubs, and feed a little bit of ArctiPods to the main tank, just to give the inverts a snack. Now it's the morning of the 23rd, which would be yesterday. Even with 3 out of the 4 macros not in the tank, the ammonia is maxed again. I get out to the LFS, and pick out about 5lbs of the cleanest LR in the tub, hoping to avoid die-off of sponge growth and that kind of thing. Get home, take out some water to make room for the LR, put it in there. No aesthetics, just piled it in. Put the other macros back, because the ammonia kept on coming without them, and I figured getting them out of isolation would have to happen soon, so why not now. New SW goes in to fill the tank back to the top. At this point I'm out of bright ideas, so I just leave it alone for the rest of the day. This morning, the 24th. Ammonia is still maxed out, so 8ppm or more. All of the sexy shrimp seem fine, and I see the hermit and at least some of the snails out. Occasionally I can spot a blue porc under a rock, waving away with those claws. Everything seems alive, if only by the grace of ammo lock. Other water parameters: Salinity: 35ppt, according to refractometer. pH: between 7.7 and 8.2, according to my Apex probe. ORP: rose from mid-200's to high 300's according to the Apex, about when I added the new rock. High 300's was the usual level before I shook things up by rearranging the rocks. Temp: 77.0 to 77.3 F. Nitrite: 0 Calcium: 480 KH: 8-ish (I have a high res test but I generally don't use because it's a pain with hand shakes). Phosphate: 0.25 or less (again, I have a better test, but the low-res seems sufficient here). Nitrate: now at 0, but was actually around 15ppm at the start of this adventure. So there it is. I (presumably) have a biofilter that should be processing ammonia, and I have macroalgae that will process ammonia, and I'm changing the water as much as I have been told is advisable, and every time I leave the tank alone for a few hours the ammonia goes through the roof. The living things in there are still living, miraculously, probably because of the chemical additives. But I am completely at the end of my rope as to where all of this ammonia is coming from. Help, community. Help, help, help. Quote Link to comment
Clown79 Posted July 24, 2019 Share Posted July 24, 2019 How did you originally cycle the tank before adding all the livestock? 1 Quote Link to comment
j.falk Posted July 24, 2019 Share Posted July 24, 2019 How old is your test kit...is it possibly expired? Ammo lock is also known to give false ammonia readings when used in saltwater. I tend to read a tank based on how the livestock is doing. If you are familiar with the livestock for a long period of time and it seems like it's doing fine, then there probably isn't a major issue going on. Getting panicked and doing quick changes to a tank is usually more problematic than taking the time to figure out if something really is wrong and then slowly trying to resolve it. 1 Quote Link to comment
CharlesFoxtrot Posted July 25, 2019 Author Share Posted July 25, 2019 Clown79, the tank was originally cycled by putting in about 1lb of LR per gallon of water, as well as some live sand, and then watching and waiting for a few weeks. It's been a couple of years since that, and nothing remotely like this has ever happened, even with fish in the tank and a couple of unexpected deaths of biggish snails. j.falk, I did think to check the test kit, and it doesn't expire until 2021 according to the bottles. I do have a brand new kit arriving tomorrow, partly to try a brand new one, and partly because the one I have now is running low. Also, the kit does show no ammonia on the control groups I've tested, like fresh SW and fresh RO. I was under the impression that ammo lock just messed up your testing because the tests measure NH3 and NH4 added together, so ammo locked NH3 still shows up even if it's detoxified to NH4. So if you test again after ammo locking, and you get a much higher number than before, you may have a lot of new NH3 showing up in the test as well as the NH4 from before. Not that this line of reasoning has been terribly effective, or anything. Anyway, I just tested again, ammonia off the scale, and then did today's water change. Tested again, ammonia still off the scale. At this point I'm about ready to just give up on it, stop the ammo lock, go back to normal feeding, and if everything dies then at least I can start over and it won't hurt my wallet too badly. Although I will feel rather terrible about letting all of my critters be poisoned to death. Of course, I'm pretty miserable about it now, so maybe it won't be much worse. Also, j.falk, I'm normally all about small changes and plenty of waiting. Unfortunately I have a non negotiable family vacation in a couple of days, which basically means that I've been feeling under the gun to find a solution or else return to some kind of aquatic carnage next week. I have family who can feed the tank, or even dose a little, but not handle this kind of thing. Thanks to you both for the responses. If anyone else has any ideas, I would love to hear them. Aside from that, I'm probably going to put the tank on automated mode while I am away, but I should be able to monitor pH and ORP. If the worst happens, would either of those probes show a major crash? I could at least get someone to go over and make sure the house doesn't smell like low tide when I get home. Quote Link to comment
Clown79 Posted July 25, 2019 Share Posted July 25, 2019 13 minutes ago, CharlesFoxtrot said: Clown79, the tank was originally cycled by putting in about 1lb of LR per gallon of water, as well as some live sand, and then watching and waiting for a few weeks. It's been a couple of years since that, and nothing remotely like this has ever happened, even with fish in the tank and a couple of unexpected deaths of biggish snails. j.falk, I did think to check the test kit, and it doesn't expire until 2021 according to the bottles. I do have a brand new kit arriving tomorrow, partly to try a brand new one, and partly because the one I have now is running low. Also, the kit does show no ammonia on the control groups I've tested, like fresh SW and fresh RO. I was under the impression that ammo lock just messed up your testing because the tests measure NH3 and NH4 added together, so ammo locked NH3 still shows up even if it's detoxified to NH4. So if you test again after ammo locking, and you get a much higher number than before, you may have a lot of new NH3 showing up in the test as well as the NH4 from before. Not that this line of reasoning has been terribly effective, or anything. Anyway, I just tested again, ammonia off the scale, and then did today's water change. Tested again, ammonia still off the scale. At this point I'm about ready to just give up on it, stop the ammo lock, go back to normal feeding, and if everything dies then at least I can start over and it won't hurt my wallet too badly. Although I will feel rather terrible about letting all of my critters be poisoned to death. Of course, I'm pretty miserable about it now, so maybe it won't be much worse. Also, j.falk, I'm normally all about small changes and plenty of waiting. Unfortunately I have a non negotiable family vacation in a couple of days, which basically means that I've been feeling under the gun to find a solution or else return to some kind of aquatic carnage next week. I have family who can feed the tank, or even dose a little, but not handle this kind of thing. Thanks to you both for the responses. If anyone else has any ideas, I would love to hear them. Aside from that, I'm probably going to put the tank on automated mode while I am away, but I should be able to monitor pH and ORP. If the worst happens, would either of those probes show a major crash? I could at least get someone to go over and make sure the house doesn't smell like low tide when I get home. I'm not sure what would cause off the chart ammonia unless you dosed something like large amounts of peroxide, did bleach treatment on rocks, or something to cause a major die off. I know that Seachem Prime when being used alters liquid ammonia test results for 48hrs after being dosed, therefore the Seachem Ammonia badge is recommended. I'm not sure how ammo lock works. I had a spike in my 5.5g when I did a large reaquascape. I used seachem prime in the tank to detoxify the ammonia and waterchanges. I did see a drop in ammonia after each waterchange. It's odd that instead of going down, it's still high which makes me suspect the results of the test with using ammo lock What are your nitrates at? Quote Link to comment
j.falk Posted July 25, 2019 Share Posted July 25, 2019 A few ideas: Have you tested your source water for ammonia? High chloramines in tap water (if I remember correctly) can also throw off an ammonia test. Has anyone sprayed any glass cleaner near the tank lately...perhaps to clean the glass? That will make ammonia spike although your livestock would show signs of distress if that were the case. Smell your tank...does the water have a rotten / bad smell to it? That's a good indicator of ammonia which would mean something is dead/dying in the tank. Honestly, if your critters look fine...do a decent size water change before you leave to clean things up a bit...then have someone feed while you are gone (measured out specific portions by you beforehand so they don't overfeed and make things worse)...and go enjoy your vacation. Quote Link to comment
CharlesFoxtrot Posted July 25, 2019 Author Share Posted July 25, 2019 All good suggestions, but also all not applicable to this particular situation. I really have tried just about everything, and I am glad that you guys are suggesting a lot of the same things. Makes me feel a little better. At this point I'm going to just have the wisdom to know that I can't change this, the serenity to accept that, and set up the tank for my vacation as if nothing is wrong. If the pH stops going up and down, or the ORP crashes totally, my mom has agreed to come over and take dead stuff out of the house. I'm going to try to catch my little hermit crab, too. She has been in this tank since the very beginning, and I'll save her if I can. Thanks again for the help, and I'll be sure to post how it turns out when I get back next week. Quote Link to comment
Tamberav Posted July 25, 2019 Share Posted July 25, 2019 Is your sand bed two years old? Did you disterb your sand bed at all? Do you regularly clean your sand bed? Usually in a rescape and ammonia present...the sand bed is to blame. 9 hours ago, CharlesFoxtrot said: All good suggestions, but also all not applicable to this particular situation. I really have tried just about everything, and I am glad that you guys are suggesting a lot of the same things. Makes me feel a little better. At this point I'm going to just have the wisdom to know that I can't change this, the serenity to accept that, and set up the tank for my vacation as if nothing is wrong. If the pH stops going up and down, or the ORP crashes totally, my mom has agreed to come over and take dead stuff out of the house. I'm going to try to catch my little hermit crab, too. She has been in this tank since the very beginning, and I'll save her if I can. Thanks again for the help, and I'll be sure to post how it turns out when I get back next week. 1 Quote Link to comment
CharlesFoxtrot Posted August 6, 2019 Author Share Posted August 6, 2019 Okay, so here is the latest. Again, text wall, skip to the bottom for a TL;DR. (Also, thanks to Tamberav. Didn't see your message because of vacation, but I did consider the sand bed. It should have been fairly clean, and I had also disturbed it significantly fairly recently, without anything like these results.) I got back from the vacation last Friday afternoon, and tested the water right away. This was also with both the brand-new test kit and the old one, and both were off the scale, 8ppm and plus. Did a water change, and tested it again, and it was still off the scale. But all of the livestock I could see (and this was most of them, all inverts right now) seemed to be fine. At this point I hadn't put anything in the tank for a week. Obviously if the NH3 was over 16ppm, everything in there would be dead as dead, so it would follow that most or even all of the total of NH3 + NH4 on the test must be NH4. I'm told that the NH4 that you get from using something like ammo lock will be processed by nitrifying bacteria, which would make sense; the total does go down over time. But it's possible that NH4 isn't processed as quickly as NH3, or that NH3 gets processed preferentially to NH4. Either would explain the test results, combined with the fact that the livestock and macros were still alive and well. I was planning on doing more water changes over the weekend, and that just didn't happen because of family emergencies, because I have to take care of my kids before my tank. I was also planning on diluting the tank water with RO to try to get a test result that was on the scale, and then do the math to approximate the actual levels. But none of that happened. Finally got around to checking it this morning, and the test was back on the scale, reading about 2ppm, with everything alive and happy. Hopefully this means that the weirdness is coming to an end. Conclusion: I had NH3 rising due to the new macroalgae, or something died during the rescape, or something else. Maybe a combination of factors, and plenty of possibilities have been mentioned in this thread. I started ammo locking it, which gave me NH4, so things were not dying, but I also wasn't testing just NH3. I was still producing it, though, I just didn't know how much. Over the 7-day vacation, any NH3 being produced wasn't getting ammo locked, so it would have been staying as NH3, and presumably poisoning the tank. But, somewhere in there the nitrifying bacteria caught up, and started processing sufficient amounts of NH3 to keep up again. They were also processing NH4, but not in equal or proportional amounts to the NH3, so NH4 was hanging around and continuing to throw off the test kits. This is conjecture by a non-microbiologist, but it does explain the test results and the lack of dying critters. Sometime over the weekend the backlog of NH4 started to get processed, and now we are approaching normalcy again. TL;DR: I'll keep this updated until I'm sure the crisis is over, but I think the lesson here is that ammo lock and the like will detoxify NH3, but that it will mess up your test kits a lot worse than expected, especially if the initial NH3 production was really high. Unfortunately I approached solving the problem in a very scattershot manner, trying to get it under control before my vacation, so I can't really say what made the difference, if indeed anything I did mattered. Maybe it would have fixed itself all along. Oh well. Now I don't have to explain to my 6-year-old why everything in the tank died, which is probably the best thing of all. A lot of the time I don't think of CUC as being pets the same as fish are, but the kid does. He's probably right, too. Cheers. Quote Link to comment
mcarroll Posted August 8, 2019 Share Posted August 8, 2019 Seems like the whole thing was a mirage to me. Ammonia test kits CAN be fooled or failed to give readings like this. Maybe consider the info about ammonia in Sustainable Aquatics' White Papers on acclimation: Acclimation White Paper It talks plainly about the dynamics of ammonia, CO2, pH, etc, et al., in saltwater. Quote Link to comment
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