Kill live rock w too much salt

[Scott mac]

I mistakenly raised the salinity in my 75 gl saltwater aquarium to 1.04 for a few days.  I changed out 1/3 water over next few days and the tick looks dead.  Can I salvage that?

[jservedio]

Yeah, just slowly lower the salinity over the next few daus by removing salt water and replacing it with RODI. After its back to normal, do a couple big water changes. Watch for ammonia for a couple weeks and be more careful in the future.

[Tired]

Do you have anything else in the tank? 

 

Check your salinity again, make sure it's where it needs to be.

 

You'll have to wait and see. Probably most of the larger organisms on the rock are dead, but at least some of the bacteria should have survived. Check to see if ammonia is still being converted to nitrates at a reasonable race.

[mcarroll]

1.040 is probably even lethal to many (most?) reef microbes.  

 

Somewhere I read that >1.030 is trouble for nitrifying bacteria.  Somewhere else I read that salinity is the #1 factor in determining the makeup of microbial communities.

 

Just dug this out of Google Scholar:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0089549

 

IMO it's fair to say you killed your live rock.

 

Can you post a pic of how it looks now compared to before?

[Andy7]

Adding a bottle of bacteria to the tank when you get the salinity lower may not be a bad idea just to boost the amount of beneficial bacteria in the tank