Having trouble with fish and corals in my tank.

[mshanno4]

Hello,
So just the other day I cleaned my tank and did around a 30% water change due to my nitrates being high. Since then I had two fish die and my leather corals and trumpet coral still look awful. If anyone has some tips or ideas of what could be going wrong I would greatly appreciate your help!

 

[Bifferwine]

Have you tested for ammonia and nitrite? Did you happen to stir up the sand when you cleaned the tank?

 

[wontonflip]

+1 biffers....if you stirred up sand, it would cause a mini-cycle.

 

[mshanno4]

I havent had a chance to test the nitrate and ammonia because I dont have my own kits. where is a good place online to get kits? And the guy I hired to do it used one of the water changing tubing with vaccum things and cleaned the sand too. If it is cycling again what should I do?

 

[fastrd400]

I havent had a chance to test the nitrate and ammonia because I dont have my own kits. where is a good place online to get kits? And the guy I hired to do it used one of the water changing tubing with vaccum things and cleaned the sand too. If it is cycling again what should I do?

How old is this tank?

If you vacuum the sand bed you need to do it from day 1 when you set it up. Otherwise, doing it on occasion because the sand suddenly looks bad will release pockets of nitrates and phosphates.

Dr. Foster and Smith, BRS, Marine Depot are just the big three that would carry test kits.

 

[mshanno4]

Its about a year old. And I had no idea about the sand vacumming thing, so would you suggest not doing it at all? I also have an engineer goby in the tank that is a very active digger do you think that he could be causing the nitrates to be high?

 

[fastrd400]

I would suggest just syphoning the water. The Engineer Goby can't do as much as a person vacuuming the entire sand bed in a 5 minute time period. This is why critters like Conches, Nassarius Snails, Sand Sifting Starfish, etc work so well. They don't cover the entire bottom in a quick time period.

 

[fastrd400]

However, a better question might be this:

Why have you had a tank up and running for a year and not had any test kits?