Tear down

I am posting in this forum because I have never done a full tear down before. I have colonial hydroids so bad that I just need to start again. I am looking for help / approval for my plan below. All of my fish are already in quarantine due to ich.

1. I am cycling a 10 gallon tank to house my corals and anemones while the main tank is going through its new cycle.
2. I plan to frag and transfer corals to the 10 gallon. Once the corals appear healthy after two weeks, I am going to bleach and acid my existing live rock as mentioned on reef central.com

That is where my expertise ends. Should I dump all of the water from the main tank and get new sand? Does anyone know if hydroids will transfer in the water column for an extended period of time? I would hate to go through this just to have the same problem again...

 

I hope you can solve your problem with hydroids and save your tank.

 

For the sake of anyone else going through this I will try to keep everything updated on here as a log.

1. I have my 10 gallon rescue tank setup with a small hob bio wheel, thermo, ammonia alert and 10 pounds of dry bleached live rock.
2. I am moving small frags of my corals into this tank to make sure they will be happy for their temporary stay. After much research I am seeing frag / coral only tanks don't really cycle because the bio load is really low. So I am testing that theory...

Once I establish the tank is safe for holding all of my corals, I will move everything I can and then follow the reincarnation for live rock I found on reef central. My goal is to have the corals in the rescue tank no more than 60 days.

 

I have a stable frag tank setup now. I have about half my coral species transferred over and I started the bleach bath on a batch of rocks. Meanwhile, I am setting up a container to restart the newly dead rock.

This consists of:

1. Brand new container from lowes, rinsed
2. Pure ammonia...for cycle food
3. Seachem nitrifying bacteria in a bottle to help seed the newly sterile live rock
4. Air stone
5. Freshly mixed salt water

My plan is to do this over a course of a few weeks to prevent a total aquarium crash in my main tank. I will do 1/4 of the rock every week or so, and it will all end up in the bath at various stages of live rock to help seed everything. By the time I have removed all live rock from the main tank, I will have a batch of freshly seeded rock ready to go and help prevent a crash. By doing it in stages, I can also monitor the rock in the display for any hydroids activity that might resurface.

I am still not clear how long hydroids can survive in the water column. I know my strain doesn't need light, as I found it growing in the dark crevice of my rocks. It has also spread to all rocks, so I know it is water borne at some stage. I also have not found any on my sump live rock. This can be purely coincidence too as not all water overflows all the time.

 

image by x2boarder1, on Flickr


image by x2boarder1, on Flickr

 

The dreaded beasts...if you see this in your tank, shoot on site! Remove the rock at any cost...


Hydroids by x2boarder1, on Flickr

 

The first set of rocks are "reincarnated" and cycling now. The bleach bath totally killed the hydroids, wiped from the face of the earth. The acid bath did a beautiful job further cleaning and ensuring they will never come back. Some of my rocks are two to three times more porous from it now too!

Still remains to be seen how hydroids transfer from rock to rock. I checked my sump tonight and found all my rocks are hydroids free, so they are not making it down there for some reason.

 

I had several CH colonies in various parts of my tank. Your method is the definite sure fire way, I'm sorry you had to tear the tank down. I would advise anyone before they get to this point to try the $12 fix and use some frag cement/putty to cover the entire colony(s). The putty covers with coraline in roughly a month and it looks like the same rock. Hope this helps should you need to remove or prevent spreading from future hydroids.

 

Although that method might work for some, and I would definitely try that before doing what I am doing, it didn't work for me. No matter how much putty I used they just sprang up around the edges.

 

Here we are a little over 5 months later, and the hydroids have been eliminated!!