Bad News :(

So the big move was coming up at the beginning of July. I had brought the clams home, housed them under their little strawberry container and all was right with the world.

Then I moved.

Suffice it to say, the move did not go well. Hence my not posting for the past month and a bit. Sadly, there was some poor timing involved and a very cold floor that everything sat on before it could get back into the tank. As a result I lost about 85% of my SPS. I got everything back into the tank and the water was cloudy and stayed that way for a couple of days before I realized it wasn't going to get any better, after all its not like I had a sandbed to create a storm in the tank. I took a sample of water to the LFS and it told the tale: sky high ammonia. All my large colonies RTNed and the ammonia was, well, stupid high. I did about 120 gallons in waterchanges over the course of that week. Dosed with prime, stability. I lost every large colony I had. My skimmer was taking out huge cupfuls of the most disgusting gack I have ever seen/smelled (you thought regular skimmate was bad). I was dumping it twice a day. When I finally got the tank stable, it went down again with the last of my "decent sized" colonies taking a hit and the ammonia was sky high once again. By that time I had a scheduled work trip that would keep me away from the tank for two weeks so I left the tank in the capable hands of a fish friend who got the ammonia levels down via prime and a waterchange.

By the time I got home, the damage was done. Those corals that had been barely hanging on when I left were bone white. Some things that I thought were bulletproof were long gone and others I thought would be finito are still hanging in there. Odd. All of my LPS couldn't be happier, I've never seen the polyps so large. The tank is what I will tentatively call stable. Mostly because there isn't much in there left to die. I lost most of the frags on the frag rack, all of my nicer (read: pricier) corals were done for.

Lucky for me I took the clams to the LFS. Two days after putting the tank back together, the fish started snacking on them again. Once I discovered the ammonia, off they went to the store. In hindsight, I probably should have taken other stuff out of the tank but at that point, I wasn't sure if it was just the ammonia or some chain reaction had started and didn't really want to send my corals over to other tanks, only to cause problems there.

During the move, I also lost 4 fish. The 2 vanderbilts chromis, the pygmy hawkfish and a little trimma goby I hadn't seen since the last time I moved the tank 3 years ago. I was pretty depressed about losing him. I also lost Bug, my bangaii cardinalfish. I couldn't find him as I was netting the fish out of the tank. I had seen him a few days earlier but don't know what happened in the in between. I was sad to have lost him too. Then to have the tank "crash" as well. Well you can imagine....

Anyway, my tank is pretty empty these days. Its pretty depressing and thats mostly why I didn't bother posting. I can't say I'm as jazzed up about the hobby as I was before. I'm sure I'll get back into it eventually. Here is a photo. The 3 larger corals you see 2 middle, one behind the regal tang, are deader than doornails. I just haven't taken them out yet, mostly because I am lazy and have only fed and watered the fish for the most part. The birdsnest just finished itself off in the last couple of days and I'm using it as a test to see how much phosphate is in the system (as you can see from the green one, there was plenty previously, I just added some phosban).