Copper in my Tank

[jackman]

I have a 75 gallon fish only tank and I have some clowns and tangs. A while back I had an disease problem and the fish store told me to use some copper in the tank. I did and the problem disapeared well since then I have bought some hermit crabs and scarlet crabs which are doing fine, but I have also bought turbo snails and cleaner shrimp and they all have died in a 24 hour period. I have done this 3 times and all 3 times they have died. I have done lots of water changes and I still seem to kill the snails and shrimp. Is there a way to get rid of the copper in the tank or what else could be wrong? Any help would be great. Thanks
Jackman

 

[sagxman]

The copper is in your substrate. Almost impossible to get rid of it from my experience if it is in the substrate. Hopefully someone else has a better idea.

 

[nas19320]

Welcome to SWF.com

The copper will bond to everything including rocks, sand, silcone, decorations. I believe you can do a muriatic acid wash to clean the tank and resilicone but I'm not sure on that one. You can also try a product called Cupri-sorb. Its going to be extremly hard if not impossible to rid the tank of any copper. Snails will be the first to die when exposed to copper and eventually all inverts will sucumb to the copper poisoining. you could always just make the tank into an aggressive or FO tank.

 

[diz]

Cupri-sorb works really well. I put some in my tank (which had cooper adsorbed onto the rocks and sand from the previous owner) and in a few weeks I was able to house crabs and snails. The copper will slowly leach out of the rocks and substrate, but will be picked up by the cuprisorb over time. also, to bring copper down quickly, you can add copper chelators which are included in good water conditioners. good luck.
diz