paisley
New Member
I've tested my water -- it's perfect. My fish are fine, my snails are fine, even my moon coral is still alive --although I think it's shrinking (which I thought was the most difficult to keep alive out of the things I had), but my anemone, star polyps, clover polyps, and coral banded shrimp have all died. They were fine for about 4 months, then all of a sudden the polyps stopped coming out one day, and two weeks later the shrimp died. It's quite frustrating, because I spent about $600 on tank equipment (new filter, protein skimmer, more lighting), chemicals to keep good water quality (Coral-Vite, Essential Element, Calcium, etc.), and live rock when I decided to change from an all fish tank (which I did well with for about a year and a half) to a reef tank. I was quite happy and excited for about 4 months, while making a new addition approximately once a month to my new "reef tank". My wife was even complaining about me spending so much time working with the aquarium, because I wanted to make sure everything was absolutely perfect. Then, all of a sudden, my anemone died (which I removed immediately and did a water change - water was fine), three weeks later all my polyps disappeared; and my shrimp died less than two weeks after that. Now I look at my tank and there's nothing in it besides one shrinking piece of coral, some rock, some snails, and four small fish. If I hadn't already spent over $2000 on this tank in the last 3 years (that's not even counting what I spent on livestock!) -- I'd probably give up!! But I love my tank, and it is SOOOOO COOL when everything is doing fine!! I just can't see what the problem is, especially after putting all this time and money into it. I keep the water perfect, do 10% water changes every 2 weeks. There's nothing mentioned on this site that I can find that I do or don't do which would be a reason for my problems. Anyways, I'm rambling. Sorry this is so long, but I need to vent. My wife doesn't want to hear me complain -- she's already more than willing to sell the aquarium after "getting so little in return for all our money and time put into it" (how many times have I heard that!!!). But I want to keep it and be successful with it. I don't know what else you can tell me that's not already on this site, but any advice is greatly appreciated. If anybody out there has this same problem, please respond so I know I'm not the only one cursed with this unexplainable bad luck. Thanks.
