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A cautionary tale for all


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This is a tale/unfortunate experiment I am living in of why you should never put water you haven't tested into your system. At the same time this is also an interesting experiment on the tolerance of heavy metals by reef inhabitants. 

 

For the record every time I ever got any livestock from anyone I always for years would just scoop some of my water into the bag, temp and salinity acclimate quickly, grab the net or gloves and plop and drop discarding the unknown water. Yesterday I did the single most stupid thing I have ever done in this hobby without even thinking about it. Anyone reading this whether experienced or not should just remember this simple thing we really should never do unless after thorough testing. This is from my build thread.

 

The fish I had were from Reefescape, I love that they QT for a few weeks and try to get fish from safer collection method using sources. Well I got the notification that my fish completed QT and off I went on my lunch break. Well dumb me totally zoning out checks salinity and temp they were super close so I just dump the royal Gramma in bag water and all. Immediately upon doing so I remembered the fish was still being held in the QT tanks that ran copper in it (Facepalm). So I immediately call them to find out what they are using because even though I was running GAC I wanted to know what I was dealing with. Turns out they run about 2.5 ppm of chelated copper (not sure exact product). So I stupidly added however much was in a bag with a royal gramma to my system. Now I was thinking logically and realized okay. I added maybe a gallon or so or however much is in a bag? All that to a system empty that is 240 gallons with my rock and 1 inch sandbed maybe like 175 gallons of water or so. So basically any way I logically did the math it came out to about .02 mg/l or less. Now its been about 20 hours and if anything was supposed to have adverse effects it sure isn't showing it. I have cuprisorb and polyfilter on the way and planned to do a water change anyways. So yes always, always, always, avoid using anyone elses water but your own unless you have tested it and even then I have never owned any test kits for heavy metal I rely on my ro/di tds meter which isnt involved in this scenario. This would have most likely caused all sorts of issues in my previous 45g. I got lucky for now and hope my system stays healthy. 

 

On a side note I have believed  for a while "old tank syndrome" and alot of unexplained coral/invert deaths are due to the accumulation of heavy metals in a reef. I had a similar die off of more sensitive corals myself in my previous system that I had for  years that I couldn't figure out and now am leaning even more to something like this. I will now be looking to acquire some additional test kits for various heavy metals as they do slowly accumulate from things being added to the tank. 

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A gallon of water for a royal gramma is unlikely (probably more like 1/10th) and probably wont affect anything. As for the accumulation of heavy metals, an ICP could eliminate any doubt. I tend to believe old tank syndrome is based more on poor maintenance syndrome. 

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Yeah they put it in one of the bigger bags of course lol same as the small tangs. But I am not sure really how much was in there I agree that even probably a gallon is a stretch. I think poor maintenance syndrome is definitely up there as a leading cause lol. I was planning on doing an ICP test before I really start loading up this tank with corals. Just so I knew what to look out for. 

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