STN from hell, please help

[DanTheReefer]

From what I understand (hopefully someone more informed can clarify), antibiotics are 'broad spectrum,' meaning they can target or kill a wide range of bacteria, including both harmful bacteria and beneficial or good bacteria.

I haven’t seen any issues yet, it’s essentially chemiclean. The two things I’ve noticed are the skimmer going nuts (as expected), but also the minimum of the Ph cycle increasing by .1

 

[SimbaAnto]

From what I understand (hopefully someone more informed can clarify), antibiotics are 'broad spectrum,' meaning they can target or kill a wide range of bacteria, including both harmful bacteria and beneficial or good bacteria.

No that's not true and it doesn't kill good bacteria. I have been doing In tank treatment with Cipro and amoxicillin with No ill effect. Also there are studies on this in reef2reef as well to confirm the same.

Always I have seen growth increased and health prospered after the treatment.

 

[Pod_01]

No that's not true and it doesn't kill good bacteria. I have been doing In tank treatment with Cipro and amoxicillin with No ill effect. Also there are studies on this in reef2reef as well to confirm the same.

Always I have seen growth increased and health prospered after the treatment.

I don’t believe there are any studies done to support your statement.
Especially I do not believe there is any scientific study that shows coral holobiont is not impacted by antibiotics. But if there are I would like to read them.

What one can say that so far the R2R experiments shows no ill effects. But corals do depend on bacteria and I am sure overuse or continuous use will lead to negative impacts. This is hobbyist playing with fire.

Also overuse, improper use will lead to antimicrobial resistance and that will be very unfortunate.

 

[Spare time]

Would like to understand more why would you say that it's harmful for everything

Microbes play a massive number of roles in their host's physiology and a disturbance to the microbiome of an organism can have numerous effects. There are tons of really cool papers on the microbiome of humans, non-human animals, and more and their interactions with the host.

 

[Spare time]

No that's not true and it doesn't kill good bacteria. I have been doing In tank treatment with Cipro and amoxicillin with No ill effect. Also there are studies on this in reef2reef as well to confirm the same.

Always I have seen growth increased and health prospered after the treatment.

What is "good" bacteria and how are you measuring that. There is no doubt it impacts the coral and fish microbiomes.

 

[DanTheReefer]

The good news for the day:
NO3 is ballpark 10 ppm with Neo Nitro addition

Bad news:
Coral nutrient uptake dramatically slowed as evidenced by Alk (11.1 dKh) and PO4 (.65 ppm) levels. Funny thing is perhaps the colorimeter isn’t necessary for Hannah alk check, when I saw the color I thought it would read 11. I discontinued dosing, will test tomorrow. By the way, this is probably the mechanism that caused increased Ph trend I’ve seen.

Coral recession increased quite a bit as well. My guess is the changes in chemistry are not helping the stress.

20% water change today (30 gallons), will probably do at least 10% per day all week. Running carbon to remove the medicine.

There has been a lot of discussion here on the antibiotics. I am concerned that the core of the problem is bacterial pathogen that took advantage of stress and the carbon dosing. I do not think erythromycin is particularly risky as it is the “proprietary salt” ingredient in ChemiClean. This is used fairly often with a few rare horror stories mostly related to oxygenation.

I’m holding back but my gut tells me an antibiotic targeting gram negative bacteria is the easiest way out.

 

[SimbaAnto]

I don’t believe there are any studies done to support your statement.
Especially I do not believe there is any scientific study that shows coral holobiont is not impacted by antibiotics. But if there are I would like to read them.

What one can say that so far the R2R experiments shows no ill effects. But corals do depend on bacteria and I am sure overuse or continuous use will lead to negative impacts. This is hobbyist playing with fire.

Also overuse, improper use will lead to antimicrobial resistance and that will be very unfortunate.

I am not going to argue. I have been using this treatment to keep acrobacter (BJD causing bacteria) away after testing my water with Aquabiomics for the strain. This treatment has helped me to save thousands of dollars going drain.

Again I am not saying it doesn't change the bacterial column and changes the mix. It might but never got affected. Only thrives. This may be anecdotal but it has helped me and a lot of reefers.

I see you are in this forum quiet a while. Please look at this article.

Thread 'Experimenting with in-tank antibiotic treatments for Brown Jelly Disease' https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/e...ic-treatments-for-brown-jelly-disease.782438/

 

[djf91]

I had a similar event happen in my system when I dosed NOPOX. Was trying to bring down NO3 and PO4 simultaneously. I think I ended up encouraging a pathogenic bacteria to take hold with the carbon dosing. Corals started to stn and my Magnifica anemone was on deaths door. Dosed Cipro which seemed to halt the stn but at the cost of my biological filter. Now 8 months later I’m battling super high nitrates that I did not have before the Cipro dosing.

Several months ago I had another smaller stn event occurring and instead of going the antibiotic route I decided to dose potassium and iodide to encourage coral health. This immediately halted the stn, colors improved on all corals, and new growth tips that had been dormant began to grow again. Anecdotal but I do believe this helped.

I would recommend lanthunum chloride to bring down phosphate. This seems to bind to only some forms of phosphate and not all of them.

 

[Hurricane Aquatics]

The good news for the day:
NO3 is ballpark 10 ppm with Neo Nitro addition

Bad news:
Coral nutrient uptake dramatically slowed as evidenced by Alk (11.1 dKh) and PO4 (.65 ppm) levels. Funny thing is perhaps the colorimeter isn’t necessary for Hannah alk check, when I saw the color I thought it would read 11. I discontinued dosing, will test tomorrow. By the way, this is probably the mechanism that caused increased Ph trend I’ve seen.

Coral recession increased quite a bit as well. My guess is the changes in chemistry are not helping the stress.

20% water change today (30 gallons), will probably do at least 10% per day all week. Running carbon to remove the medicine.

There has been a lot of discussion here on the antibiotics. I am concerned that the core of the problem is bacterial pathogen that took advantage of stress and the carbon dosing. I do not think erythromycin is particularly risky as it is the “proprietary salt” ingredient in ChemiClean. This is used fairly often with a few rare horror stories mostly related to oxygenation.

I’m holding back but my gut tells me an antibiotic targeting gram negative bacteria is the easiest way out.

Chemiclean won't kill anything in your aquarium that would be causing coral recession.

Cipro is what you would use to kill an outbreak of all corals that were receding IF and only IF all your parameters were good. We know that your NO3 was 0 so we can't rule that out.

If I were you, I would just let things settle and stop dosing or adding this or that. If they are dying due to a bacteria, then they're done. I lost an entire colony collection of Acropora to a bacteria and I treated with Cipro and it still wiped them all out.

In my case, I was adding a lot of Biota maricultured Acropora that had been doing very well for a year. Then, BOOM. Everything was perfect, all parameters, then out of nowhere. I won't be adding any more mariculture corals to any system. I think they bring something in that lays dormant and then explodes.

It hard to tell at this point, all you can do is get your parameters correct by adding NO3, as you've done, and stop dosing or adding anything to see if it clears up in a couple of weeks. You're not going to stop it overnight and all the addition and changes will make matters worse. I understand that's the first thing we want to do is stop it, but if they are receding that bad, there is no quick fix.

 

[djf91]

I think when altering NO3 and PO4 this should be done extremely slowly over the course of many months.

I believe SPS can adapt to low nutrient systems and do just fine but it takes a very long time for them to adjust.

 

[Tuna Melt]

There is a good article that just released in Coral mag about using Oxolinic acid to treat STN / RTN. Its similar to CIPRO but not used in human medicine so obvi preferable. Give it a read.

 

[KrisReef]

Finally hit the point of panic with my 120g ProStar

Dec 2023: Largely Happy Reef Tank for years. Dosing A4R. PO4 a bit high at .35 PPM, nitrate near 0, only issue is some turf algae and coral aggression




Jan 2024: Decide to start dosing NoPox to see if PO4 would come down a little. Concur that I should not have dosed NoPox unless both nitrate and phosphate were elevated. Dosing 1.0 mL daily.

3/18/2024: Dark spot starts forming on seasons greetings monti, zoanthids next to Forrest fire digi partially closed, discontinue NoPox



3/31: Tissue death evident, brown spots growing



4/30 Forrest Fire Death

Stylo starts receeding



Today: About half colonies in tank continuing to recede. Mostly affecting SPS (acros, montis, leptosaris), plus a few zoanthid colonies. LPS like torches, candy canes, frogspawn seem resilient.



Attempts to fix:
- Started with assumption of unknown toxin in tank, ran Rox carbon in media reactor for two weeks and aggressive water changes, 200 or so gallons last month

- 3 treatments of EM Erythromycin past 5 days, tissue decay unaffected

Pretty tragic and stressful. If anyone has any thoughts please let me know.

Alk: 8.5 dKH
Calcium: 430 ppm
Mag: 1440 ppm
NO3: 0.5 ppm
PO4: 0.27 ppm

I was just reading

Mystery Zoa melt, my search for a cure (follow my journey).

Given the crazy amount of information out there, along with endless accounts of experienced reefers who out of nowhere begin to struggle keeping zoanthids long term. I wanted to make a dedicated post where I document all of my attempts at solving my miserable and dying zoanthid collection...

www.reef2reef.com

and the solution they came to accept was microbiome issues (solved with adding fresh live rock) and trace elements dosing (Moonshiners) for zoa's, but the road you described of attempting to lower P and antibiotic treatments could easily have a similar impact on microbiome.

Something to think about. I hope you find a good road to recovery. The before pics were beautiful and the after are very sad.

 

[Troylee]

I’d just stop everything if it was me! Do a large water change and let the tank reset.. run some carbon and just dose the major 3! From what I’ve read you’re lucky you got the n03 up as I’d expect a dino outbreak soon from the chemiclean it’s a common occurrence anymore and should only be used as a last ditch effort! You got way to many things going on at once and panicking.. stop the carbon dosing, stop the antibiotics and the everything else you’re dosing.. large water change and run some carbon and let the tank settle for a week or 2… if your sps continue to stn/rtn clip off some healthy frags above it and glue them back down.

 

[ReeferZ1227]

Still baffled with the $$ into everything you've been trying, why you haven't ruled out a contaminant, identified the known unknowns, or established a baseline via ICP.

Since your nitrates are now up, which were likely not the core issue to begin with, you could toss a hail Mary at a dose of biodigest. I agree with the others that you have a whole lot going on and letting the tank stabilize (doing nothing except WC) is best option.

I have 100 count of 500mg cipro/amox and im glad I didn't start lobbing that into my tank when the heavy metal issue showed up, which I would have never identified without ICP.

 

[Pod_01]

identified the known unknowns, or established a baseline via ICP.

On R2R there is stigma with ICP and its use/ interpretation.

It is lot easier and acceptable to just as you say lob cipro/amox into a tank at any sign of an issue.

ICP and having baseline should be one of the first things to do. Cipro/amox and other magic bottles should be the last attempt, I tried everything parameters are good , everything is on target but corals are still going down hill.

 

[ReeferZ1227]

On R2R there is stigma with ICP and its use/ interpretation.

It is lot easier and acceptable to just as you say lob cipro/amox into a tank at any sign of an issue.

ICP and having baseline should be one of the first things to do. Cipro/amox and other magic bottles should be the last attempt, I tried everything parameters are good , everything is on target but corals are still going down hill.

Crazy, $50 saved me $5k or more in livestock. I'd hate to still be guessing watching everything die anyway. I wouldn't dose trace based on ICP but it sure does give you an educated direction to explore (or not).

 

[Mwatts12]

So you're offering nothing but to say "I don't agree, but I can't prove it" to the conversation? Great advice. 20 Nitrate can't be proven scientifically or anecdotally? Oh and ICP test can? You do know those are not scientific either, right?

Let me educate you. When you ride the razors edge for Nitrate 0 to 5 and Phosphate (0.02 to 0.06 or so) and ONE little mistake happens, your done. A higher Nitrate provides balance for the system and causes no ill effects to the system.

Your advice to him for an ICP test is your opinion based upon your mistake of rusty or faulty equipment and not checking regularly. Ok so that ICP test takes about a month at least right? You know where his corals will be in a month? In the trash can.

I take no offense to what you said, it's your opinion and you're entitled to it.

Agree, 20 is a good safe number to be at.

 

[Mwatts12]

All these ideas and bickering………. I’d stop the nopox and dose some nitrates.

Everyone else. People are allowed to share there opinion. OP can chose what he agrees with or doesn’t.

To summarize. Answer the OPs questions and move one. Save everything else for your pillow at night time.

 

[ReeferZ1227]

If you read OPs post he discontinued nopox a month and a half ago. I guess let's keep throwing the kitchen sink, telling him to do what he already did, and guessing.

i guess while were at it, OP toss up a pic of how well the nitrate dosing, antibiotics and discontinued Nopox has worked.

 

[Mwatts12]

lots and lots of sensitivity. If everyone has that much time. Go do a water change.