Worst Fish Tank Disasters

cubuffs

Cleaner Shrimp
#1
Please share your experiences.

I have a few, but these two are pretty epic. In 2004, a friend of my roommate (who slept on my couch for free for 3 months) decided to poor bleach in my 180 gallon FOWLR. I lost 200 lbs of live rock and live sand, crosshatch trigger pair, 13 anthias, goldflake angel, zebra eel, harlequin tusk, and a few other random fish. In total, I lost over $4000 in livestock. Everything was white! I filed a police report and according to the police officer who investigated, he told me that "fish aren't considered animals" so I couldn't file for animal cruelty nor could I prove that he poured the bleach in the tank. He denied everything then.

Next, I got the 180 up again 2 years later as a beautiful and nearly matured reef, filled with large colonies. In January 2007 we had a huge snowstorm and I was staying over at my girlfriend's home (now wife) 20 miles away. We got 3' of snow in less than 2 days and I was snowed in and the power to my house was off. When I came home, I expected the power to be back on as it typically does within a few hours, but this wasn't the case. The power was out for over 24 hours and the water temperature was 63 degrees. The house smelled like death and rotten fish. It took 2 weeks to air it out and move back in. I lost 200 lbs of rock again, 200 lbs of sand again, an 18" clam (thanks again Luis!), 48 frags and very large colonies, 18 fish. The only fish that survived was a redtail trigger and a zebra moray eel. They immediately went to the fish store and were re-homed. I took a 6 hear hiatus from the hobby after this one.

Since then, the fish stores have crashed two of my tanks during vacations, making it a total of 4 complete rebuilds in the past decade. Happy Reefing!
 

Chris_W

Blenny
M.A.S.C Club Member
#2
Wow. Thats terrible.

Worst one for me so far was that i just lost nearly all fish to velvet last week...

Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk
 

jda123

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#3
I had a room mate in college put a bucket of pine sol solution on my tank while he was cleaning and it fell in. Was able to save some fish, but they were never the same. He felt bad for years and years. That was in 1997 or 1998 when a purple tang was like $60 and a flame angel about $40.

Had a Blueline heater controller put my tank at 104 degrees in about two hours - luckily, there was not too much in there yet, but learned the lesson that a single high-wattage heater is very dangerous and many smaller heaters could not do that kind of damage if one freaked out. Also, only dual controlled heaters now.

I used to have massive breeding stock of F1 discus and africans that I nursed through an ice storm with a car power inverter - thank goodness that they can handle some 70 degree temps. Generator is plenty cheap compared to restocking. I had to use the generator a few times since then and it has been a lifesaver.

I built my opinion that I am not using any equipment that is less than five years old - being on the front edge of tech will lead to tank crashes. I did break this paradigm once and bought a DC return pump only to have it fail three times before I just put a laguna back on. I have had no crashes since I took this approach of using only over-time trusted high quality stuff.
 

SynDen

Administrator
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#4
Knock on wood but I have only ever had one major tank crash/disaster and it was mostly my fault, but when I was a teenager, I had gotten into Disqus. I had a beautiful planted tank with 6 prized Disqus fish, that I had mowed a lot lawns, and worked many extra hours, to purchase. I had them for about a year and half when they started laying eggs.
One winter night though, we had a power outage. I had wrapped the tank and was doing pretty good at maintaining the temp. When the power came back on though, I added one of my extra heaters I had to help bring the temp up a bit faster, and then I went to bed. Woke up the next morning to find all my fish cooked to death as the extra heater had stuck on, and the water was 110 degrees.
Needless to say, I torn down the system after that, and it was about 12 yrs before I took it up again
 
#6
I had an ATO stick open and pumped a brimming brute bin of RODI into our system while we were on a business trip - our daughter was talked through removing the excess water and testing the salinity. After we found out that wasn't *that* far off, I had her mix some waters + salt to a hyper-salinity and add it relatively slowly. I was coming back in 2 days, so I was able to get back and fix it all apart from the flood, which she had almost dried out.
 
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