Ammonia Spike! Crap!!!

So my girl friend had a purple firefish goby in her FOWLR tank that was getting beat up and was not doing hot... I put it in my fuge hoping that it would make a recovery. I was back home at my parents (My tank is at school) over the weekend, and she was doing top offs and such. Today, the fish is no where to be seen, my tank is cloudy, and my ammonia is at about .50-.75 ppm!!!:-[ I did a 10 gallon change, added some Amquel, and changed all the carbon in my penguin 400. (Media containers and the filter pads, which also are full or fresh carbon.) I plan on doing another 5 gallon tomorrow and Wednesday. I adjusted the skimmer to skim a little wetter, and am running a rio 600 that is modded and used to run my backpack in the sump to dump a bunch of dissolved oxygen into the tank. My tank was FINALLY starting to get somewhere, and now my corals are looking like absolute garbage! Well the LPS at least. The frogspawn is completely closed up and the hammer coral is on its way. Is there anything else i can do?!?!

 

Now not only is my tank in trouble... But I am in trouble for letting her fish die.. Not good not good!!! I suppose i should mention my tanks a 46 bowfront with a 29 gallon fuge with macros and some rubble...

 

A dead firefish in that volumn of water is not really going to cause an ammonia spike, nor should it cloud the water IMO.

 

+1. It won't hurt to keep searching for possible contributing factors to the ammonia spike. In the mean time, water changes...I would even do a 10 or 15 gallon change.

 

ditto...
however the fish could of died because of the ammonia spike in the first place?

i would start by doing a 15% water change perhaps.
check your other parameters as well.
has anything fallen or placed in the tank?

 

I agree.... do u think she may have "fed" the fish?...and by "fed" i mean dumped a can of food and brine and whatever else food u have available in the tank?

 

I have no idea what else could have caused it. Nothing else has changed and everything else is accounted for... I just can't think what else could have done it.

 

lol, How big was the purple firefish?...

Purples get rather large from what Ive seen in some petstores. If it was a larger one then it could cause an issue.

 

So she was left to tend to the tank for a few days, correct? How much/often did she feed?

 

That is a strong possibility... She tends to think the fish are hungry ALL the time. As much as i try to stress that they will just keep eating until they explode and when you dump a bunch in there at one time half of it will get blown under the rocks and rot. I'm sure the fish died because of the shape it was in. It really wasn't doing so hot and i put it in my fuge against my better judgement. However, the fish was about 4.5-5 inches in length. One of the largest firefish i've ever seen, which is why it did well in her FOWLR for quite a while before her fish decided they didn't like it. So i'm sure its the sum of several issues.