Powerhead + Slug = Upset Corals

Posting this for two reasons. 1) Get some advice on how to help our corals revive and for feedback if anyone's experienced this, and 2) when we were freaking out trying to figure out more about our slug and what to do, I wasn't satisfied with what information I was able to find. So I post this to help someone who googles the keywords "sea slug, toxic, powerhead" lol


So my husband and I had recently added a tri-color slug to our reef aquarium. All was well until he began misbehaving. He was floating around aimlessly and almost got sucked onto the side of our powerhead. Turned them off, he went onto the glass. So crisis averted right?

Wrong.

We returned to our tank ten minutes later to only see that our little slug decided to float again, but this time four feet across and straight into our powerhead. There was no saving this little suicidal slug so without thinking, we gave his remaining parts to our pistol shrimp. As soon as we did this, my husband noticed all our corals were acting funny and closing up.

Didn't take us long to put two and two together: our slug was probably toxic. Oops.

We went to get water at the LFS but within those 2 hours, toxins killed our blue tang. Corals looked horrible. Did a 20% water change, ran carbon and let our protein skinner do it's thing.

Post Day 1: Following AM parameters good. All fish and invertebres seemed ok, including our pistol shrimp. Lost the feather duster. Anemone not too happy. Frogspawns looks shrunken and flimsy, like our mushrooms and ricordeas. Only corals that seemed to be completely unaffected were the zoas. By end of day, one of our two flame gobys died. A 25% waterchange, dosed, etc.

Post Day 2: Parameters great. All fish normal, eating and happy. One of our two skunk shrimp died. Corals still look bad, but none worse. Anemone still upset but he ate when I fed him.



Below is a picture of our tank setup previous to this incident and a picture chart of how the affected corals are visually progressing.

 

Aww I'm sorry, I hope everything gets better

I won't ever touch a sea slug

 

Welcome to 3reef NanoReef.

Excellent documentation regarding the affects the death of a sea slug can have on a systems.

Hope it all turns around for you, lesson learned and hopefully through your post someone will not have the same misfortune.

 

Thanks Corailline!

We should have done our homework but I guess it makes sense - if a creature is so slow and bright, needs something to defend itself when something attempts to bite it.

Corals are looking better: Frogspawn is starting to fill out again. Anemone looks fuller as well while mushrooms are slowly opening up. Our purple sea fan is peeling now, so that's our only loss.

 

Any suggestions of what we can do to help our coral heal / grow quicker besides time?

 

water changes and run carbon.