61 degrees - Any chances?

Acipenser · #1 12/06/2007, 04:41 PM

Last night I came home from an overnight trip to find my fish room dark, cold, and quiet. A circuit breaker had tripped. My wife of course forgot to check on the system the previous night or through out the day.

I got everything back up and running. Checked the temperature and it was 61 degrees. I have three yellow tangs and a damsel (can't catch it out). They were sluggish, and one tang was lodged in the rockwork but gilling slowly. As the water slowly began to warm, the fish seemed to start acting normal.

I only have about 10 small SPS frags, but they all seemed ok. No bleaching. Two had polyp extension.

This morning. The fish seem to be behaving normally Temp is up around 81. SPS still looked good. No bleaching. Some polyp extension.

I really can't believe that they could survive 61 degrees. I hope they are not going to be all bleached when I get home from work.

Any chance that they will survive? Anyone else have SPS at this low a temperature and survive long-term? Any suggetions (besides running down the tripping problem)?

Thanks.

sjfishguy · #2 12/06/2007, 05:28 PM

I had a small tank get down to 68 for at least two days while I was away and I only lost a colony of green clove polyps. No SPS were lost and I had maybe 10 SPS species in there. I was indeed surprised that everything survived. However, if you think about it, reefs in the upper Florida Keys sometimes get down in the upper 60's in the winter, so I guess its not that big of a deal.

pdfb55 · #3 12/06/2007, 05:54 PM

once everything looked fine at 61 i would have been worried about the quick change to 81. Quick sudden changes seem to usually be what will kill them. Good luck though, hopefully you can come out of this one clean.

slojmn · #4 12/06/2007, 07:39 PM

Did circulation on the tank stop as well??? I am thinking the fish were sluggish because they were slowly running out of oxygen if circulation stopped in the power outage. Once things got fired back up oxygen levels rose and the fish responded. I had a similar event without the temp drop...A boatload of CO2 dumped into the system thus robbing the tank of oxygen during the night. Once I woke up and found my tank looking terrible I did a water change as the first response. The fish responded quickly and eventually i found out about the CO2 issue. But in the end the fish were so stressed from the whole event that 50% of them perished over the next few weeks from ICK. The corals were fine, but no temp drop. I think you will see over hte next month or so which corals were more stressed and those that could handle the temp variation. Maybe you will get really lucky and everyone will be just fine as it sounds like you caught it fairly quickly.
Good Luck and keep us posted.

woz9683 · #5 12/06/2007, 07:55 PM

I shipped some SPS during a cold snap last year (stupid, I know). Water temp in the bags was around 55 when I received them, and I think I lost one coral out of 25 or so. I was surprised at their resiliency as well.

Acipenser · #6 12/06/2007, 08:20 PM

pdfb55 - It took hours for the temp to get back up. I found the tanks at about 7 pm. At about 11 pm they were at about 67 degrees, and I went to bed. Was 81 next morning at 7 am. So about 12 hours.

slojmn - yep, everything was off. No circulation at all. Could have very well been DO that made them sluggish, but they were not gilling very quickly. So I think it qould be more cold than DO. Also lower temp can hold more O2 in water.

Tonight everything looks fine. Fish feeding. Corals all look ok too.
I guess I got lucky. Only time will tell.

CeeGee · #7 12/07/2007, 12:30 AM

It is much better for the tank to get cold than for it to overheat.

I had the same thing happen when I went to get married. Came home and found my tank at 63 degrees. It had been that way for a week. All fish survived. All coral survived. My blue tort bleached and I thought it was dead. I decided to leave it in the tank and it is a good thing that I did as it survived.

Good luck.

sin05_omar · #8 12/07/2007, 03:01 AM

Many a time we underestimate our SPS-es.. they are alot more resiliant then we think....once they are comfortablly accliamitized to our reef...

Yup... A cooling disaster is better than a warming disaster... but its best not to have a disaster...lol

Deuce67 · #9 12/07/2007, 08:59 AM

We had a blizzard that rolled in early this year and knocked out the power for 30 hours. Dropped the tank temp to 52 degrees. I really thought all was lost but all the fishes survived but I did lose 4 out of 45-50 sps. All that saved the tank was a battery powered air pump.