Bio Pellet Caused Tank Crashed

[Canadianeh]

at least in this youtube video. He seems to be experienced reefer with 1000 subscribers on his reefing channel. One day he quit using bio pellets and his tank crashed. All of his SPS bleached out.
Is this possible? What went wrong here for him? Is it true that once you use BP you can't quit since your system will depend on it?

 

[AdInfinitum]

I have started...stopped and transitioned between many types of carbon dosing over the years with no issues..always done gradually to allow everything to adapt....too many question marks and not enough details in that video to draw any real conclusions....

 

[thehvacman]

You can't remove the boifiltration, and still expect your tank to be able to process wastes properly. Nitrates probably went through the roof, and had an ammonia spike. If he thought it was processing waste too efficiently than he should have started by just removing a little at a time, giving bacteria a chance to populate other areas of the tank.

 

[TORX]

He said he 'thinks' that bio pellets were stripping the nutrients in the tank, that is why he stopped them. What does he mean he 'thinks'? A simple test kit would tell him his nutrient level. If he was running bio pellets and suddenly removed them, this will happen. Look at how little rock he has, it leaves almost no bio filtration. Also, his tank did not crash, it just stopped being able to support some SPS. There is still some SPS in the tank that was doing well along with some LPS, leathers and gorgs.

 

[Skim]

I think he had something else festering. Removing pellets I do not believe did this as Bio Pellets promote a totally different Bacteria than the Nitrifying Bacteria that consume Ammonia and Nitrite. Your tank is covered in Nitrifying Bacteria, all tank glass, all the rock and every tiny piece of substrate and then there is the sump and Skimmer body. This simply fact is what most likely kept his fish and softies alive. He did not mention any water parameters so it's hard to say, but it looks like a Temperature or Alkalinity shock that caused the SPS tissue loss. I ran 400 ml + of Bio Pellets and just shut the reactor down one day and removed it and had no ill effects.

 

[Kevin Cantelon]

I wonder why he quit using the bio pellets if his reef was looking/doing good.

 

[Poseidon]

as with anything in this hobby, do it very slowly and gradually.
Try to only make one change at a time and record what the change was so you can link problems to changes.

'Thinking' something caused something else just creates a bad information cycle and is a problem in reef keeping.
Torx is right, it wouldnt take much to test the water for nitrates and ammonia to verify his theory.

 

[Glee]

Dork!