So last night I had a huge emergency at 1 am involving my saltwater tank. I'm posting my experiences because I learned some stuff and wanted to share that.

The saltwater tank is a 30 long and prior to last night (sorry no pics) it was mostly full of various caulerpa sp of macro algae. Because I need more algae than I get in planted tanks, right?

Yesterday afternoon my fiance noticed that our mandarin was breathing a little heavy, but looked otherwise fine. Then, shortly after the lights went off in the tank we noticed him up near the top of the tank swimming erratically. Everything else in the tank looked fine.

After a lot of testing, we learned that the salinity was a little high and there was a touch of ammonia in the tank. Did a quick water change and added some ammonia detox stuff and started looking for what could have been the cause of the ammonia level rising. There are 3 fish and a couple reef hermits and a coral banded shrimp in the tank so it certainly wasn't a bio load issue.

It turns out one of our turbo snails had died in the caulerpa forest and we hadn't noticed. He couldn't have been dead more than a day or so and wasn't terribly decayed. Hence the only trace amounts of ammonia in the tank.

All the while the mandarin just kept looking worse and worse. He was swimming drunkenly if at all and had turned nearly white. That's when we noticed the tiny yellow tips on some of the caulerpa. It had started to bloom! Our best guess is the death of the turbo snail in the midst of the caulerpa had caused it to go sexual as it tried to escape the ammonia. If you're not familiar with marine algae blooms, they are what cause red tide.

We ripped as much of the algae out as we could, added some extra filtration and did another water change. Almost immediately the mandarin's color started coming back and today he seems to be doing ok.

There weren't any pics of caulerpa blooms that we could find online so here is what ours did in case you ever have a similar issue you'll know what to look for. As kind of an interesting side note, southwest FL is having a bit of a red tide issue right now, so much so that it is the suspected cause of 2 manatee deaths in the area. :(

caulerpa blooms:
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Clay Turville
Southern Oak Aquatics