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in tanks that are left unattend for 2 months and without heat, nor water, movement and any auto management stuff?


As you guys all know I have been away to Kansas for couple months and, in fact, I travelled back and forth a month or so before that.

So, I left all my tanks unattanded and removed all fish and corals (actually I still have couple rainbow acans frags) to my friend's tank. One particular tank I want to mention is the 240G system volume one in my unheated garage. During the month of travelling and as all my fish are gone, I decided to go further lower salinity than already low to kill off everything that may be harmful. This is the holding tank for my fish import. It is dropped to 1.001 (it's maintained at 1.001 by my bois) to make sure there are no ick and such. I finally moved to Kansas and thus I stopped all heaters, all pumps and power head for 2 months. The water was freezing cold when I return 3 4 weeks ago. What do you guys think happened? There is another 40G holding tank that has the water salinity issue in the reverse of the 240G, that is the salinity is very very high when I returned due to evaporation as I told my bois to just ignore that tank. Guess what I found in the tanks when I started the pumps couple days ago.

Just before I left, there should be no fish (well I know there must be couple purple firefish that has went to the sump but with ~1000lb rocks there, I gave up to located them after 3 days); there must be snails, crabs, stars, and macro algae. Should everything there have died-super cold, no water movement, no food, no light(except a little form the tiny window)...
 
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well in either case, a snail come out once I turn on the pumps.
A nassarius for low salinity and a mud snail for the high salinity. I think they can go dormant during extreme cold and for the extreme low salinity case, the N snail's survival makes me wonder the possibility of the saying that "ick is always in our tank"
 

aznt1217

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So the whole point of the thread is to guess what survived right? Didn't quite comprehend what you typed about 3/4 of the way down.

*EDIT*

Just saw your post. Snails can take quite a beating for a long time because they can seal themselves up. Furthermore, the thresholds of salinity that each snail has will vary with each species.

I firmly believe Ich is always present on fish... but this can be debated.
 
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More data after restarting the pump since the thread started.

The larger tank has a 80/100 Nitrate!!! (My god when will I have enough RO/DI to refill it!)

The small tank has only 10 nitrate
Both have more than 4 snails of various kinds including 2 huge Mexican turbo and 2 tuxedo urchins(one died yesterday-I think due to starvation as the algae on the rock disappeared since I restarted the pump)

Some (both the Nassuarius and the Snail) snails survived even in two extreme nitrate conditions.:scratchch
 
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