TriggaFish99
Premium Member
A while back I got a really big (baseball sized) long spine urchin from Scott (Ashler). This thing was a perfect beautiful specimen. It had spines that were so long, it barely fit into the salt bucket I brought to pick it up.
It's been doing fine and looking cool cruising around the tank...doing what urchins do.
Well yesterday, it created an incident.
It spawned in my tank. At first, I thought "that's cool". I've seen others post of spawning in their tank. This thing kept spewing a huge white cloud out for about 10 minutes. I still thought it was kind of cool at this point. My tank was now pretty cloudy...that's a big deal too. My tank is a 300 gallon tank with a 55 gallon fuge/sump combo. So now I have about 330 gallons of cloudy water.
I started thinking...my skimmer should take care of this right? So, I opened my stand to look. The skimmer was doing a great job of removing this stuff from the water.
Now for the NOT cool part. The skimmer had foam all the way up the collection cup and running down the skimmer back into the sump. That spawning event was way too much for the skimmer's collection cup.
I'm sure that if I wasn't home the foam would have surely overflown the sump and gotten all over the stand. Luckily I was there to react quickly. Otherwise, it would have been a real mess. After about 30 minutes of scooping foam from the skimmer, things were starting to get back to normal. The skimmer was still producing a lot of skimmate, but not overflowing the collection cup (a little over a quart, I'd guess). In a few hours, the tank was clear again.
I never really thought that the skimmer would overflow like that, but it did. Even if I had a shut off valve, I don't think it would have prevented this from occurring. I keep my skimmer in my sump just for such situations. I always try to prevent mishaps in the tank. I figured that if the skimmer is in the sump, the worst that could happen is that some of the skimmate would leak back in the tank if I was negligent in the cleaning or if it leaked. I never expected standing foam to become an issue.
Has anyone else ever experienced something like this? Any suggestion on how to prevent it?
I really like the urchin, and would like to keep him. I have to quickly figure out a way to prevent this from happening again.
It's been doing fine and looking cool cruising around the tank...doing what urchins do.
Well yesterday, it created an incident.
It spawned in my tank. At first, I thought "that's cool". I've seen others post of spawning in their tank. This thing kept spewing a huge white cloud out for about 10 minutes. I still thought it was kind of cool at this point. My tank was now pretty cloudy...that's a big deal too. My tank is a 300 gallon tank with a 55 gallon fuge/sump combo. So now I have about 330 gallons of cloudy water.
I started thinking...my skimmer should take care of this right? So, I opened my stand to look. The skimmer was doing a great job of removing this stuff from the water.
Now for the NOT cool part. The skimmer had foam all the way up the collection cup and running down the skimmer back into the sump. That spawning event was way too much for the skimmer's collection cup.
I'm sure that if I wasn't home the foam would have surely overflown the sump and gotten all over the stand. Luckily I was there to react quickly. Otherwise, it would have been a real mess. After about 30 minutes of scooping foam from the skimmer, things were starting to get back to normal. The skimmer was still producing a lot of skimmate, but not overflowing the collection cup (a little over a quart, I'd guess). In a few hours, the tank was clear again.
I never really thought that the skimmer would overflow like that, but it did. Even if I had a shut off valve, I don't think it would have prevented this from occurring. I keep my skimmer in my sump just for such situations. I always try to prevent mishaps in the tank. I figured that if the skimmer is in the sump, the worst that could happen is that some of the skimmate would leak back in the tank if I was negligent in the cleaning or if it leaked. I never expected standing foam to become an issue.
Has anyone else ever experienced something like this? Any suggestion on how to prevent it?
I really like the urchin, and would like to keep him. I have to quickly figure out a way to prevent this from happening again.