Hello all aquarium enthusiasts- welcome to my first BLOG post.

Some of you may know more about my life with aquariums and marine animals than do others.  Therefore, so as not to start by listing redundant stats about my life, I will jump right in by beginning with current events.    

Recently I encountered a bit of a surprise in a client’s reef aquarium.  We had moved his thriving and stable reef aquarium from Miami Beach north to Pompano Beach about five months ago.  After approximately a month after the successful reset up, both his reef tank and his son’s smaller reef became covered with a thick, copious and“goopie” white slime!  The corals were dramatically affected and started to decline.   As you might expect I was not at all happy at this turn of events! I ran all reef tests and the chemistry parameters were good, so no information there.

However once before I had experienced a similar slime coating such as this one many years ago in Vegas, where  our company was taking care of a dentist’s office aquarium and they developed this seemingly similar white slimy metabolism that coated everything.  We immediately changed all chemical and mechanical filters and pads, performed huge water exchanges every week and still the horrific “Glob” returned, every time!  No literature or research that I patiently pored over revealed any information for this unique metabolism.

Fortunately I was scheduled to leave soon for the annual Fish Disease Workshop, at the University of Georgia, Veterinary College.  I quickly took the advantage of the instructing staff headed up by Dr. John Gratzek (now Professor Emeritus), and after I explained the scenario, I asked if he had any idea as to what the cause could be.  Well he certainly did!  From my description, Dr. Gratzek informed me that there is an airborne bacterium that thrives in the presence of alcohol!  (Alcaligenes faecalis). Well it certainly was not likely that the dentist’s office was having late night parties, so where in the world would alcohol be coming from?  Dr. Gratzek went on to explain that many dentists’ and doctors’ offices use either chemi-claves or auto-claves to sterilize their instruments.  Since the auto-claves use steam for their sterilization method, there is no problem there.  However, the “chemi-claves” use ALCOHOL for their sterilizing agent.  I immediately telephoned our client and asked about which of the methods they were using.  They told me right away that they had just upgraded from autoclaves to chemiclaves! As soon as I explained to our client doctor what we now believed to be the causative factor of our problem they immediately changed back to the autoclave system and the metabolism disappeared.

So then drawing on this experience for our Florida client with a similar white slime situation we understood that this was a very different case as there are no chemiclaves in the house nor do the clients drink there often and the problem remained.  I was soon able to discover that the carpets had just been cleaned throughout the home, using a dry-cleaning method and not with a steam cleaning method.  Therefore we are deducing that the chemicals contained in the cleaning fluid provided by the carpet cleaner are the causative agent for the slime.

I have systematically performed water exchanges weekly, changed the chemical filter media weekly and asked that they ventilate the house thoroughly, weather allowing.  At the time of this writing, the slime coating is subsiding and the corals are looking much better, to my (and my client’s) great relief.

Therefore, my patient readers, the moral of this story is:

• There still remains much for us to learn from and about living reef environments, both contained and wild.
• Remain patient as your reef aquarium goes through its many changes over the years.
• Try to appreciate just how many unknown ingredients there might be in many products we use so casually every day.  If there is a dramatic or radical change in your otherwise stable reef, you must look beyond the obvious.
• A reef just might be telling us something about the products we use if it is having an adverse or radical reaction to something in our home or business.

At this writing I am continuing to research and reach out to other qualified industry scientists that may be willing to venture into the study of this metabolism.  I will provide the updates as they are revealed to me.

If any of you have had similar experiences, please be sure to write to me.  I truly enjoy hearing of other aquarists’ experiences as it is my belief that through this interaction, personal growth and expansion of the hobby are greatly enhanced.

In closing, some of you may be curious about how I started out in this 35+-year career odyssey, please visit my web site (www.captiveseasaquariums.com) for our brief bio, which includes a few of our Las Vegas aquarium highlights and what we have been doing since we left Vegas in 1999.  FYI: The “we” I refer to is me (of course) and Mikki, my wife and partner since 1982.  Mikki quickly embraced my love of marine animals and aquariums and has been working by my side each and every day and every step of the way and still does.  She is a remarkable woman and we are a great team. – Lance

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