RBTA puking and snails procreating

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l'eau IQ

Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Joined
Oct 24, 2004
Messages
13
Location
Wilmington, NC
I did a 5 gallon water change yesterday with sw from my lfs that had a lower salinity level than normal, actually much lower. Unfortunately I did not have any salt on hand to add to it and I didn't think it would lower my overall tank salinity much so I did the change. It did, from 1.023 to 1.020. A couple of hours later I noticed my cleaner shrimp was legs up. Surprisingly my rbta only retracted slightly but looked fine this morning. This evening when I got home it still looked fine so I added some mysis to the tank for the fish. I came back an hour later and noticed the rbta was shrivelling up and the tank was foggy. It was puking out a cloudy spew of something and still is. I also have a ton of small snails in my tank that all decided to stack up on each other. They are giving off their own cloudy substance that the fish love.

First and obviously the most important question, should I do another water change or let the tank stabilize and the livestock acclimate? Is the rbta doing this to expel some bad food or is it due to the salinity change? Why the delayed reaction if so? Any help is greatly appreciated. I'll try to get some photos up shortly.

Tank specs before change: 29 gal long, emperor 280 filter, prizm protein skimmer, 2x65W Actinic, 2x10,000W fluorescent, temp=78, pH=8.2, Nitrite=0, Nitrate=15, Ammonia=0, tanks been as is for a year plus.

I'll get the new specs with the pics in a minute. Thanks in advance for any help.
 
Thanks for the advice. I did not have any saltwater on hand and it was after LFS hours so I decided to leave it since the parameters after the even were the same to those before. I was banking on the rbta being healthy and able to pull through it. Thankfully that was the case. It was back to normal this morning.

Now I'm curious as to why all of my snails decided to "spawn" at this time. Did the offgassing of the rbta trigger this by chance?
 
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