My giant clam is dying!

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Faciosity

reefer
Joined
Mar 26, 2009
Messages
1,181
Location
Spokane
I don't know what happened, but yesterday morning my big Derasa was happy and looked healthy. Last night when I got home, he was gaping a little and his mantle was shrunken in slightly. This morning he is gaping wide open, and is almost completely unresponsive. I didn't make any changes in the last week or so except that I threw some of my old shells in the sump two days ago. I hope I didn't reintroduce a clam disease that wiped out my other ones.
 
Is it possible that copper was introduced before and attached to the shells.

No copper. I lost 4 other clams over the summer, and thought it was due to my tank getting too hot, but that is definately not the case here.
 
It's a good possibility. All my corals and fish are doing really well though, particularly my SPS corals.
In a mostly SPS 180 tank, once lost a group of clams after a Kalkwasser issue. Spiked the PH and Alk. Clams then proceeded to spawn and died off one at a time, all corals and fish did fine.
 
I have a similar type of tank and just lost a Derasa as well. My other two clams (maxima) were fine. I discovered that my salinity was way low (1.022). I normally keep it at 1.026. This happened over the summer when I was not paying a lot of attention to the tank. I kept emptying the skimmer and I did not add the salt to compensate. I should have caught this. I noticed my softies not fully opening, which is a clue I usually catch when I need to add salt. The derasa was twice the size of the maxima's. I'm not sure if that is why it was affected sooner.
 

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