It breaks my heart to write this post, I’ve put it off for some days now. Kestra died, and the only reason we can think of is that we used coral epoxy- Seachem Coralcrete- in the tank. Everything I could find suggested that it would be OK, and though I felt hesitant I let John talk me into it. He feels horribly guilty, as if it’s all his fault. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT, JOHN!!!
We did this in the evening, and saw no change in Kestra’s behavior. The next morning, I noticed she looked “off” so I made John get up early with me and we did a water change. Throughout the day we could tell she wasn’t looking great- we had moved the freshly epoxied corals into the larger tank. Then we got totally confused as to whether we should just try to go with more water changes or move her to a different tank, we decided moving her might cause even more stress, and changed more water. In the long run, she was gone by the next morning.
As all this was happening, my daughter’s leopard gecko was going back-and-forth to the exotic vet. She learned how to give it a shot and was soaking it regularly. I don’t even want to try to total the amount of money we spent between the octopus and the gecko, but at this point both are gone and there is great sorrow at the Bentley Street Zoo.
The major lesson learned, the very hard way – is it from now on if we need to use super glue or epoxy for corals, we will be doing it in a separate bucket and giving things time for the chemicals to wear away.
