The little one died when I did a water change from the big tank in preparation to move it. I bought some more eggs, a pack of about 30 and decided to hatch them in the bigger tank again. I had maybe 5 hatch and they all died inside a week. That's 3 failures in a row.

I'm now thinking; this tank I'm using was owned by fish novices and the water was like pea soup when I came round and rescued their barbs. They quite probably put in an algae killer at some point to try to clean it up or even snail killer as they had some green mush in the tank that may have once been plants too. These things often contain copper in which case up I'm right up the spout trying to use this tank for triops. It would explain the appalling hatch and survival rates. Perhaps I'll try killifish but not at the moment.

Work has been killing me, while trying to do this several new projects have turned up and thanks to this and a primary server going knockers up I've been regularly working 8am to 6pm then 10pm to 2am during the week and then 8am to 4pm Sunday. This has effected both my enjoyment of the tanks and my sense of humour.

So I get home last Friday and found Dory had a serious fungal infection that wasn't there the night before. Looks like she banged her head and got an infection. Now Dory is not a fish that enjoys attention and the only way I could catch her is to strip the tank and drain it to 6" of water. (had to do it before) Even then it would be difficult. I really couldn't face the destruction and wasn't convinced that it was a good idea considering my tank is FOWLR (and a few soft corals more or less thrown in.) So I picked up my invert friendly, "reef safe", oodinex, turned off the carbon and UV and dosed accordingly.

Instantly the mushrooms shrivelled, the cowrie hid and the torch coral disintegrated (although the torch has been on its way out for months now). 3 days of this and the mushrooms appear to be recovering, the cowrie is unhappy but alive and I no longer have a flatworm problem. Better still Dory is improved but this was a very dramatic example of what 'reef safe' actually means. Terrible. I need to get things back in control and I need to find and train someone to look after all these fish for me because next year I'm going to Florida for 3 weeks.

As you can imagine with all this and 2 kids that are currently 'testing boundaries' I've taken the only sensible course of action with the triop project... I give up.