Christy's Reef Tank

christyf5 — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:24:00 +0000

Frag mania! So I had purchased some frags way back when. I was running out of room and a friend kept them for me while I was all “oh I’m going to get the big tank running soon” (which I’ve come to terms with, more on that later) anyhoo, 6 months later, tank crash etc. I have room! Plus I was feeling guilty that she had this fugly frag rack full of my stuff, smack dab in the middle of her tank, detracting from her gorgeous tank view. So yesterday I made the trek and got my stuff, I think I had about 9 frags or so of various corals I had ordered from CoralMaster all of which have grown like crazy. As well, my friend was nice enough to clip me several pieces from her collection, which is quite extensive and the most gorgeous colors!

So I took some pics and as usual I thought I was Annie Liebovitz but most of them look like arse. Here are the ones that turned out as well as a group shot Some of them I sort of know what they are, others I haven’t a clue. Here they are!

Acropora striata

No idea but all that yellow you see is actually green!

Acropora gemmifera

Acropora hairyensis (ok I have no idea but talk about hairy!)

I think this is an Acropora plana

Acropora rosaria

Acropora turaki

Dunno but it has gorgeous blue polyps

“Super grape” A. millepora

Acropora nana/valida

And heres the full frag rack! (2 pics so I could get closer in)

So somewhere in those two pics there is a yellow tenuis, highlighter milli, A. lovelli, A. loisettae and a A. vermiculata.

What fun! Of course I don’t know where I’m putting them all but man, what a rush getting this much at once!

christyf5 — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 02:21:00 +0000

New tank photo up top (hopefully as it was being a pain in the arse earlier).

The tank is doing well, I haven’t really been doing much with it besides feeding and waterchanges. Even the waterchanges have been a bit slack lately. Now that summer is over, I need to get back on track. The tank has been doing pretty well without my attentions though, I’m wondering if I should mess with a good thing

I sold my chiller. The new house has a concrete slab basement which is a cold as… well, lets just say its cold. Anyway, I’m actually having troubles keeping the tank at temperature, it seems to hover around 77 or so. Which is mostly fine, its the night temperatures I’m worried about. So far so good though. It hasn’t really gotten cold enough to turn the house heat on but when it does that will also help out. Without the chiller, the mag 12 really hauls the water, I’ve had to do away with my stockman standpipe as it was slowing the flow. I’m too lazy to put a valve on the return line so the tank is a bit noisier than usual, its in the basement though so I don’t have to hear it.

The dosing pump is doing a lovely job as usual. I was baking baking soda in the oven and using that but I was finding a lot of precipitate in the sump so I’ve given up on the baking part and am just adding baking soda to the tank. The pH is running a bit lower than usual (7.9, which is what it used to run with the calcium reactor) and I haven’t seen any adverse effects.

Had the camera out tonight, on to the pics!

christyf5 — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 03:03:00 +0000

So the tank is rebounding. The colors are coming back slowly and things are looking better and better each day. I turned on the ozone for a bit but I’m having to recharge the air dryer beads daily and well to be frank, its annoying and I’m just not seeing the benefits of ozone right now so I’m not running it. Yes I’m fickle.

I went to a frag swap a few weeks ago and scored a few new pieces to fill in some of the holes. Some sort of yellow stag acro, bright pink birdsnest, couple mystery acros, a green digitata and a really nice piece of pink milli as well as a couple of “colony” sized pieces from one of the stores across the way that was having a killer sale.

My frag rack is back to being mostly full, or at least fuller than it was. The delicate acro on the left was part of a full colony that I bought about a month ago to see how the tank was doing. Evidently the tank wasn’t doing well enough to handle that acro as thats all I have left of the original colony. Its doing really well though, and as usual, theres $50 invested in that 2″ bit of coral. Sheesh. Most of the corals on the rack are survivors except for the pink birdsnest I got at the frag swap.

Frag swappage

A really cool photosynthetic gorgonian from the frag swap. I’ve never really been much for these guys, mostly because all I see around here is that corky finger stuff which doesn’t really float my boat. This one is pretty cool though, and if it does well I might get a couple of other varieties now that I’ve found a source for it (fellow reefer).

I also got a new fish! I couldn’t resist. I’ve been looking for a midas blenny for awhile now and they’re so pricey around here. I managed to scoop one for a really good deal. He’s adapted to tank live “swimmingly” and managing to get into the thick of it during feeding time. He was a bit skinny looking when I first got him but I’m managing to get him fattened up a bit.

I also took a few pics of the survivors. This one is an acro I bought ages ago. Its never done stunningly well in the tank and was fragged within a few inches of its life when it started to RTN about a year ago. its managed to come back and has 2 other corals on the plug. One I think is a piece of the pocilipora behind it and the other is a piece of purple rimmed cap that I lost in a montipora eating nudibranch debacle last year. Yay bonus corals!

Acropora batunai from CoralMaster. I’m quite shocked this one survived as it was reported to be rather delicate and finicky. Its almost colored up to what it was before the tank had its various issues.

This poor tricolor. I thought for sure it was a goner as I watched it die from the base up. Apparently somewhere along the way it stopped dying and now the tips are starting to plate out over the dead bits. Weird.

Some of the most bright orange ricordea I’ve ever seen. I’m so glad these guys survived, they’re pretty awesome in person.

Super poofy blasto.

Happiest I’ve seen this acan in months.

This is a tiny piece of the really large purple nana/valida that sat front and center in my tank. At one point it was starting to grow onto the next rock. I lost the colony but this little bit survived and has even grown in the past couple of months.

All in all, the tank is looking pretty good for the most part. Some slimy green algae covering a few rocks and that crappy reddish shag algae covering the back glass, not to mention the joy of majanos.

Hopefully if I’m diligent I can get rid of that via turkey basting and scraping the back glass. I even see a few spots of coralline back there, hopefully it does well and outcompetes the algae. I guess it didn’t help that the skimmer wasn’t working for the past week and a half while I was on holidays. Bloody thing had a clogged airline it turned out. I didn’t get a chance to have a good look at it before I left and rather than burn the pump out or something I just turned it off. Hence all of the LPS looking so darned happy. Turned out the air volute had a bunch of zeolite fines jammed in it. Bloody stuff. Anyway, I cleaned that out and drilled out the volute a bit larger. Not much to really make a difference but enough to make me feel better and its up and running now

christyf5 — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 03:06:00 +0000

So the big move was coming up at the beginning of July. I had brought the clams home, housed them under their little strawberry container and all was right with the world.

Then I moved.

Suffice it to say, the move did not go well. Hence my not posting for the past month and a bit. Sadly, there was some poor timing involved and a very cold floor that everything sat on before it could get back into the tank. As a result I lost about 85% of my SPS. I got everything back into the tank and the water was cloudy and stayed that way for a couple of days before I realized it wasn’t going to get any better, after all its not like I had a sandbed to create a storm in the tank. I took a sample of water to the LFS and it told the tale: sky high ammonia. All my large colonies RTNed and the ammonia was, well, stupid high. I did about 120 gallons in waterchanges over the course of that week. Dosed with prime, stability. I lost every large colony I had. My skimmer was taking out huge cupfuls of the most disgusting gack I have ever seen/smelled (you thought regular skimmate was bad). I was dumping it twice a day. When I finally got the tank stable, it went down again with the last of my “decent sized” colonies taking a hit and the ammonia was sky high once again. By that time I had a scheduled work trip that would keep me away from the tank for two weeks so I left the tank in the capable hands of a fish friend who got the ammonia levels down via prime and a waterchange.

By the time I got home, the damage was done. Those corals that had been barely hanging on when I left were bone white. Some things that I thought were bulletproof were long gone and others I thought would be finito are still hanging in there. Odd. All of my LPS couldn’t be happier, I’ve never seen the polyps so large. The tank is what I will tentatively call stable. Mostly because there isn’t much in there left to die. I lost most of the frags on the frag rack, all of my nicer (read: pricier) corals were done for.

Lucky for me I took the clams to the LFS. Two days after putting the tank back together, the fish started snacking on them again. Once I discovered the ammonia, off they went to the store. In hindsight, I probably should have taken other stuff out of the tank but at that point, I wasn’t sure if it was just the ammonia or some chain reaction had started and didn’t really want to send my corals over to other tanks, only to cause problems there.

During the move, I also lost 4 fish. The 2 vanderbilts chromis, the pygmy hawkfish and a little trimma goby I hadn’t seen since the last time I moved the tank 3 years ago. I was pretty depressed about losing him. I also lost Bug, my bangaii cardinalfish. I couldn’t find him as I was netting the fish out of the tank. I had seen him a few days earlier but don’t know what happened in the in between. I was sad to have lost him too. Then to have the tank “crash” as well. Well you can imagine….

Anyway, my tank is pretty empty these days. Its pretty depressing and thats mostly why I didn’t bother posting. I can’t say I’m as jazzed up about the hobby as I was before. I’m sure I’ll get back into it eventually. Here is a photo. The 3 larger corals you see 2 middle, one behind the regal tang, are deader than doornails. I just haven’t taken them out yet, mostly because I am lazy and have only fed and watered the fish for the most part. The birdsnest just finished itself off in the last couple of days and I’m using it as a test to see how much phosphate is in the system (as you can see from the green one, there was plenty previously, I just added some phosban).

christyf5 — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:47:00 +0000

The clams are still living happily under their strawberry container. Although after I gave it a good cleaning it dind’t last very long before building up another layer of crud on them. They look ok underneath though. I think I must have cut one of the “aeration” holes on the side too big though and one clam was too close, I notice its mantle is all ratty looking and it wasn’t open very much. I’ve since repositioned him and all is well, he’s happy as a clam. Well.. a clam that isn’t getting nipped anyways

New things to report? Hmm, my aquatronica overdosed the tank on magnesium yet again. I can’t remember if I mentioned that. It happened a couple of weeks ago and the tank is still pegged at 1500ppm..well, thats as high as the test kit goes anyway. I know its overdosed because my alkalinity is in the toilet. On the bright side I have growth up the ying yang which is totally awesome. Plus nothing has died, a side benefit I’ll have to put the doser through its paces and see wtf is going on that it doses extra mg yet the ca and alk are fine.

Colors in my tank are coming around. I started dosing my little bottle of zeo potassium-iodine-fluoride again as I was losing the blues. Sure enough, there they are. Crazy stuff, I never noticed the effect of low potassium before. Mind you, I guess I just didn’t know it was potassium or that it was low and now that I know I can fix it..well, thats just neat-o! I’m wondering what other zeo junk I should start dosing again. The rest of the tank is doing pretty well actually except for that bloody green slimy bubbly algae which I think is the result of my home-job frag racks. For some reason that white eggcrate grows algae like nobody’s business. Its all over the freaking tank now.

Guess maybe I should work on that alkalinity, maybe that will help keep it in check.

christyf5 — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:13:00 +0000

I brought the clams home at the beginning of last week hoping that the fish would just ignore them as they had for the previous 2 years. However that was not to be. Within 24 hours (actually less than that) the clams mantles were just looking ragged from all the nips. And they’d healed so nicely!!!!! There were also larger nips than before so I’m suspecting my regal tang and scopas. So what to do? Well I was going to take them to the LFS but I didn’t think they’d even fare that well until I could get them there. Then I discovered that 4lbs of strawberries makes for more than just jam!

Yep, they’re still under there. That plastic can grow some nasty biofilm on it. Ten days and it needed a good cleaning as I could hardly see the clams anymore (on the surface anyways). The clams are having a good old time under there, loving that they can be open and happy without threat of becoming snackycakes for the fish. Even for the few minutes I had the cover off to clean it tonight the fish were in there like dirty shirts, cleaning off whatever goodies had grown. They look so innocent, diligent little cleaners. My scopas was practically losing it he was so excited, but as usual when I’m watching he’s got his halo on.

Anyway, not sure what to do at this point. Its rather unsightly having that plastic cover in the tank. I really love my clams so I’m thinking that during the tgank move the scopas will have to go. I’m on the fence about the regal though, even though he’s a total idiot I do like him. Maybe I’ll try leaving the scopas in the sump for awhile and see how the regal does on his own, if it continues, well I guess I’ll have some thinking to do.

christyf5 — Fri, 29 May 2009 02:31:00 +0000

Yay new wavebox! Yes I work fast. I was using a tunze 6100 in there as a replacement but IMO it was a poor substitute. My corals and fish seem to appreciate the wavebox much better, I think its because of the “interruption” in flow rather than a ramping up and down of flow that the 6100 provided. Oh well, both will go in the big tank eventually

Took a few photos tonight, here are the best of them

christyf5 — Sat, 23 May 2009 23:36:00 +0000

So my wavebox kicked the bucket. Not sure what thats all about, one minute it was working, the next nada. I’ve got another one on the say, great timing on a used one and my birthday I tried retrofitting my wavebox with a tunze 6100 but they are positively tiny compared to the 6260 wavebox pump and it looked kind of silly and really didn’t get the job done. I’ve just got the 6100 running now, its pulsing some but its not the same. Hopefully the new wavebox will be here soon.

Hmm what else, oh my frag rack is growing the brightest lime green slimy bubbly algae. Its really quite disguting yet a lovely color at the same time. I think all around I’d rather not hage it there. Plus it floats so every time I turkey baste it off of there it just floats around the surface of the water . Gross.

The dosing pump is still working out very well. The little coralline dots that I can see aren’t getting any bigger but there is a lot of coralline below the rock line. I guess it just isn’t partial to bright light. I do have a couple spots on the front glass that I almost didn’t want to clean. And some on the overflow and such. Still pretty exciting!

No new stuff in the last while. I know, weird for me eh? Oh wait, I lied. I got a couple of frags from some friends in Powell River. Oh and theres a group order I’m getting in on. Of course I have no room so its all going to someone else’s house in the meanwhile until we move. The last house deal collapsed so we’re hoping to get going on another one pretty soon. Looks like we may be moving early July now. Maybe.

christyf5 — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:06:00 +0000

I’m sure I made another post in between the last one and this one. Oh well, not sure where it went.

The clams are healing nicely at the LFS I’ll give them a couple more weeks before I try introducing them back into my tank. I don’t think there will be a problem but who knows.

The dosing pump is working out wonderfully, I was having a bit of a problem with low alkalinity (around 6.8 I wanted 8.4) and it was steadily dropping so I baked up a new batch. I think the previous batch I baked and then left out overnight. Likely it sucked up some humidity from the air and maybe went back to being sodium bicarbonate instead of sodium carbonate. Anyway I’ve got it all fixed up and alk is at about 7.4 calcium at 400 and well, the magnesium is over 1500. Its been that way for a couple of weeks now. Which I suppose is a bit high but… I’ve got coralline algae!!!! I haven’t had coralline algae in like 2 years! I’m totally stoked. Little pink dots on the glass. Whee!!

And in other news, I’m tank of the month on Canreef. I’m a moderator there and I run the TOTM so its mostly by default as I’ve always made myself or one of the mods the backup when another one falls through. Nice to showcase my tank though Check it out!

christyf5 — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:31:00 +0000

So the pinchy clam died last week. One minute he was just pinchy on one small part of the mantle, next minute empty shell. I hate it when that happens. No more small clams for me. Its just too hard to keep them alive it seems, whether its some strange affliction or their predilection for laying on their sides (even when you prop them up with something on either side).

So this week I had a bit of a rockslide, a coral landed on one of my clams and tore a small part of the mantle. In the ensuing days, one of my fish decided this was tasty and went to town on that clam and 2 others. It got to the point where I couldn’t even see the mantle because they were retracting it so much but eventually if I spent enough time in the room with the tank they would open their shells, this is what made me think it was the fish. They wouldn’t nip while I was looking (yes I know, anthropomorphic). By the time I got them out of the tank there were 4 clams affected. I still have one clam in the tank, its at the opposite end and is unaffected but I will be keeping an eagle eye as its my prized maxima with the blue spots on the brown mantle.

I haven’t managed to lay blame on whoever was the culprit, I strongly suspect either my wrasse or the scopas tang. The scopas was very interested in the clams and they were clean as whistles on the outside but I didn’t see him nip the mangles at all but he just spent too much time around them for my liking. As for the wrasse, well he’s just a rather determined critter and has a taste for meatiness so he’s on the list.

Anyway, the clams are at the LFS. I hope they do well there. Once they heal up I’ll try adding them to the tank again. I think with the torn mantle something was released into the water, much like sharks and blodd and a feeding frenzy ensued (although a sneaky one because they didn’t do it when I was in the room).

In other news, I’ve scrapped the calcium reactor and gone with an aquatronica dosing pump. I’m hoping this will be more successful in keeping my parameters in line. Magnesium has fallen way off lately despite my cramming the reactor with more than the recommended 10% of volume. So far its sucked up a goodly portion of the magnesium I ordered. Good thing I’m made of money