Finally uploaded new pics! Enjoy.
Unfortunately for the 180G tank, I have completely ignored it for the past 5 months and the colors have gone way south…Water change this weekend and some TLC will hopefully bring them back to full brilliance.
Other issue is that I added a pair of GSM clowns – they look great, but created a massive sand storm which covered all of my monti’s on the ground, this killed 1/2 of the setosa and a number of other corals…not cool! They have been removed to the sump.
The rose anenome is also at least 3x bigger that a few months ago, it has definately stung a few corals…Hopefully it will stay put on that rock, otherwise its out!
Finally, I added 25 glass carinals (apogon lepticanthus), I have about 18 remaining at this point, they look amazing, but I can also guess that the massive bioload addition has not been good for the tank. Lesson to me – change water more than once every 4 months! Lets see what a nice 45 gallon change will do!
Since the tank has been ignored and water quality pretty poor, the aiptasia in the tank have also just taken off. I ordered 30 berghia with some other locals and put 15 into the tank. I kept 2 as a breeding pair in the sump and am just now getting the first set of sub-adults from that pair to sell back to the community. I will also be supplementing my tank with some more berghia to attack the problem. Ill likely put an additional 10 berghia in the tank (all together in the same spot, so they lay eggs!). I hope that by christmas the tank is looking great again.
happy reefing!
-Kyle
Thank god I don’t have a bigger tank. I finally decided to pull out my rock work and eliminate my mysterious black mythrax crab that had been silently poaching my fish and dragging them away to their watery graves.
All the rock out, it took about 20 minutes (and a couple tea pots of boiling water) to find his burrow, and pull his boiled parts free. Once loose, it took another coule hours to clean up, place some new sand (which I had been meaning to do for quite awhile) and get onto the task of re-structuring my rock work.
In the end, I’m not sure if I love the configuration … but so it goes, one can never be fully content or else what would we have to work on next weekend!?
Got my new impeller/mesh fixtures from Sapphire late last week. The new piece is a rigid mesh (as opposed to the old soft mesh). Took all of about 20 seconds to get the cover off the pump, get the new piece on, and then re-install the skimmer into the center chamber. PRESTO – kicking out tons of skim mate (which is to be expected after being out of commission for the past 10 days). In fact, pretty sure the rigid mesh is kicking out more bubbles than the soft mesh, but that won’t be solid until the I can get the params back to normal.
Next up, tear everything out of the display – find the b$ast$rd crab that keeps killing my fish, and re-assemble. Details coming soon!
Almost made it a month … lost my nova skimmer pump tonight. Guess I’m gonna start looking for a replacement. All the guys over on the ReefCentral board seem to be having similar probs with this unit — too bad, it’s a good skimmer if you can keep the pump running!
Cracked plastic on the housing
here is a link to the original part (if you care to check it out):
Green algae blanket. That’s the only way to describe what was building on the sand in my display. I tried siphoning, some chemical dosing, but in the end it would always come back in a couple weeks.
I figured it was finally time to start fighting fire with fire, so I went to the LFS and picked up a diamond goby. I’d had a couple of these before (at different times) but they had a tenancy to not do so well in my tank. Not sure if it was the size of the tank, if they weren’t getting enough food or what. I looked into a couple of other options to get more sand turnover (engineer gobies, dragon goby, more nasarius snails) but in the end this little guy was cost effective and a fun addition to the tank.
After a 45 minute drip acclimation, I turned him loose. Shortly there after, the sand storm began. I’m guessing I just had an OBSCENE amount of junk in my sand, but the more he sifted the worse the storm got. I ended up doing 10% water changes every other day for a week – and finally the storm started to settle.
No that he’s settled in, and the cloud has subsided, things are looking MUCH better. My sand is looking clean and healthy again and he continues to pound out some serious turnover!
After a 3 month back order, my new Sapphire Aquatics skimmer finally came in today!! Rather than bore you with ALL the details – here is a link:
http://www.nanotuners.com/product_info.php?cPath=51&products_id=596
Installation was quick and painless. I added a bunch of pics to the gallery ( and a few randoms below) – check em out and tell me what you think!
Presto! The lip is gone  |
Lip is cleaned up …
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Kind of fuzzy, but you can see on the left that the skimmer body won’t fit in the center compartment with doing a quick mod to remove a small plastic lip on the tank.
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Got the new 14k pheonix 150w bulb installed over the weekend. Didn’t really take any pics because it was so easy to take care of. I also got some of my frags cleaned up and gave them a Revive bath. Would have helped if I had read the directions a little more carefully (or would have had my second cup of coffee before started in …). Guess I wasn’t paying attention and used FRESH water to give my frags their bath … not things aren’t really looking that good (I think I might have lost the whole rack – time will tell).
In other news, SJ’s mom sponsored us a new fish!! We have a new Royal Gramma – that pretty much does nothing but hide in the rocks – these pics might be all you ever see of the little guy! I’ve also got my new Saphire skimmer coming in the mail – I’ll have pics up of the install as soon as it gets here (I’m hoping for tomorrow!)
 Clinton + Royal Gramma
Clinton + Royal Gramma
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 Frags post cleaning
Frags post cleaning
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 Petey the Royal Gramma!
Petey the Royal Gramma!
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Kyle made another trip to LA over the weekend and was kind enough to bring me a spare frag rack. We had a chance to catch up over a 6 pack and then grab a surf the next morning.
I tried to clean the frag rack as he suggested by bringing some water to a light boil and soaking with some vinegar water. Unfortunately, even though I was watching the rack carefully, the heat became more than the plastic could take and it started to melt.
At this point, I opted to just clip out what hadn’t melted – give it a good hot soapy water bath, and see what I could do with what was left. Although I lost quite a bit, I still have plenty of space to do a round of Revive on my coral – I’ll be sure to keep more pics coming as the process progresses
