Fishless Cycle Advice

[brandon429]

Owners of very large reef setups have to try their best with numbers testing and water only actions due to inaccessible scapes

But that's not your tank. Use it's accessibility to simply cheat the entire uglies loop and just force the tank to comply

Or just buy true coralline skip cycle matured live rock from a pet store, not from the mail, and switch it out for that white rock. Too many options but at least these are ones we didn't see in the thread, they're rare options the masses don't try

Light power is for sure your #1 thing to lower and sustain, that anemone will move to brighter spaces if needed. Only increase lighting when that rock starts to age and not be reflective bone white

Cured rock from a pet store looks and functions totally opposite of white rock in dinos battles WHEN lighting controls are factored and adjusted and when a halfway decent quarantine effort helps to eliminate some of the worst strains ever getting into the main tank.

 

[brandon429]

these are just my opinions as a self appointed aggregator and regurgitator of what 22 years of web threads look like in hindsight. other aggregating methods may find another alternate pattern for better outcomes (please link that here asap when found for comparison)

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I hate to recommend test- based dinos control to anyone on the web until a simple search on test kit accuracy audits shows much tighter ranges.

I would add that I don’t think a tight range is needed to reduce dino chances.

If one adds 3 ppm nitrate and 0.02 ppm phosphate per day to water that reads low as a way to reduce dino chances on bare dry rock, then if the real values were actually higher, there’s no big issue in having them a little bit higher still.

 

[iannarelli]

***qt hypocrite alert

I myself do not qt. and for the times bad things got into my tank, I directly ripped out those bad things in 1 minute, I left only the good things in place all these years. so yes I'm skipping quarantine, but I triple dog dare six strands of GHA to show up in my reef. it's too scared to do so lol

when a bad aiptasia anemone hitched in because I didn't quarantine, instead if injecting it, or boiling the area like the masses do, I cut the rock portion the anemone was on clean off the rest of the rock and thew it out. hard to have an aiptasia problem with an attitude like that

in a small tank, you can attitude it into compliance against any invasion I'm 100% sure of that its the large tankers/the inaccessible that need all the extra luck.

I, too, do not QT... not because I don't believe in all the benefits, but it's just somewhat impractical in a NYC apartment. If I got rid of my 75 gal freshwater tank, I'd have room. But I'm already making RODI water in my shower, and mixing salt water in my hallway, and currently the soaking tub is "Spare Aquarium Parts Depot". When I get around to cleaning that out, I could potentially set one up there. Or maybe I just get rid of my bed and sleep on the couch. Haha.

I try to compensate for that by purchasing fish locally from LFS who quarantine, observing fish to make sure they're healthy/no impulse buy, dipping all my corals, and running a beefy UV that all of my return water goes through.

 

[iannarelli]

One thing that impacts that thread is the reported accuracy of numbers stated

Notice how in 99% of jobs listed there, any parameter measurement is accepted as accurate by all respondents? If you say your nitrate is zero, they'll agree every time and aim to fix that. That's nearly every job shown.

Check the pages, when someone posts their nitrate or po4 levels, the umpires make the advice based on the numbers posted. Rarely are the levels verified or challenged.

But what if we take time to search out test kit accuracy comparison posts across the web for nitrate or po4 across kit brands and types = 100pm~ variance in reported nitrates from the same sample, depending on the kit. How accurate are hobby test kits in the hands of the masses?


I hate to recommend test- based dinos control to anyone on the web until a simple search on test kit accuracy audits shows much tighter ranges.

If the chemists here were running the tests and reporting the levels and were only using pool strips I'd believe them. Chemists and the well- practiced don't have trouble verifying their levels in threads, but that's not the masses.




reef2reef has ten+ pages of search returns on test kit audits, and the grand summary of those threads for me is that everyone is horseshoeing in this game and dealing in guesstimates if they're not chemists


And that for me explains why the 90% majority outcome of that huge thread is dinos tanks becoming GHA tanks and cyano tanks, but almost never simply fixed tanks. Invasion species outcompete one another agreed but the tanks by and large don't look good even after 6 months of work, I feel that trending is fairly shown in a scan of pics from that giant dinos thread

we're adding fertilizer to peoples tanks who reported 0 nitrates but that was just on red sea colorimetric kit (for example) but ran on another kit the fact they were actually at 100 ppm before we drove it to 190ppm easily explains the gha forest situation





Manual gardening as stated, lifting out your rocks and cleaning them off, then setting back clean in the tank is harmless and fast and can't cause dinos and has nothing to do with numbers debates. It's using manual reef dentistry to force opposite results until someone writes an 800 page thread where 90% of the jobs on file are simple fixes

We don't have one of those yet, so we all do the best we can

When your rocks are full of coralline and corals, the system will be more mature and better rejecting of dinos

Work the rocks manually until you don't have to.

Quarantine matters big time also





Observing your new coral batches in a separate holding system for months before they go into your tank is what pros do, the non masses. You can check for invasive dinos this way, aiptasias etc. It's what zoos do

Nobody who manages 1 million dollar zoo reef systems inputs new animals into the tank, that's what the masses on reef forums do

Reading up on quarantine building is an opposite something that benefits this planned battle and you'll see it's criticality in fish disease management



***qt hypocrite alert

I myself do not qt. and for the times bad things got into my tank, I directly ripped out those bad things in 1 minute, I left only the good things in place all these years. so yes I'm skipping quarantine, but I triple dog dare six strands of GHA to show up in my reef. it's too scared to do so lol

when a bad aiptasia anemone hitched in because I didn't quarantine, instead if injecting it, or boiling the area like the masses do, I cut the rock portion the anemone was on clean off the rest of the rock and thew it out. hard to have an aiptasia problem with an attitude like that

in a small tank, you can attitude it into compliance against any invasion I'm 100% sure of that its the large tankers/the inaccessible that need all the extra luck.

I hear EVERYTHING you're saying. And now I'm wishing I didn't glue all of my rocks together. The one in the back is massive. I can lift it, but it was unwieldy before it was saturated with water and slippery with marine growth. I've searched for some good settings for my lights (A360x), but I'd say I'm could use some advice in the best levels. Should I just run their acclimation mode? Or is there a PAR level I should shoot for? I'd be more worried about the clam than the nem but I could always relocate him even higher on the rocks.

Funny you mention aptasia, I just noticed one hiding on a frag plug. Going to take the whole thing out and refrag the coral.

 

[iannarelli]

I would add that I don’t think a tight range is needed to reduce dino chances.

If one adds 3 ppm nitrate and 0.02 ppm phosphate per day to water that reads low as a way to reduce dino chances on bare dry rock, then if the real values were actually higher, there’s no big issue in having them a little bit higher still.

Hey Randy! Since I'm sure you've posted it somewhere already, do you have a link to your recipes for dosing nitrate and phosphate? If I wind up being low, I imagine it would be better to control it rather than feed heavier.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

I'm even thinking of getting a Purple Short Spine Pincushion Urchin, which most sites list as a pseudoboletia maculata or just pseudoboletia sp. and naming it Grimace! I think it's misidentified though, and is really is a Passion salmacis urchin (Salmacis virgulata) based on this. Perhaps @ISpeakForTheSeas could confirm. Anyway, I digress.

Yeah, it's definitely not Pseudoboletia maculata; Pseudoboletia indiana is a possibility, Lytechinus variegatus is another (both of these can be white with purple spines, but aren't necessarily), and Salmacis virgulata is another.

Honestly, probably the easiest way to tell them apart (with some margin of error) would be their ocean of origin, but there are ways to use their tests (their shells) to tell them apart. I would not be surprised at all to find if two or all three of those species are being sold as Purple Short Spine/Pincushion Urchins though.

 

[iannarelli]

Yeah, it's definitely not Pseudoboletia maculata; Pseudoboletia indiana is a possibility, Lytechinus variegatus is another (both of these can be white with purple spines, but aren't necessarily), and Salmacis virgulata is another.

Honestly, probably the easiest way to tell them apart (with some margin of error) would be their ocean of origin, but there are ways to use their tests (their shells) to tell them apart. I would not be surprised at all to find if two or all three of those species are being sold as Purple Short Spine/Pincushion Urchins though.

I ordered on from @AquaSD (listing photo below), and it will get here next Wednesday, so, if you'd like to try and make a determination, let me know what photos or any other info you'd need. Based on the stock photo, it looks very similar to the photos in my original link.

I definitely can see Pseudoboletia indiana:

or Lytechinus variegatus:

(assuming these photos are attributed to the correct species) too! Any of them will make a fine "Grimace". In the meantime, maybe AquaSD knows the ocean of origin, or can find out from their distributor.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

if you'd like to try and make a determination, let me know what photos or any other info you'd need.

A close up pic of the top of the urchin and the bottom of the urchin would be good, as well as pics of the spines:

-Salmacis virgulata has small spines on top and large, flat-tipped spines down lower on the test.

-Pseudoboletia indiana is hard to find info on, but it's differentiated from the relatively well-studied P. maculata by the color (P. maculata has spots while P. indiana is just white), so based on P. maculata, I would expect all the spines to be the same size.

-Lytechinus variegatus has large spines and small spines with the large spines getting narrower toward the top rather than flattening out.

So, you should be able to differentiate them based on the spines (beyond that you'd need clear, close up photos of things like the holes the tube feet come out from, the pedicellariae, the ambulacra and interambulacra, etc. which are much harder to see on live specimens and which are much harder to ID from).

So, based on the spines, I would guess the species pictured in your post above are S. virgulata, P. indiana, and L. variegatus in that order.