Lucrio
New Member
Ok, long-delayed update--
Wins:
Things are going ok. Everything is alive (even happy) despite going on vacation for 11 days and leaving everything with a housesitter. I've added a couple fish and a few crabs and snails since last time. Acquired a few more zoas and a clove polyp. Need to glue most of it down somewhere. Pictures to follow
Challenges:
My "refugium" in the sump compartment is growing chaeto but also green hair and I'm not sure there's anything I can do about that except remove as much hair algae as possible each time. I expected the chaeto would outcompete most things as it's already so voluminous comparatively but evidently not. I imagine micromanaging nitrate/phosphate might help but that's sort of what I included the refugium for so I'm not gonna do that. If I had room I'd make sure it was high-flow enough to rotate but it's not gonna happen in this tank. It's still exporting nutrients so, I guess, it's fine?
Back when I had the jar I did a 90% water change every week or so, so worrying about calc/mag/alk wasn't something I ever did, but with this tank I went ahead and bought a bunch of testing kits from BRS and everything looked good except my alk was low (like 5.9-6.1). I knew (and thought it was weird) that my salt mix targeted an alk of 7-9 when most references say you want to aim for 8-12, but I'd watched other people do the jar with this salt successfully and due to some shipping shenanigans I already had like 2+ years worth of salt anyway. After doing some digging I figured out that's probably why I could never seem to grow any coralline algae in the jar. I've started adding a supplement to my freshly-mixed saltwater and adding a little to freshwater top-off between water changes. Still fine-tuning this in terms of dose and frequency but I'm already seeing improvements in coral growth, even the zoas seem happier despite having no need for carbonate.
Related, I hope, to the low alk level is I discovered you can buy corals from weird places like etsy and ebay and I tried that out a little because the prices were attractive and some of the selections were crazy. Unfortunately my ebay purchase (an acan/micromussa) was dead the next day (it smelled like seafood when I opened the bag, I'm pretty sure the heat pack the guy used was too strong for the little box he shipped in), though given the alk I don't think it would've done well anyway. I've sinced purchased a cheaper frag and it's been alive a while, hoping to see it pick up now that I'm fixing my alk problem.
I got my hands on a par meter. BRS doesn't rent them the way they used to and of the two LFS I have here the one that had a par meter for rent is almost impossible for me to get to because of my work schedule, but I got it done finally. I had been told, repeatedly, that the stock light on this tank is "not enough" and that I needed supplemental or replacement lights. I was a little worried I was melting things with the stock light and both orbits mounted so I figured I'd get par ratings for the stock light by itself and then map with 5%, 10%, 20%, etc, on the orbits. Turns out the stock light hits 75 par on the sand and about 280 at the top of my rockwork. I...am fairly confident now that i could've grown whatever I wanted in here (I'm not likely aiming for a bunch of acros anyway) with the stock light and not bothered with a lot of my expenses and troubles. End of the day I wanted more blue and more control over when it was blue than the stock light gave (I can't believe how little control they give you over the stock light, if I didn't already have a light-included fluval tank that had bluetooth controls I don't think I'd be likely to ever buy fluval again), so I ended up with about 60% blue on the orbits and 40% stock white to get to decent par for "daytime." Because of the way the orbits are mounted they would leave a shadow on the peak of the rockwork where my theoretically-most-light-demanding stuff will live, including the monti I already have, so I may experiment with turning the white up a little and the blue down for daytime. Given the par rating I could probably just turn the orbits off completely during the day and let the stock light do its job.
A blurry photo of a couple of the sexy shrimp. These guys are great. Obviously my photography needs work
Royal Gramma, also sketchy photography. I've messed with the camera settings to capture coral fluorescence a lot but haven't really tried to photograph the fish/crustaceans much before now. Will work on it.
Yasha goby
Mushroom island is poppin', have two new splits since I put them in here.
A zoa tried its best to die on me when I removed it from the jar and it wouldn't stay glued to things so I've put it in time-out. Will do a water change in the next couple days and either it's attached now or I'll replace/clean the time-out cup.
A pink guy from etsy, growing a new polyp on the side, not pictured.
Etsy #2, rasta I think?
Tidal gardens zoas
Anyway that's it for now. The challenges section is a lot bigger but everything in there has a solution now or one in-progress, so I think it's mostly all wins. Hopefully soon I'll finally have some coralline algae and get around to cutting those frag plugs and gluing everything down someplace.
Feel free to offer advice or constructive criticism.
Wins:
Things are going ok. Everything is alive (even happy) despite going on vacation for 11 days and leaving everything with a housesitter. I've added a couple fish and a few crabs and snails since last time. Acquired a few more zoas and a clove polyp. Need to glue most of it down somewhere. Pictures to follow
Challenges:
My "refugium" in the sump compartment is growing chaeto but also green hair and I'm not sure there's anything I can do about that except remove as much hair algae as possible each time. I expected the chaeto would outcompete most things as it's already so voluminous comparatively but evidently not. I imagine micromanaging nitrate/phosphate might help but that's sort of what I included the refugium for so I'm not gonna do that. If I had room I'd make sure it was high-flow enough to rotate but it's not gonna happen in this tank. It's still exporting nutrients so, I guess, it's fine?
Back when I had the jar I did a 90% water change every week or so, so worrying about calc/mag/alk wasn't something I ever did, but with this tank I went ahead and bought a bunch of testing kits from BRS and everything looked good except my alk was low (like 5.9-6.1). I knew (and thought it was weird) that my salt mix targeted an alk of 7-9 when most references say you want to aim for 8-12, but I'd watched other people do the jar with this salt successfully and due to some shipping shenanigans I already had like 2+ years worth of salt anyway. After doing some digging I figured out that's probably why I could never seem to grow any coralline algae in the jar. I've started adding a supplement to my freshly-mixed saltwater and adding a little to freshwater top-off between water changes. Still fine-tuning this in terms of dose and frequency but I'm already seeing improvements in coral growth, even the zoas seem happier despite having no need for carbonate.
Related, I hope, to the low alk level is I discovered you can buy corals from weird places like etsy and ebay and I tried that out a little because the prices were attractive and some of the selections were crazy. Unfortunately my ebay purchase (an acan/micromussa) was dead the next day (it smelled like seafood when I opened the bag, I'm pretty sure the heat pack the guy used was too strong for the little box he shipped in), though given the alk I don't think it would've done well anyway. I've sinced purchased a cheaper frag and it's been alive a while, hoping to see it pick up now that I'm fixing my alk problem.
I got my hands on a par meter. BRS doesn't rent them the way they used to and of the two LFS I have here the one that had a par meter for rent is almost impossible for me to get to because of my work schedule, but I got it done finally. I had been told, repeatedly, that the stock light on this tank is "not enough" and that I needed supplemental or replacement lights. I was a little worried I was melting things with the stock light and both orbits mounted so I figured I'd get par ratings for the stock light by itself and then map with 5%, 10%, 20%, etc, on the orbits. Turns out the stock light hits 75 par on the sand and about 280 at the top of my rockwork. I...am fairly confident now that i could've grown whatever I wanted in here (I'm not likely aiming for a bunch of acros anyway) with the stock light and not bothered with a lot of my expenses and troubles. End of the day I wanted more blue and more control over when it was blue than the stock light gave (I can't believe how little control they give you over the stock light, if I didn't already have a light-included fluval tank that had bluetooth controls I don't think I'd be likely to ever buy fluval again), so I ended up with about 60% blue on the orbits and 40% stock white to get to decent par for "daytime." Because of the way the orbits are mounted they would leave a shadow on the peak of the rockwork where my theoretically-most-light-demanding stuff will live, including the monti I already have, so I may experiment with turning the white up a little and the blue down for daytime. Given the par rating I could probably just turn the orbits off completely during the day and let the stock light do its job.
A blurry photo of a couple of the sexy shrimp. These guys are great. Obviously my photography needs work
Royal Gramma, also sketchy photography. I've messed with the camera settings to capture coral fluorescence a lot but haven't really tried to photograph the fish/crustaceans much before now. Will work on it.
Yasha goby
Mushroom island is poppin', have two new splits since I put them in here.
A zoa tried its best to die on me when I removed it from the jar and it wouldn't stay glued to things so I've put it in time-out. Will do a water change in the next couple days and either it's attached now or I'll replace/clean the time-out cup.
A pink guy from etsy, growing a new polyp on the side, not pictured.
Etsy #2, rasta I think?
Tidal gardens zoas
Anyway that's it for now. The challenges section is a lot bigger but everything in there has a solution now or one in-progress, so I think it's mostly all wins. Hopefully soon I'll finally have some coralline algae and get around to cutting those frag plugs and gluing everything down someplace.
Feel free to offer advice or constructive criticism.
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