Bobblehead
Community Member
As some of you may have read on my introduction page, I took over this tank for a friend that was unable to take care of it anymore due to family and work commitments. He has had it running for about 12 years as far as I know so things were well established. I didn't know much about running a reef tank as I only had some experience with a planted tank but thought what the heck, lets give it a go.
Moving day was mid February, nice and cold! Loading my truck wasn't too bad as I had a couple friends help out but I did feel the rush to get things home quick because everything was in garbage cans in the back of the pickup in 5-10C weather. After a mad hour or so of setup and adding newly mixed saltwater to the old, I dumped the clown, gramma and pj cardinal into the tank, not knowing at the time that saltwater is supposed to mixed at least a few hours ahead of time. My bad, didn't research enough but they made it. Tank looked like this for the first day.
And the next day
What I didn't know then was that the disturbing of the sand bed was going to release a cloud of not so goodness into the water column and in a months time, the tank was covered in algae.
My friend never vacuumed the sand bed as he was of the opinion that the organisms would take care of it. Right or wrong, I now had to do something about this so for the next month or two, I spent hours pulling rocks, scrubbing, and even used hydrogen peroxide to help. I also decided that the sand bed was too dirty to clean so I vacuumed all of it out slowly from April to mid May and added Fiji pink over the last 2 weeks of May. Shortly after adding the last of the new sand, I noticed that my alkalinity was dropping much faster than before so had to up my kalk by a fair bit. Again, at the time I had no idea why this was so but now after all the threads that I've read on here, I feel like the sand must be taking up some of the alkalinity as my dose seemed excessive for the quantity of corals I had. I also tried Vibrant in April and May, twice a week at the recommended dose but don't feel like it had much effect for me, other than causing a minor cyano issue afterwards.
As far as livestock goes, I started off with the clown, gramma and cardinal. I slowly added a clean up crew of 3 turbos, 5 ceriths and about 10 hermits. In my experience they don't do anything for the type of algae I have now. Sure I see the snail leaving its eating marks on the glass but the GHA growing on the rock is untouched and growing well. Too well. I then added a tuxedo urchin and a cleaner shrimp with the hopes of helping the snails but again, no such luck. Just recently I added a little yellow wrasse and 3 chromis after having them in QT for a month. The clown was quite aggressive towards the wrasse for the first couple weeks but he's mellowed out now other than the odd chase here and there. As our last fish, we have a white tail bristletooth tang in QT, to be added to the DT in about 3 weeks. He's my last resort to take care of the GHA, maybe he'll eat it, maybe he won't. Here's a side shot of the tank which shows the algae I have.
As for corals, I started off with some frogspawn, mushrooms and xenia. I added some zoas, lepto and acans to start, just to see how they would do. After I saw that they were doing well, I decided what the hey, the rock is aged so why not try some acros. And seeing as my tank is not huge, I didn't want to fill it with stuff I would regret later so my first SPS purchase was an RR OP. And its doing well! I think!! All told I now have around 9 acros, a TNT anacropora, space invader pectinia, some plates, acans, torches, zoas and probably a couple others. The only coral I seem to be having problems with are the acans which seem to do well to start then slowly shrivel up. I've lost a 2 head acan like this.
Lately, maybe the last month or so, I've been noticing that the small spots of reddish slime on the GHA has been turning brown in places, both with small air bubbles under them. At times the brown stuff kind of becomes stringy and stretches upwards which leads me to think I'm starting to get dinos. I got myself a Red Sea test kit for Nitrates and Phosphates and found that the levels of both are borderline undetectable, just a hint of colour in each. And here is where I get confused...all of my corals (other than acans) seem to be doing well so I've got to be doing something right. I feed quite heavy, for both fish and corals yet the N and P are very low, which I understand is being used by the algae. I would likely have to feed an obscene amount to get measurable values in this manner. Maybe I do have to dose N and P to prevent the dinos from getting worse? I did buy a couple different products to dose but will have to do some more research before deciding on a course of action.
This is our tank as it sits today, a nice combination of fish, corals and my algae farm!
And some growth/recovery pics of our corals
Just after dipping and now
The second pic does look bleached but in reality its not, just lighting and bad camera
And I suppose thats it for now, if anyone has any input, I'm all ears! Thanks for reading!
Moving day was mid February, nice and cold! Loading my truck wasn't too bad as I had a couple friends help out but I did feel the rush to get things home quick because everything was in garbage cans in the back of the pickup in 5-10C weather. After a mad hour or so of setup and adding newly mixed saltwater to the old, I dumped the clown, gramma and pj cardinal into the tank, not knowing at the time that saltwater is supposed to mixed at least a few hours ahead of time. My bad, didn't research enough but they made it. Tank looked like this for the first day.
And the next day
What I didn't know then was that the disturbing of the sand bed was going to release a cloud of not so goodness into the water column and in a months time, the tank was covered in algae.
My friend never vacuumed the sand bed as he was of the opinion that the organisms would take care of it. Right or wrong, I now had to do something about this so for the next month or two, I spent hours pulling rocks, scrubbing, and even used hydrogen peroxide to help. I also decided that the sand bed was too dirty to clean so I vacuumed all of it out slowly from April to mid May and added Fiji pink over the last 2 weeks of May. Shortly after adding the last of the new sand, I noticed that my alkalinity was dropping much faster than before so had to up my kalk by a fair bit. Again, at the time I had no idea why this was so but now after all the threads that I've read on here, I feel like the sand must be taking up some of the alkalinity as my dose seemed excessive for the quantity of corals I had. I also tried Vibrant in April and May, twice a week at the recommended dose but don't feel like it had much effect for me, other than causing a minor cyano issue afterwards.
As far as livestock goes, I started off with the clown, gramma and cardinal. I slowly added a clean up crew of 3 turbos, 5 ceriths and about 10 hermits. In my experience they don't do anything for the type of algae I have now. Sure I see the snail leaving its eating marks on the glass but the GHA growing on the rock is untouched and growing well. Too well. I then added a tuxedo urchin and a cleaner shrimp with the hopes of helping the snails but again, no such luck. Just recently I added a little yellow wrasse and 3 chromis after having them in QT for a month. The clown was quite aggressive towards the wrasse for the first couple weeks but he's mellowed out now other than the odd chase here and there. As our last fish, we have a white tail bristletooth tang in QT, to be added to the DT in about 3 weeks. He's my last resort to take care of the GHA, maybe he'll eat it, maybe he won't. Here's a side shot of the tank which shows the algae I have.
As for corals, I started off with some frogspawn, mushrooms and xenia. I added some zoas, lepto and acans to start, just to see how they would do. After I saw that they were doing well, I decided what the hey, the rock is aged so why not try some acros. And seeing as my tank is not huge, I didn't want to fill it with stuff I would regret later so my first SPS purchase was an RR OP. And its doing well! I think!! All told I now have around 9 acros, a TNT anacropora, space invader pectinia, some plates, acans, torches, zoas and probably a couple others. The only coral I seem to be having problems with are the acans which seem to do well to start then slowly shrivel up. I've lost a 2 head acan like this.
Lately, maybe the last month or so, I've been noticing that the small spots of reddish slime on the GHA has been turning brown in places, both with small air bubbles under them. At times the brown stuff kind of becomes stringy and stretches upwards which leads me to think I'm starting to get dinos. I got myself a Red Sea test kit for Nitrates and Phosphates and found that the levels of both are borderline undetectable, just a hint of colour in each. And here is where I get confused...all of my corals (other than acans) seem to be doing well so I've got to be doing something right. I feed quite heavy, for both fish and corals yet the N and P are very low, which I understand is being used by the algae. I would likely have to feed an obscene amount to get measurable values in this manner. Maybe I do have to dose N and P to prevent the dinos from getting worse? I did buy a couple different products to dose but will have to do some more research before deciding on a course of action.
This is our tank as it sits today, a nice combination of fish, corals and my algae farm!
And some growth/recovery pics of our corals
Just after dipping and now
The second pic does look bleached but in reality its not, just lighting and bad camera
And I suppose thats it for now, if anyone has any input, I'm all ears! Thanks for reading!
Last edited:
