ChrsFrssll
New Member
Nano Back from the Dead: My BioCube14
Introduction
Over the past 5 months or so, with a lot of work and a lot of research to buoy me up, I've managed to resurrect my once-feared-lost BioCube14 mixed nano reef system. The crisis was a bad system crash, and an ensuing minor but prolonged existential crisis that led to a year of outright, gross neglect. It's been a roller coaster from the low point of my reef-keeping career to a high point in that few few months, and maybe by sharing the experience can help someone else find what they need to Keep Calm and Carry On. To pique the interest of anyone who might be reading, I'll start with a current photo of the restored system, shot just this morning:
Above: the subject aquarium as it appears on 15 July 2022.
It's July 2022 as I post this, and I originally started this system about ten years ago. Starting almost almost two years ago, things took a turn for the worse in this tank; corals began to die back, a couple of fish disappeared, parameters started spiking, and nothing seemed to work to turn things around. Eventually a full-on algae outbreak led to a progressive crash.
Disillusioned, I left the heater on, kept the light on a timer, backflushed the return pump every couple of months, topped things up with RODI water every month or two, and threw in a couple pinches of flake food every few of days for the pair of clownfish I knew were somehow still hanging on in there. That's it! No water changes, no filter media changes, no glass cleaning for over a year. Cyano, then bubble algae, hair algae, brown algae, and chrysophytes took took over every available surface, and the detritus load was....disgusting. One small blessing was the tank didn't outright stink-- but if you lifted the lid and took a good whiff, it might remind you of the smell of a leaky old dingy left tied to a piling and abandoned for a few years.
For most of that year, I considered the tank a total loss--as did everyone else in the household who had to look at it. I was certain I'd have to tear everything down and start over, but I couldn't find the energy or vision to bring myself to do that. I think the hardest part was admitting to my total failure as a reef keeper; the second hardest part was not being able to put my finger on a clear explanation for what had triggered the system's downfall. (In retrospect it was probably a progression initiated by an exceptionally hot summer, in our non-air conditioned home, that led to elevated temperature of 27-28 degrees C for several weeks--more than a simple clip-on fan array could mitigate.).
So How Bad Was it Really? Oh Yeahh...
Now I really wish I had taken a few photos when I first cleaned the half-inch thick algae mats off the front glass to get a good look in at the mess. But for me then, it was just too painful and embarrassing to consider it worth documenting. I wanted to forget the fruits of my failure, not share it. So you'll have to use your imagination. Suffice it to say I am sure 90 percent of the reef-keepers here would have considered the system a total loss--due for the landfill, or for the more optimistic, a few buckets of bleach.
Survivors
Part of what held me back was the odd fact that not only were there a few things still alive down there in that soupy mess, visible only when I lifted the lid. Ridiculously, a handful of things seemed to be outright thriving. Despite my black depression over the whole affair, it seemed the dead wasn't really dead. During that dark year a pair of tank-raised A. ocellaris tank-raised clowns had grown to maturity, established a pair bond, and inexplicably seemed in excellent condition and exceptionally bold and saturated in color. A pistol shrimp was never seen once for the duration of that down year, but every month or so, announced its unlikely persistence by way of a few telltale clicks at midnight.
Both Actinodiscus and Discosoma mushrooms thrived for the first few months post-crash, expanding over much of the available rock, binging on the nutrient bath and stolidly edging algal mats out of the way. But by the end of that year, the corallimorpharians were receding in size and no longer reproducing. Water parameters helped explain that recession I think--I was surprised to find that nitrate and phosphate were almost unmeasurable at the time I began the restoration process-- even though the water was yellow-brown with organics. It seemed the algal community had finally bootstrapped and outright won the battle for sequestering nutrients. A half-inch reef mussel that had once arrived integrated into a fragment of organ pipe coral also was still alive, thought it had visibly receded inside its translucent shell such that its body tissue was perhaps a third of its previous mass.
Those and a very few ever-present bristle worms were about all the life that was evidently present when I finally rolled my sleeves up and tackled the restoration job. In later posts, I may mention a few other species, like some palys, that though they seemingly had vanished, did manage to hang on and are coming back now.
These survivors were a real blessing. For one thing, they amazed and inspired me with their abject toughness. For another, they kept me engaged, if only by constantly reminding me of my responsibility to get off my duff and do what was necessary for their well-being. On the other hand, they also complicated things by making it harder to decide whether to tear the system down and embark on a total re-start, or to try to rehabilitate the system in situ. Ultimately, I think it was the Randall's pistol shrimp--who by the way has been at home in this tank at least 7 years-- that convinced me to try to rehabilitate the system with its existing sand bed and rock, rather than disassemble and reboot. Also, I didn't have any kind of ready back-up system to house the survivors in the meanwhile. So I took the risk that if they were all tough enough to handle the past year of neglect, they could handle a couple months of the massive perturbation in physical and chemical conditions that a restoration project would entail.
Restoration in situ decided, I could find little information online clearly outlining steps to take this task on. About all I could find was some scraps of advice to scrape everything scrape-able, siphon out everything siphonable, and change water until the cows come home. So that, plus some filtration measures, is mainly what I did--with concessions to minimizing trauma to the resident survivors. For example, I ruled out a complete sand bed scrubbing because I didn't want to disrupt the the burrow system I strongly suspect had been constructed and maintained by the Randall's shrimp with an architecture finely tuned to filter and manage water quality in its primary living space. And I didn't want to dramatically reconfigure the main rock-scape arrangement, as the ocellaris pair was and still is very tied to a particular spot between the largest rock and back wall as their home base.
So Far so Good!
When I get to my next post, I'll try to outline the steps I took in the restoration process, and how things progressed (a lot more rapidly than I expected!) At some point I should describe some of the mods I've made to the BioCube infrastructure over the years that I think have improved its suitability as a reef system. None of them are novel, but some of them play key roles in the current success of the system I think, so may be worth mentioning.
Above: This Bubble-tip anemone, now about three inches across, arrived as a muddy brown, fingernail-sized, injured juvenile on a live rock purchased early in 2022, just after the tank restoration. Its growth and coloration attest to the conditions of the restored system.
Introduction
Over the past 5 months or so, with a lot of work and a lot of research to buoy me up, I've managed to resurrect my once-feared-lost BioCube14 mixed nano reef system. The crisis was a bad system crash, and an ensuing minor but prolonged existential crisis that led to a year of outright, gross neglect. It's been a roller coaster from the low point of my reef-keeping career to a high point in that few few months, and maybe by sharing the experience can help someone else find what they need to Keep Calm and Carry On. To pique the interest of anyone who might be reading, I'll start with a current photo of the restored system, shot just this morning:
Above: the subject aquarium as it appears on 15 July 2022.
It's July 2022 as I post this, and I originally started this system about ten years ago. Starting almost almost two years ago, things took a turn for the worse in this tank; corals began to die back, a couple of fish disappeared, parameters started spiking, and nothing seemed to work to turn things around. Eventually a full-on algae outbreak led to a progressive crash.
Disillusioned, I left the heater on, kept the light on a timer, backflushed the return pump every couple of months, topped things up with RODI water every month or two, and threw in a couple pinches of flake food every few of days for the pair of clownfish I knew were somehow still hanging on in there. That's it! No water changes, no filter media changes, no glass cleaning for over a year. Cyano, then bubble algae, hair algae, brown algae, and chrysophytes took took over every available surface, and the detritus load was....disgusting. One small blessing was the tank didn't outright stink-- but if you lifted the lid and took a good whiff, it might remind you of the smell of a leaky old dingy left tied to a piling and abandoned for a few years.
For most of that year, I considered the tank a total loss--as did everyone else in the household who had to look at it. I was certain I'd have to tear everything down and start over, but I couldn't find the energy or vision to bring myself to do that. I think the hardest part was admitting to my total failure as a reef keeper; the second hardest part was not being able to put my finger on a clear explanation for what had triggered the system's downfall. (In retrospect it was probably a progression initiated by an exceptionally hot summer, in our non-air conditioned home, that led to elevated temperature of 27-28 degrees C for several weeks--more than a simple clip-on fan array could mitigate.).
So How Bad Was it Really? Oh Yeahh...
Now I really wish I had taken a few photos when I first cleaned the half-inch thick algae mats off the front glass to get a good look in at the mess. But for me then, it was just too painful and embarrassing to consider it worth documenting. I wanted to forget the fruits of my failure, not share it. So you'll have to use your imagination. Suffice it to say I am sure 90 percent of the reef-keepers here would have considered the system a total loss--due for the landfill, or for the more optimistic, a few buckets of bleach.
Survivors
Part of what held me back was the odd fact that not only were there a few things still alive down there in that soupy mess, visible only when I lifted the lid. Ridiculously, a handful of things seemed to be outright thriving. Despite my black depression over the whole affair, it seemed the dead wasn't really dead. During that dark year a pair of tank-raised A. ocellaris tank-raised clowns had grown to maturity, established a pair bond, and inexplicably seemed in excellent condition and exceptionally bold and saturated in color. A pistol shrimp was never seen once for the duration of that down year, but every month or so, announced its unlikely persistence by way of a few telltale clicks at midnight.
Both Actinodiscus and Discosoma mushrooms thrived for the first few months post-crash, expanding over much of the available rock, binging on the nutrient bath and stolidly edging algal mats out of the way. But by the end of that year, the corallimorpharians were receding in size and no longer reproducing. Water parameters helped explain that recession I think--I was surprised to find that nitrate and phosphate were almost unmeasurable at the time I began the restoration process-- even though the water was yellow-brown with organics. It seemed the algal community had finally bootstrapped and outright won the battle for sequestering nutrients. A half-inch reef mussel that had once arrived integrated into a fragment of organ pipe coral also was still alive, thought it had visibly receded inside its translucent shell such that its body tissue was perhaps a third of its previous mass.
Those and a very few ever-present bristle worms were about all the life that was evidently present when I finally rolled my sleeves up and tackled the restoration job. In later posts, I may mention a few other species, like some palys, that though they seemingly had vanished, did manage to hang on and are coming back now.
These survivors were a real blessing. For one thing, they amazed and inspired me with their abject toughness. For another, they kept me engaged, if only by constantly reminding me of my responsibility to get off my duff and do what was necessary for their well-being. On the other hand, they also complicated things by making it harder to decide whether to tear the system down and embark on a total re-start, or to try to rehabilitate the system in situ. Ultimately, I think it was the Randall's pistol shrimp--who by the way has been at home in this tank at least 7 years-- that convinced me to try to rehabilitate the system with its existing sand bed and rock, rather than disassemble and reboot. Also, I didn't have any kind of ready back-up system to house the survivors in the meanwhile. So I took the risk that if they were all tough enough to handle the past year of neglect, they could handle a couple months of the massive perturbation in physical and chemical conditions that a restoration project would entail.
Restoration in situ decided, I could find little information online clearly outlining steps to take this task on. About all I could find was some scraps of advice to scrape everything scrape-able, siphon out everything siphonable, and change water until the cows come home. So that, plus some filtration measures, is mainly what I did--with concessions to minimizing trauma to the resident survivors. For example, I ruled out a complete sand bed scrubbing because I didn't want to disrupt the the burrow system I strongly suspect had been constructed and maintained by the Randall's shrimp with an architecture finely tuned to filter and manage water quality in its primary living space. And I didn't want to dramatically reconfigure the main rock-scape arrangement, as the ocellaris pair was and still is very tied to a particular spot between the largest rock and back wall as their home base.
So Far so Good!
When I get to my next post, I'll try to outline the steps I took in the restoration process, and how things progressed (a lot more rapidly than I expected!) At some point I should describe some of the mods I've made to the BioCube infrastructure over the years that I think have improved its suitability as a reef system. None of them are novel, but some of them play key roles in the current success of the system I think, so may be worth mentioning.
Above: This Bubble-tip anemone, now about three inches across, arrived as a muddy brown, fingernail-sized, injured juvenile on a live rock purchased early in 2022, just after the tank restoration. Its growth and coloration attest to the conditions of the restored system.
