ariellemermaid
Well-Known Member
We’re at a crossroads in this hobby. More like, we’ve spent probably $25,000 on equipment and livestock in a 200g system and have very little to show for it. What we want is a tank filled with coral and life, but what we’ve done instead is lit 1,000’s of dollars on fire. It’s been 2-3 years now and while we can keep fish alive, coral survival is completely random. Most softies and LPS do ok, but that’s not bankable. However, basically not a single SPS or acropora has made it and that’s all we really want from our tank. Plating shelf corals, branching acropora, etc. that’s our goal.
It’s to the point we’re almost ready to be done with the hobby. Our tank could not possibly be more stable. Temperature, light, pH, alk, Ca, Mg; everything has been so consistent with Apex and Trident. But we spend $1,000 on SPS frags at a time, they survive anywhere from days to months, and then they all die eventually. At one point we had a really successful birdsnest in our QT; it grew like crazy, but the power went out for 12 hours and it all died, down to the very last frag and ever since all birdsnest corals die within a month. It’s beyond frustrating. We got MEN in QT that wiped out all monti’s; no matter how much we dipped and scrubbed the corals, it didn’t matter. The MEN survived and the corals died.
I feel like it doesn’t matter what we post here about our parameters. Someone will say “oh just do this or that,” or the root of everything is x, y, or z. I think this thread is a great example; before folks realized who @Roberto Denadai is and what he can do with corals folks kept chiming in with what he’s doing wrong and why it’ll never work despite his incredible success.
But fine, we’re at our wits end and have nothing to lose except more 1,000’s of dollars. We have a Red Sea XXL 750, it’s naturally a ULNS with nitrate running around 0.33 and low phosphate. We’ve been keeping Alk 7.65-7.7, Ca 430, pH 8.11-8.25, temp 77-78. ICP test is within normal limits all-around. We’re using AI Hydra lighting with a range of PAR’s but 150-300’s around our frag racks. Of note, our last batch of SPS corals survived 1-3 months before dying. We do battle cyano blooms at times; we’ve used chemiclean but mostly it just kind of waxes and wanes over time. Zero hair algae except in the sump.
So, where do we go from here? Will it take another $10,000, or another 3 years before our first acropora survives? Or, should we cut our loses, re-home our fish, and just be done with this whole thing?
It’s to the point we’re almost ready to be done with the hobby. Our tank could not possibly be more stable. Temperature, light, pH, alk, Ca, Mg; everything has been so consistent with Apex and Trident. But we spend $1,000 on SPS frags at a time, they survive anywhere from days to months, and then they all die eventually. At one point we had a really successful birdsnest in our QT; it grew like crazy, but the power went out for 12 hours and it all died, down to the very last frag and ever since all birdsnest corals die within a month. It’s beyond frustrating. We got MEN in QT that wiped out all monti’s; no matter how much we dipped and scrubbed the corals, it didn’t matter. The MEN survived and the corals died.
I feel like it doesn’t matter what we post here about our parameters. Someone will say “oh just do this or that,” or the root of everything is x, y, or z. I think this thread is a great example; before folks realized who @Roberto Denadai is and what he can do with corals folks kept chiming in with what he’s doing wrong and why it’ll never work despite his incredible success.
But fine, we’re at our wits end and have nothing to lose except more 1,000’s of dollars. We have a Red Sea XXL 750, it’s naturally a ULNS with nitrate running around 0.33 and low phosphate. We’ve been keeping Alk 7.65-7.7, Ca 430, pH 8.11-8.25, temp 77-78. ICP test is within normal limits all-around. We’re using AI Hydra lighting with a range of PAR’s but 150-300’s around our frag racks. Of note, our last batch of SPS corals survived 1-3 months before dying. We do battle cyano blooms at times; we’ve used chemiclean but mostly it just kind of waxes and wanes over time. Zero hair algae except in the sump.
So, where do we go from here? Will it take another $10,000, or another 3 years before our first acropora survives? Or, should we cut our loses, re-home our fish, and just be done with this whole thing?
