bluerider098
Active Member
Fwiw those par levels are plenty for Lps as you said in fact maybe on the high side.It's been a long time since I've updated this thread... partially because the tank continues to chug along, but only with partial success. Over the past 22 months I've had no fish deaths (KNOCK ON WOOD) which has been great! However, coral has been an entirely different story. I've had short term success with various LPS corals including hammers, lobos, duncans, trumpets, and blastos, but over time they all seem to meet an untimely demise. I've been able to dial in dosing of alk, ca, and mg to levels I would deem normal for a tank with a large amount of coralline and don't seem to be getting mass amounts of precipitation any longer.
Here's a recent FTS and the lone survivors.
About three months ago I took the skimmer completely offline. Prior to this, no matter what I tried, I couldn't eliminate cyano and dinos and I thought the skimmer might be stripping out too many nutrients. Since then, the tank has transitioned from cyano and dino outbreaks to a medium-sized hair algae outbreak which would make sense if there's more available nutrients in the water column.
The grand plan for this tank absolutely still includes corals, but I want to get the hair algae under control first. Because some of the hair algae was ID'd as bryopsis, I decided to give ReefHD Fluconazole a try. I left it in the tank for 3 weeks and It worked wonderfully on the bryopsis and even put a dent in the standard hair algae. However, once it was removed from the system the hair algae returned to previous levels. I tried another 3 week treatment, but this time it did not seem to affect the standard hair algae. During the large 30% waterchange post-fluconazole, I discovered the disaster below...
This is my probe holder from the sump. It was positioned juuuuust above the waterline and the rusting magnet was on the inside where it wasn't at all noticeable. I don't know how long it's been like this, but based on the amount of rust I'd have to guess it's been several months at least! This gives me some hope that maybe I've figured out what's been killing the corals. Although I have run several ICP tests over this time period and none of the levels have been significantly off.
Since I had just done a 30% waterchange, I felt confident that the best course of action was to remove the magnet, toss in fresh carbon along with some Brightwell Purit to hopefully pull any heavy metals out of the water column. I plan to let that run for a few weeks and send in another ICP.
In another attempt to diagnose the mystery coral deaths in the tank, I finally rented a PAR meter and took readings throughout the tank. I should have done this immediately after setting the tank up. I had been running the A360X at 80% intensity. Come to find out that the levels (even) at 100% intensity are lower than I expected.
Red = 8 inches off the water
Yellow = 7 inches off the water
Both height settings give me levels that should sustain LPS. So now the light will be set to 100% intensity going forward.
I think my next move is to introduce several macro algae species into the tank. I haven't decided if this means putting them in a refugium in the sump or ornamentally within the display. My hope is that by adding some macros I can gently pull the excess nutrients feeding the hair algae out of the water column without stripping the levels to 0 as I was with the skimmer. I just need algae barn to get some of their clean macros back in stock!
Anyway, if you made it to the end of this long update, thanks for reading! Here's hoping that the next few months are smoother than the last few. As always, I'll just keep with my mantra: Patience, patience, patience.
Good luck.
