Coral Update:
The remainder of my first round of coral has all come in and remain in quarantine.
I have found my first 2 aiptasia on two different corals during QT this week. It looks like I successfully killed them with calcium hydroxide. Will continue to closely monitor them for pests. The plan is to quarantine for at least 60 days.
Fish room update:
Despite having an exhaust fan in the fish room to exhaust the hot and humid air the large lights put out a lot of heat. When climbing up the ladder I am typically greeted with a significant thermocline whenever the lights are on full blast. I have been searching for a better solution to the heat in the room.
My solution came from the home marijuana growers of all places. I discovered inline ductwork fans that these growers use to in their grow spaces and created a mount to hook it into my ceiling exhaust fan.
I purchased an 8 inch AC Infinity fan which allows me to push a ton of air and also run it at lower power. The actual exhaust fan ductwork drops down to 4 inches, but I still am able to push a lot more air out than the tiny exhaust fan could and the temperature is significantly improved up along the ceiling. I am extremely pleased with the addition.
I recently climbed into the tank to do some cleaning of the diatoms and dinos I've been dealing with and fell off my ladder, landing on my back and onto my lead weights I wear to keep me negatively buoyant so that wasn't fun. Thankfully no harm done but I did add some anti-slip grip tape to my ladder now as well!
Tank Update:
I have been diligently battling this SCA dino outbreak for weeks now dosing silicates and bacteria daily along with testing my nitrates and phos, and dosing phyto and copepods weekly. I have had good success so far with the dinos dying out and getting my expected diatom bloom. I have finally stopped dosing silicates to see how things do.
The large amounts of hair-like mucus all over my sand and rocks have been improving on the rocks but not the sand. I took several microscopic pics and chat GPT thinks it may be a type of diatom actually. I have noticed a significant cyanobacterial bloom throughout the tank unfortunately. Most of it is a reddish/maroon color. I did start to get the large pad of deep purple cyano growing over my sand along the back of the tank.
Last night I climbed in to try and vacuum it up and it wouldn't budge. It ended up being this thick matting of detritus that was too thick to suck up. I manually removed some of it and then stirred up the rest in that section to try and get it filtered out. While I was in there I also began manually scooping up the mucus stuck to the top of my sand and removed it. The tank looks much better since I did that.
Still lots of work to go to get more of these uglies gone. I have an ICP sent off and am considering a blackout or possible chemiclean but am afraid it may create new problems.
It appears one issue I need to better address is the amount of detritus on the back portion of my sandbed. I have adjusted my lower gyres and their flows but I think I need to add my clean up crew. I need some advice on how best to proceed here. I currently have 3 conches, a variety of snails (including turbo, trochus, nassarius, nerite, magarite). I have an urchin hitchhiker from Tampa Bay. What else should I add here to keep the detritus well-taken care of and the sand bed well-maintained. It is very difficult to syphon the sand bed unfortunately given its depth.
Things I am considering are adding several cucumbers, adding more nassarius snails, adding more conches, and/or adding in some star fish, sand sifting vs brittle. I feel like my tank could support a sand sifting starfish given its size. Or would I be better off adding several brittle star fish? Or should I consider adding both? Thoughts?
haha this tank is already gorgeous can’t wait to see it come along even more! For this size of tank. , an order of 600$ clean up crew might be needed - I have a 20G with 30 snails / 10 hermit crabs and 1 emerald so just times that by 500 to get your number lol
