A new year for this coral tank. The last year! In September we will close the museum/aquarium since we are going to rebuild the whole builing. And we will construct a new building for the new Aquarium! This work will take about 3 years and during that time we will have to move all the corals and the fish(the ones we'll keep) to a smaller room in our building. There we will set up smaller tanks for the corals, and hopefully after 3 years we will have a lot of corals to move into the new Aquarium
The last weeks has given us some extra work due to 2 failing pumps, one skimmer pump and the retur pump. And the power went down in our sump room. This happened at midnight of course, and somehow the alarm didn't work(or we couldn't see anything wrong when the alarm went off). So the water level was 3 cm lower then usual for about 6 hours in the main tank and the tips of some corals died(when the returpump was off). One interesting thing about this was to see what kind of corals who died and what kind who survived. Like we have seen before the Seriatopora species didn't do well and the most of the Acroporas survived. The Stylopora also died. But again, only the tips of the corals, so this failure didn't do much for the whole tank. The water movement was on in the tank etc.
Another thing we see in this system is the difference in the main tank and the 3 smaller tanks connected to the same sump. The nutrients are low at the moment, both NO3 and PO4 are close to 0 when we meassure. I've seen it coming the last months and I wanted to see if we would get cyano or not when the nitrate got really low. In the main tank there is almost no cyano at all. In the smaller tanks(600-1800 L) it has increased. My guess is that it's caused by higher turn over rate (tank - sump) in the smaller tanks and lesser fish there. It's too "clean". But the corals still do fine.
Yes, and a happy new year to all here at R2R!
/ David
The last weeks has given us some extra work due to 2 failing pumps, one skimmer pump and the retur pump. And the power went down in our sump room. This happened at midnight of course, and somehow the alarm didn't work(or we couldn't see anything wrong when the alarm went off). So the water level was 3 cm lower then usual for about 6 hours in the main tank and the tips of some corals died(when the returpump was off). One interesting thing about this was to see what kind of corals who died and what kind who survived. Like we have seen before the Seriatopora species didn't do well and the most of the Acroporas survived. The Stylopora also died. But again, only the tips of the corals, so this failure didn't do much for the whole tank. The water movement was on in the tank etc.
Another thing we see in this system is the difference in the main tank and the 3 smaller tanks connected to the same sump. The nutrients are low at the moment, both NO3 and PO4 are close to 0 when we meassure. I've seen it coming the last months and I wanted to see if we would get cyano or not when the nitrate got really low. In the main tank there is almost no cyano at all. In the smaller tanks(600-1800 L) it has increased. My guess is that it's caused by higher turn over rate (tank - sump) in the smaller tanks and lesser fish there. It's too "clean". But the corals still do fine.
Yes, and a happy new year to all here at R2R!
/ David