240g Blair Reef Project

[SteveG_inDC]

Exciting update! Babies!

I just noticed today for the first time that my 6 normally group-social cardinals have paired off. One pair is huddled in the corner and it appears I have a male with a brood of eggs in his mouth. Woo-hoo!

 

[Skynyrd Fish]

Nice! How are the anthias?

 

[ShepherdReefer]

Looking great, enjoy watching the tank being put together.

 

[SteveG_inDC]

Nice! How are the anthias?

Good. They are all still female. Not sure when one will turn.

 

[SteveG_inDC]

Livestock additions (These have been added over the past month or so, just updating now): Yellow tang, rescued from a tank where it was being bullied. Missing some dorsal fin, but nursed back to health by another local club member before I got it.

I also have been picking up some frags and even a colony of birdsnest, which was so brittle, I ended up fragging lots of little branches.

Mother colony:

Some ricordeas

Aussie green slimer

Miyagi tort (not a great pic)

I also have a blue throat trigger in QT. Local club member sold it to me, saying "he's a good guy" but this is definitely a female.

 

[LBReefer]

Update:
While the cardinalfish are chilling in the quarantine tank (observation only for now), I'm making some upgrades to the display tank.

• Installed Tunze ATO in an old 3.5 gallon reservoir that I used on my old reef tank. The float valve was trashed so I bought a new one and will be plumbing it to some tubing tee'd off from my RO/DI output line.
• Installed Tunze Turbelle wavemaker. Thing is a beast. I also have deep sand, so that's being rearranged LOL. I don't mind the uneven distribution. Looks like the ocean. Even has wave patterns, just from the pump set at 20% power.
• Set up the skimmer: Reef Octopus 250 EXT Royale edition. It leaks big time, so I have to check all the connections. Also, the supplied output line doesn't reach the water line and I can't figure out how to extend it. The pipe dimension appears non-standard.
• Installed two Kasa automated switches, so now all my lights are on one and all my QT equipment is on another and I can voice-control them all (and schedule them) through Amazon Alexa. I'm trying to stick it to The Man by not getting an Apex controller.
• Two 300 watt heaters are on an Inkbird controller.

I also started to cycle this bad boy. Big disappointment is that the rock I was trying to cure for 9 months in bins ended up completely sterile. Maybe I didn't dose enough ammonia (I hardly dosed any), maybe I left it out in the air too long while aquascaping, but it provided zero ammonia reduction. So I bought 16 oz. of Dr. Tim's One-and-only and a bottle of ammonium chloride and I've started his fishless cycle method. So far, I've spiked the ammonia, but it's not come down. Hope I get better test results tomorrow.

Too bad because my QT cycled just fine with ghost feeding it flakes. Maybe I should move the sponge to the DT since it's new and I've never treated it with copper. But I did buy it used and who knows what the previous guy used it with. I should have sterilized it first. Oh well. At least I won't risk moving my QT sponge to the DT.

I started feeding the cardinals and it looks like they'll take frozen mysid, but they are a bit big, so maybe I can get each fish to eat one mysid at a time. They spit out the pellet food, but I made some live brine and they went crazy for that.

All my family and friends keep asking when the display tank will be full of fish. They don't understand how important it is to go slow. It's hard. I was at the LFS and they have a really nice clown tang that I would love to add, but not ready. Trying to put aggressive fish in later.

I had the same issue with some rocks I was cooking for months. I think my ghost feeding was too little and the bacteria died off.

And great build. I've been following along.

 

[zukihara]

Looking forward to more pics and peogress.

 

[SteveG_inDC]

I had the same issue with some rocks I was cooking for months. I think my ghost feeding was too little and the bacteria died off.

And great build. I've been following along.

Thanks!

 

[SteveG_inDC]

Some coral frags. Miyagi tort, birdsnest, porites (darth maul)

 

[SteveG_inDC]

Overdue update

It's been about 11 months since my last update and a lot has changed. Where to begin? To summarize, I've had some major battles -- parameter swings, hair algae, cyano, equipment problems, kalk overdose/snowstorm, test kit and probe problems.

Pic above showing the worst of it.
Pic below showing more recent view after a long blackout.

Through it all, the fish have done pretty well, but the corals, not so much. I am basically starting over in terms of the corals. I got cocky and spent a lot of money on coral frags, thinking I was SPS ready, and a few inverts that didn't make it.

Guess what? Blue throat triggers really do like ornamental shrimp! Who knew? Also guess, what: it's hard to keep your parameters stable in a tank's first year of life. That's one of those things I read over and over and believed I was somehow going to overcome because... I don't know, I took some invincibility potion.

July: Kalk overdose
The tank being 6 months old I was still not very good at keeping Ca and Alk levels up. I ordered a couple of dosing pumps and was going to program the additives. While the package was en route I was dosing kalk manually from a kalk stirrer. I went out to dinner with my wife for our anniversary. During dessert I got a call from my son: Dad, the tank is all cloudy, maybe you should come home. Of course, I had forgotten to turn off the drip that morning. Major pH spike and Ca/Alk crash as everything preciptiated out. It looked like a massive snowstorm. White stuff everywhere, like a snow globe. All the fish survived. I probably lost some snails.

September: trigger popeye
My blue throat trigger has been a fun fish. Cool swimming pattern, big eater, leaves other fish and inverts alone (or so I thought). It even developed nice colors after being somewhat washed out when I bought him from a fellow reefer (he looked like a she). But it must have been all the wedging himself into the rockwork but his eye got grotesquely deformed.

From what I read if it's one eye it's probably not infected and won't spread. The fish continued eating and behaving normally so I hoped it would go away. It did go down somewhat, but in recent months it's been back and as ghastly as ever. I'd like it to resolve so I can sell him. I foolishly listened to my LFS who assured me he wouldn't eat (expensive) skunk cleaner shrimps. He ate the pair, or at least I assume he did. I haven't seen them since I put them in the tank 10 days ago. No evidence of their having been eaten, but they were too big to just disappear.

Same happened to a peppermint shrimp I added last spring, but I assumed that was small enough to look snack sized anyway. Bye, bye, trigger. I'm selling you to a good home as soon as your eye heals.

November: Tank crash (literally)
I was working on the tank and raised the light fixture (a 61" aquaticlife T5 hybrid) and the cable snapped, sending the fixture with 4 T5 bulbs and 3 Kessil A360s into the tank. A pretty loud pop and then all the power went out. This was a few hours before I was supposed to go catch a plane for a 5-day trip. I unplugged everything in sight, pulled the fixture out, reset the breakers, and plugged things in one at a time to get the basics going. Four weeks later, only 2 of the 3 kessils is working. None of the T5s works. One of the sockets has burn marks. The other pair probably has a bad ballast. Silver lining: keeping the tank dark for 4 weeks and then lighting it at about 1/3 the intensity of before mostly took care of a nasty hair algae problem I had. (Don't worry, it will return).

December: Banggai Babies
I do want to point out a very cool thing that happened. I started with a group of 6 small banggai cardinals. They were great, ate well, and formed three pairs, which I thought in a 240g tank with plenty of hiding places would be fine. Well, after several months of harmony I suddenly had one pair, most likely due to aggression by the dominant pair. That's not the very cool thing. The cool thing is how easy these are to breed. I had seen the male (presumably) go into these periods of not eating and having a full mouth, so I figured they were mating. But I assumed the eggs would be tank food. Then over thanksgiving I left for a few days and came back to find two fry in my overflow, which is about 18 gallons of water with slow flow and totally protected from predators. They've been eating and behaving normally, so I may be able to raise them to adulthood. Very cool thing!