Andre’s Full blown 300Gallon SPS Reeftank up within a week ;-)
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- Thread starter PSXerholic
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Zuma
Active Member
Nice work and really appreciate the third graph. Really brings to light (pun intended!) how low the light is on our captive reefs compared to reefs in nature.
This is how the total PAR measured over the day look like in a graph, thanks to excel these days, it's relatively easy to make some charts for this type of use.
This is the Intensity curve from a cloudy day at a Reef in 10 feet depth.
I'm not trying to compete with the PAR levels the Reef reached, but like to compare how the curve characteristics compare to nature in a variety of views.
This is how the curves compare to each other, based on approximate starting and end points, and aspect ratio of the natural curve been kept. Very clear that I won't be able to reach the high PAR values.
Here the natural curve over the graph, referenced with start and end, as well the peaks at each other.
That is definitely something I can improve to make it more natural.
fcmatt
Well-Known Member
This was at the top of the main website page when I clicked to visit the site... but darn 69 pages to consume to get to the meat of things? If reef2reef wants to highlight someone's tank they should have a page that summarizes it. It was called tank of the month on a diff website cough cough. Give the owner a heads up next time?
vetteguy53081
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69 pages makes it a build thread and quite common
OP
OP
What the heck happened here. Coming to check and see hundreds of folks in my thread ?!?
OP
OP
Thank you Rev, I heard about your trouble recently..... sorry to hear that.
You know where to find me and my brown bottles in case you wanna try them ;-)
Here another pack as eye candy ......
fcmatt
Well-Known Member
I guess i miss the old summary way of doing things with eye candy pics galore all on a single page. It really hits home the way the author/owner thinks and often the writing style is humorous. Lists all sorts of good stuff. Reading 69 pages is 20% author and 80% others...
Andre
Would you mind talking a little about coral placement, pruning, and management. I like the “all corals” look and am curious how that plays out when you don’t know how a frag is going to grow up.
Would you mind talking a little about coral placement, pruning, and management. I like the “all corals” look and am curious how that plays out when you don’t know how a frag is going to grow up.
Skynyrd Fish
Valuable Member
Looking awesome!
OP
OP
Yep, mostly true, exept in this case the Author contribution is for sure higher ;-)
OP
OP
Actually, this is temporary now since 2 years and will be broken down in a while and has to move within the house fortunately only. But that will be a nice restart. Thinking about how to restart and what to improve right now.
I feel the tank equipment is pretty much set and chosen for running this tank down the road.
Nothing fancy really, just skimmer, siporax, 40 breeder sump, and calcium reactor along with bioball filter and a UV mainly and a Powerfilter inside the tank.
And then more sand and fish ;-)
OP
OP
That's actually a brochure filling question.
Usually when I got new corals, I glue them on a plug, even colonies will be glued on a plug, and then the plug is mounted on a spot in the tank where from experience the required light and flow is present. However, many times it's a gamble and you have to wait how the coral does at that spot. Observing for a few weeks or months and see how the tissue will look, the fluorescence will come along, how the PE is during the day and how the growth looks. Corals browning usually need more light, stagnant growth or hibernating like behavior canalso have to do with light/flow or even temperature since I nowadays tend to run lower temps in the 76/77 degree celsius to slow down growth a bit, so corals can develop and put their energy in coloration and catching food.
Then I have the chance to easily remove the coral if it doesn't do very well at that spot, and repeat this ceremony somewhere else in the tank ;-) After acclimation of new corals, and moving around within the tank, they improve or worsen with in 2-4 weeks usually.
In the beginning you leave some space for the corals to grow, small sticks need to get to a certain size before they start getting a kick and grow then exponentially. How they sometimes grow, you have to wait and see. I usually place frags for growout in the horizontal, which allows a faster growout later on since many new branches start to grow out into vertical direction on most corals.
Trace elements have a huge influence on the corals metabolism and can boost many things, but careful, there are lower and higher limits. Over the years I have developed a fun and easy method to deal with all of them without headache and stressing myself and it works in many many cases really nicely.
Fragging of corals that are already seen to come along very well, will make the growth even worse I see a lot, means they grow them even faster.
Reasons I cut constantly frags is that I first want to keep now apart from each other so that corals to avoid killing each other too badly, also it's a great opportunity to keep certain corals from growing too dense so that they remain clean by the powerhead generated flow. In addition I keep plenty of Emerald crabs to keep colonies clean, they act a bit as porcelain crabs which normally keep Acro colonies clean. Too dense growth is definitely becoming a point of trouble or additional maintenance such as artificial cleaning the corals with powerheads manually etc. which I fortunately don't have to do now. Not yet at least.
Fragging and trimming also allows too keep the colonies decent in size so I can keep a good amount of species. Right now I have about 110 corals or so in the tank, and some are still XL frag size and I ran out of room already. So a lot of corals have to be fragged to keep the size as is where I'm happy with it. You won't believe how much fragging that requires.
I did some more research on my calcium reactor and compared it with some other great tanks out there and the growth is actually quite impressive from the perspective of numbers behind calcium reactor performance. Here again I blame the pimped trace element levels for improved metabolism, coral and growth, and most important health.
So to answer your question in a single sentence, you play around with the animal until you found a good spot for it ;-)
Some corals I had to relocate 3-4 times to find a good spot for it. Also I know I could have for certain corals a better spot, but these are already taken by others. At some point you have to make decisions also which corals stay and which corals have to go.
This tank under this method is now a bit more then 2 years, and I did not expect this to happen so fast and so effective to be honest.
JCOLE
Grower of the Small Polyps
Awesome tank! Great looking colors! I am in the same boat as you now. I packed my 150 to the max and have a feeling in the next year I am going to spend most weekends fragging. 
ReefGrammie
Must...stay...away...from...live...sales...
Thank you for this!! I'm going though something similar right now and wondered if I was crazy, moving frags around. That's the reason I started gluing the frag plug to a piece of rubble, which makes relocation a little easier. When I decide on permanent placement, I glue to the live rock, but that isn't always permanent either!!
Stunning tank, and thank you for sharing your piece of the reef with us! ;Joyful
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