commod0re's UNS R90 Build

[commod0re]

On Monday my new aquarium controller hardware came and I spent both that evening and the following evening getting it set up:

I got this dual-core dosing container from Printed Reef to hold my reference A and B fluids for the ion director and plumbed it in. Now that it’s all hooked up and on, it kinda looks like something you would see in the background in Mr. Freeze’s laboratory… just needs blue dye in the reference fluids haha!

I accidentally ordered extra ref B but not A so will be fixing that mixup this week lol

The probe is doing some kind of preparatory soak right now and I’ll get to take the first measurement with it a bit later today, just after noon, which I’m pretty excited about

Unfortunately, NONE of this stuff, including the power bar, fits into the equipment area in my cabinet…. which is fun since I forgot to check dimensions before I spent all the money. So I will be putting it in the space behind the cabinet instead. The next step on this particular piece of the project will be to 3D print some kind of thing to hold it a little better than this.

On the software side my first impressions are: robust and featureful, but really bad UI. Absolutely awful. As unintuitive as it gets, it reminds me of Panasonic’s PBX management console from the 1990s in a lot of ways lol. At least most of it doesn’t need to be touched once things are configured. I’ll have to figure out how to get all the sensor data into home-assistant for better graphing.

On the tank side: I unfortunately no longer have the conchs. I didn’t see what happened to the tiger conch, the shell turned up empty after a few days, but I did see what happened to the fighting conch: last night, Harry the halloween hermit, committed conch murder, right in front of me. I attempted a rescue operation but it was too late, the conch was done for. All that I managed to accomplish there was to allow the two shrimp to get a few bites in too. Welp! No more conchs in this tank, unless I move Harry to another tank eventually first anyway lol

I still haven’t seen the goby again yet but I now hear the pistol shrimp snap at something else in there, at least once per evening now. I haven’t spotted it but I have clearly heard it. It’s somehow both louder and quieter than I expected lol

One more dose of cipro left on the BJD treatment. I’m pretty sure the smaller duncan did not make it. Every day, I get less confident that this will save the other duncan, but I’m gonna keep the treatment going to the end of the course and cross my fingers that it does work

 

[commod0re]

New lid arrived today:

Extremely pleased with it so far. It seems strong enough in case cats get up there and sealed enough for the looming wrasses

Another thing that arrived today: a couple weeks ago I ordered a pico pack from TBS for my wife to put in her new 10 gallon. She used about half of the sand and most of the rocks. I put what was left into my tank, mostly in the refugium but I did put one rock in the display. I also got a container of sludge and put that in the refugium as well. I left the return pump off for about 20 minutes but that wasn’t long enough for it to fully settle so it briefly clouded up the display tank as well but it’s clearing back up. I’m going to wait until it’s almost completely settled before I run the first measurement with the ion director, probably in another couple of hours.

 

[commod0re]

neato

 

[commod0re]

also interesting is what happened with redox and pH after I added the live rock, sand, and sludge - and it was just 4 fairly small rocks too!

the increase of both parameters began after the return pump started again... interesting! adding the live rock, sand, and sludge had an immediately obvious impact on the environment within the tank - for the better. I'm already thinking about ordering more lol

 

[TheWB]

It didn’t take much patience at least! It only took 1 week to culture 16oz of it into a gallon. It does need a bit of space, not a ton but some

Patience was probably the wrong word to use. What I meant was that I’m very unlikely to properly clean and sterilize the containers between batches. I would have good intentions but then I’ll slack off and the next thing you know the whole setup is just sitting there unused. I really wish I knew someone local to me where I could just stop in a buy some when I want it. The only option for something local I’d have to order it ahead of time from K&P because they never have any extra. That doesn’t work when I just want to pick some up whenever. Not really looking for a subscription. So I do without.

 

[commod0re]

Patience was probably the wrong word to use. What I meant was that I’m very unlikely to properly clean and sterilize the containers between batches. I would have good intentions but then I’ll slack off and the next thing you know the whole setup is just sitting there unused. I really wish I knew someone local to me where I could just stop in a buy some when I want it. The only option for something local I’d have to order it ahead of time from K&P because they never have any extra. That doesn’t work when I just want to pick some up whenever. Not really looking for a subscription. So I do without.

Ah yeah, I completely get that. There’s a very real chance that will happen to me too, and since I don’t really need as much as I can make in a batch, there’s also a reasonable chance that the starter I set aside from my first harvest will actually expire before I can use it to start a second batch… I almost need to get into culturing pods too, just to be sure I can use it fast enough to keep it going lol

 

[overhead]

On Monday my new aquarium controller hardware came and I spent both that evening and the following evening getting it set up:

I got this dual-core dosing container from Printed Reef to hold my reference A and B fluids for the ion director and plumbed it in. Now that it’s all hooked up and on, it kinda looks like something you would see in the background in Mr. Freeze’s laboratory… just needs blue dye in the reference fluids haha!

I accidentally ordered extra ref B but not A so will be fixing that mixup this week lol

The probe is doing some kind of preparatory soak right now and I’ll get to take the first measurement with it a bit later today, just after noon, which I’m pretty excited about

Unfortunately, NONE of this stuff, including the power bar, fits into the equipment area in my cabinet…. which is fun since I forgot to check dimensions before I spent all the money. So I will be putting it in the space behind the cabinet instead. The next step on this particular piece of the project will be to 3D print some kind of thing to hold it a little better than this.

On the software side my first impressions are: robust and featureful, but really bad UI. Absolutely awful. As unintuitive as it gets, it reminds me of Panasonic’s PBX management console from the 1990s in a lot of ways lol. At least most of it doesn’t need to be touched once things are configured. I’ll have to figure out how to get all the sensor data into home-assistant for better graphing.

On the tank side: I unfortunately no longer have the conchs. I didn’t see what happened to the tiger conch, the shell turned up empty after a few days, but I did see what happened to the fighting conch: last night, Harry the halloween hermit, committed conch murder, right in front of me. I attempted a rescue operation but it was too late, the conch was done for. All that I managed to accomplish there was to allow the two shrimp to get a few bites in too. Welp! No more conchs in this tank, unless I move Harry to another tank eventually first anyway lol

I still haven’t seen the goby again yet but I now hear the pistol shrimp snap at something else in there, at least once per evening now. I haven’t spotted it but I have clearly heard it. It’s somehow both louder and quieter than I expected lol

One more dose of cipro left on the BJD treatment. I’m pretty sure the smaller duncan did not make it. Every day, I get less confident that this will save the other duncan, but I’m gonna keep the treatment going to the end of the course and cross my fingers that it does work

Sorry to hear about the conchs. I thought about getting larger hermits, but stuck with the blue leg hermits hoping they would be a little more peaceful and less likely to do crab stuff. I hear my tiger pistol as well, usually a couple of times a day whenever one of my peppermint shrimp wanders too close to an opening under the rock. My goby is still missing as well, I searched the tank looking for bones thinking my ******* of a Royal Gramma may have finally killed it, but I don't see any. Could be dead under the rock for all I know.

That controller set up looks pretty cool and can feel your pain about bad UI's. I am an aviation dork and set up an ADSB receiver in my house using a Raspberry pi. People can write awesome software to collect, interpret, catalog data and display it on a map, use multilateration to fix aircraft locations that are not transmitting their location data, etc but somehow to set it up or to change something I still have to manually update some text configuration file(s) to get it to work. I feel like it is a test to determine if I am cool enough to run the software or not.

 

[commod0re]

Sorry to hear about the conchs. I thought about getting larger hermits, but stuck with the blue leg hermits hoping they would be a little more peaceful and less likely to do crab stuff. I hear my tiger pistol as well, usually a couple of times a day whenever one of my peppermint shrimp wanders too close to an opening under the rock. My goby is still missing as well, I searched the tank looking for bones thinking my ******* of a Royal Gramma may have finally killed it, but I don't see any. Could be dead under the rock for all I know.

Oh yeah I knew this was a risk going in, because halloween hermits are specifically adapted to cone shells with the side openings like conchs. None of my other crabs gave the conchs even a glance because it's not the shape of shell they care about... and normally, I would be able to say that Harry is my most peaceful crab, I've never seen him fight other crabs or pull other snails out of their shells and he was the very very first animal I put in my previous saltwater tank like a year and a half ago

That controller set up looks pretty cool and can feel your pain about bad UI's. I am an aviation dork and set up an ADSB receiver in my house using a Raspberry pi. People can write awesome software to collect, interpret, catalog data and display it on a map, use multilateration to fix aircraft locations that are not transmitting their location data, etc but somehow to set it up or to change something I still have to manually update some text configuration file(s) to get it to work. I feel like it is a test to determine if I am cool enough to run the software or not.

Thanks! It's been a satisfying exercise so far setting it up in spite of the difficulty. I've worked with a lot of different kinds of electronics and software over the years but this is my first brush with something like a Programmable Logic Controller. I think if I were already used to PLCs specifically, I would find parts of this interface less obtuse, or at least more familiar. The upside is that the manuals for it are detailed about how to set things up, so even though the interface is a bit clunky, it's not actually all that hard to achieve desired configurations. Although even with that, there are like 4-5 parallel manuals that each cover slightly different things, so I might have to search through more than one to find the answer on how to do something that I want to do, or to find a more detailed explanation of something that was mentioned in another manual

Something I've noticed as both a professional software engineer and an open source enthusiast is that polishing a setup/configuration flow is boring work, and especially if you're contributing in your free time vs getting paid, you often want to bang on something more interesting. And the config file is "good enough" so it would inevitably take a back seat to developing or improving more pertinent features. And then if that goes on long enough, more and more of the most enthusiastic+vocal users will actually defend the config file and create additional/unexpected friction around improving it... and at the same time, users have gotten both dumber and meaner in recent years, which contributes to accelerated burnout of the devs (who wants to keep doing free stuff for users who are so ungrateful?) so they spend less and less time on the project in general... anyway I digress

 

[overhead]

That makes sense

Oh yeah I knew this was a risk going in, because halloween hermits are specifically adapted to cone shells with the side openings like conchs. None of my other crabs gave the conchs even a glance because it's not the shape of shell they care about... and normally, I would be able to say that Harry is my most peaceful crab, I've never seen him fight other crabs or pull other snails out of their shells and he was the very very first animal I put in my previous saltwater tank like a year and a half ago


Thanks! It's been a satisfying exercise so far setting it up in spite of the difficulty. I've worked with a lot of different kinds of electronics and software over the years but this is my first brush with something like a Programmable Logic Controller. I think if I were already used to PLCs specifically, I would find parts of this interface less obtuse, or at least more familiar. The upside is that the manuals for it are detailed about how to set things up, so even though the interface is a bit clunky, it's not actually all that hard to achieve desired configurations. Although even with that, there are like 4-5 parallel manuals that each cover slightly different things, so I might have to search through more than one to find the answer on how to do something that I want to do, or to find a more detailed explanation of something that was mentioned in another manual

Something I've noticed as both a professional software engineer and an open source enthusiast is that polishing a setup/configuration flow is boring work, and especially if you're contributing in your free time vs getting paid, you often want to bang on something more interesting. And the config file is "good enough" so it would inevitably take a back seat to developing or improving more pertinent features. And then if that goes on long enough, more and more of the most enthusiastic+vocal users will actually defend the config file and create additional/unexpected friction around improving it... and at the same time, users have gotten both dumber and meaner in recent years, which contributes to accelerated burnout of the devs (who wants to keep doing free stuff for users who are so ungrateful?) so they spend less and less time on the project in general... anyway I digress

That makes sense. I run an audio feed of air traffic control from an antenna on my roof up to Liveatc.com. They don't make a bunch of money providing the audio. They send you a build, you install it on a pi and hook up a couple of SDR's to an antenna. They then log in to set up the frequencies. I wanted to do the configs, or atleast understand them, but they said it would take longer to show me than it would for them to log in and do it...I asked for a manual, not available. I get it from them, there is no money in what they are doing and if everyone asked to do what I wanted to do it would just take up their time. I started messing around with it and figured it out, but it took time. The ADSB data goes up to ADSBexchange.com, airplane tracking data can be valuable, but I am not sure if that company is selling the data or not. They may just live on advertising on their site. Their software was a little easier to use and required no help from them so I am not sure how their support is. There is also a larger community of people using the software. I wanted to look at and export some of the raw ADSB data because I was working on a little project to use a projector to display planes passing over my house on the ceiling that also displayed speed, altitude, type, etc (told you I am an aviation dork). I had to figure that out myself, but it was not that hard...never did get the projector to work. If I spent less time picking algae out of my tanks by hand maybe I would have time to get back to that project.

I am just a simple systems admin/project manager/technical manager, I don't do a ton of coding, My brain is not cut out for it, both my brothers are programmers.

 

[commod0re]

I run an audio feed of air traffic control from an antenna on my roof up to Liveatc.com. They don't make a bunch of money providing the audio. They send you a build, you install it on a pi and hook up a couple of SDR's to an antenna. They then log in to set up the frequencies. I wanted to do the configs, or atleast understand them, but they said it would take longer to show me than it would for them to log in and do it...I asked for a manual, not available. I get it from them, there is no money in what they are doing and if everyone asked to do what I wanted to do it would just take up their time. I started messing around with it and figured it out, but it took time. The ADSB data goes up to ADSBexchange.com, airplane tracking data can be valuable, but I am not sure if that company is selling the data or not. They may just live on advertising on their site.

My second computing job was doing a combination of IT and writing acceptance test suites in python for a local small engineering company that makes VHF transceivers and receivers for marine AIS and while we _did_ have manuals available that explained how to configure, communicate, parse serial data output, (it was all using defined standards anyway), we almost always performed the initial configuration (and, sometimes, the actual physical installation as well) for all clients for the same reason: it got them up and running much faster and more reliably to have an expert set it up initially, and so so few of them ever wanted to know how to set it up themselves anyway. Also, doing the preconfig allowed them to be sure that the receiver data feed back to their own system was set up and working. They had (probably still have) a custom serial data multiplexer that would receive serial data from various different receivers over a tcp port, combine it all together, and then output the combined feed. While collecting it also output the combined feed in multiple streams as well, a couple for use internally mainly for marketing and testing stuff, and the external outputs were all either paid or traded for. I would be surprised if something similar wasn't happening with that ADSB data. FlightAware gives a free Enterprise account to anyone who sends them a copy of their feed, so it must be pretty valuable

I wanted to look at and export some of the raw ADSB data because I was working on a little project to use a projector to display planes passing over my house on the ceiling that also displayed speed, altitude, type, etc (told you I am an aviation dork).

I live fairly near to two airports and also multiple military bases involving planes, and I have one of those USB SDR dongles around here somewhere, so I've considered trying to set up some of the open source software projects that can read and export the data and also visualize it, but have never really gotten around to actually doing it. Seems like a fun project though

I am just a simple systems admin/project manager/technical manager, I don't do a ton of coding, My brain is not cut out for it, both my brothers are programmers.

I've pretty much always done both, when I started with computers you almost had to be able to do both in order to have access to the widest variety of fun with it. for most systems administration I've leaned heavily on the linux/unix side for... gosh probably 25 years now, and so am generally pretty comfortable with the text configuration files. Having a lot of dev experience in that area too just solidifies my understanding of why there are so many things that still use them. It has its advantages but it's not always the most usable or intuitive, and it kinda seems like the older a given project is, the weirder its configs can be lol

 

[overhead]

My second computing job was doing a combination of IT and writing acceptance test suites in python for a local small engineering company that makes VHF transceivers and receivers for marine AIS and while we _did_ have manuals available that explained how to configure, communicate, parse serial data output, (it was all using defined standards anyway), we almost always performed the initial configuration (and, sometimes, the actual physical installation as well) for all clients for the same reason: it got them up and running much faster and more reliably to have an expert set it up initially, and so so few of them ever wanted to know how to set it up themselves anyway. Also, doing the preconfig allowed them to be sure that the receiver data feed back to their own system was set up and working. They had (probably still have) a custom serial data multiplexer that would receive serial data from various different receivers over a tcp port, combine it all together, and then output the combined feed. While collecting it also output the combined feed in multiple streams as well, a couple for use internally mainly for marketing and testing stuff, and the external outputs were all either paid or traded for. I would be surprised if something similar wasn't happening with that ADSB data. FlightAware gives a free Enterprise account to anyone who sends them a copy of their feed, so it must be pretty valuable

I am not sure how either site manages all the inputs they receive. ADSBExchange is open source and does not filter traffic, they show military traffic and traffic that has requested the FAA block all their information. That is how that kid was tracking Elon Musk's jet all over the place. That just means they FAA will not provide them flight plan information or any other data the FAA may hold reference the plane or flight. Flightaware follows all the rules, they block most military traffic and block information from people that request it. For instance, a nationwide major flight school had a young student take a plane out, stop talking to ATC and decided to commit suicide, sadly, by crashing the plane. People tracked the flight and made videos about it (which is sort of gross), after that the school changed the ownership name for all their planes and asked the FAA to block their information so people could not track their flights. I can still see them on ADSBExchange and obviously can see them on my own receiver and can see them while in flight with the portable ADSB receiver I use.Flightaware also sells their flight tracking services to smaller carriers and other parties that might want it. I could set up my software to feed multiple ADSB tracking sites, including Flightaware, I just have never done it.

I live fairly near to two airports and also multiple military bases involving planes, and I have one of those USB SDR dongles around here somewhere, so I've considered trying to set up some of the open source software projects that can read and export the data and also visualize it, but have never really gotten around to actually doing it. Seems like a fun project though

It would be fun, I think there are a couple of programs up on github that will do something like that. A small company has made digital boards that will show the airline, altitude, destination, etc in writing, I believe they hook up to Flightaware via the internet and do not need a local antenna, but I am not sure. They are called "Flightwall". I am within 15 miles of a joint field which is mostly navy (I am literally under the final approach for one runway), the Navy master jet base for the east coast, Langley air force base and Norfolk international airport. Lots of traffic around here.

I've pretty much always done both, when I started with computers you almost had to be able to do both in order to have access to the widest variety of fun with it. for most systems administration I've leaned heavily on the linux/unix side for... gosh probably 25 years now, and so am generally pretty comfortable with the text configuration files. Having a lot of dev experience in that area too just solidifies my understanding of why there are so many things that still use them. It has its advantages but it's not always the most usable or intuitive, and it kinda seems like the older a given project is, the weirder its configs can be lol

My very first job in IT was running a BIND server and a couple of Apache servers for a small local company. Man, that was a long time ago. I don't mind configuration files or text editors; I just would prefer I know what the heck I am doing....wait a minute, I had no idea what I a was doing the first time I set up a zone file, but at least I had some documentation. Funny to think about, but when I switched to the Windows world back in 2000 or so I was like a DNS expert to them because of my BIND experience when in reality I did not know much. I can certainly write a script to do simple things, I just don't have the focus to write an entire "program" to do much of anything. I somehow ended up in the identity space years ago and never left, not much need for coding beyond writing scripts to pull data from a database or to pull errors from logs. Don't get me started on old projects, some of the stuff we tried to upgrade or transition when I worked on a military contract was often written by someone that died 20 years ago, lol.

Sorry for sidetracking your tank thread!!!!!

 

[TheWB]

Ah yeah, I completely get that. There’s a very real chance that will happen to me too, and since I don’t really need as much as I can make in a batch, there’s also a reasonable chance that the starter I set aside from my first harvest will actually expire before I can use it to start a second batch… I almost need to get into culturing pods too, just to be sure I can use it fast enough to keep it going lol

It’s kinda a real problem, isn’t it?

 

[commod0re]

The thawing cup that came with my Top Lid is nice

Went to both Sea King and Saltwater City yesterday to grab a few things, mostly more snails (2 turbos and 10 astraeas), a pincushion urchin, some more salt, some sexy shrimp for my wife’s tank.

The urchin is pretty cool looking. It’s noticeably bigger than the tuxedo urchin. Close to the size of a baseball I’d say if that makes sense. Seems like the tips of its spines are light pink which is pretty neat. Both urchins are surprisingly active around the tank, which is pretty fun to watch


I also picked up a Neptune magnetic probe rack for my GHL probes. $65 for this thing feels like it’s about 3x the price it should be. In light of that my review will be harsher than usual, because a premium price demands premium quality.

It does look better than a dangling pile. The magnet is strong enough and it fits my probes. The threads in the block are clean and well formed, so the screws don’t bind up. However, they chose a fine thread pitch, the screws are long and fully threaded, and it comes with them fully inserted into the block. Each one needs to be almost fully unscrewed before a probe can fit and with the fine thread pitch, it takes a lot of turns. And they’re all thumb screws. That mostly only matters during the initial setup, but for that much money I expect a little more thought put into that aspect of the product. It’s not enough to make me dislike it or regret the purchase, but I would have gone for a cheaper generic one if either store had one lol

Both of my zoa rocks were getting too overgrown with turf algae and none of the inverts seem to want to help with it, probably at least too much length. So I set up and did a 10 minute hydrogen peroxide dip and used a toothbrush to remove every last bit of the algae before I moved them back to the tank. Hopefully it won’t be long before the zoas open back up. Some of them haven’t been open in a while because of the algae, but they all still look alive at least

I think the 10 day treatment course saved the one duncan from BJD. I’m now just keeping an eye on that coral to see if it starts to improve again. The fish and crabs are doing well at least

 

[commod0re]

sad news today: we lost all of the fish we had in the tank. We are fairly certain it was flukes, but unfortunately we caught it too late and the attempted prazipro treatment didn't save any of the fish. This all happened before we actually received the pink streaked wrasse from Dr. Reefs, so there is some silver lining to be somewhat thankful for:

1. none of the fish lost were terribly expensive or hard to find, so the lesson could have been worse

2. there are no bullies in the tank to stress out the new pink streaked wrasse while it gets used to things

3. so far the new wrasse seems to be doing fine and is settling into her big mostly empty home smoothly.

4. the inverts seem to be all fine. we did lose kingpin, but it seemed to be due to problems with a molt and not related to any of the problems with the fish. The peppermint shrimp, pistol shrimp, crabs, urchins, and snails, are all fine

Some of the LPS corals are showing signs of stress probably related to the prazipro treatment, unfortunate but will just have to deal with whatever happens there. I don't really buy fancy expensive coral because I'm still learning anyway. The GSP, sinularia, cloves, and zoas all seem unbothered at least

at this point, the plan is to complete the two consecutive prazipro treatments (the first one will be finishing up soon) to ensure that the flukes are absolutely gone, and then try to get the tank into a better balanced state before I start adding fish again. It's also probably time to suck it up and get a proper quarantine setup going. My wife has a Mr. Aqua 12 gallon long that she's not using (because she doesn't like it anymore) that she said I can take for that, so I'm going to clean it up, make a lid etc for it, and try to set it up for quarantining various things.

the most surprising thing about it to me is that we didn't really add anything new to the tank recently except a ball of gracilaria in the refugium, so it must have come from that... I guess I'll have to be more diligent in the future about considering vectors like that

as for the new pink streaked wrasse: as mentioned, so far so good. she stays near the rocks (which is to be expected, I think) but, she comes out to the front of them and pecks at them frequently, so she's hunting and eating. Seems to be in perfect health otherwise, at least as far as my wife can tell (I can't seem to see any of this stuff yet somehow so I rely on her abilities and experience in this area a lot)

anyway I'm not giving up. I'm determined to get everything back on track and learn from this so I can keep it that way

 

[TheWB]

sad news today: we lost all of the fish we had in the tank. We are fairly certain it was flukes, but unfortunately we caught it too late and the attempted prazipro treatment didn't save any of the fish. This all happened before we actually received the pink streaked wrasse from Dr. Reefs, so there is some silver lining to be somewhat thankful for:

1. none of the fish lost were terribly expensive or hard to find, so the lesson could have been worse

2. there are no bullies in the tank to stress out the new pink streaked wrasse while it gets used to things

3. so far the new wrasse seems to be doing fine and is settling into her big mostly empty home smoothly.

4. the inverts seem to be all fine. we did lose kingpin, but it seemed to be due to problems with a molt and not related to any of the problems with the fish. The peppermint shrimp, pistol shrimp, crabs, urchins, and snails, are all fine

Some of the LPS corals are showing signs of stress probably related to the prazipro treatment, unfortunate but will just have to deal with whatever happens there. I don't really buy fancy expensive coral because I'm still learning anyway. The GSP, sinularia, cloves, and zoas all seem unbothered at least

at this point, the plan is to complete the two consecutive prazipro treatments (the first one will be finishing up soon) to ensure that the flukes are absolutely gone, and then try to get the tank into a better balanced state before I start adding fish again. It's also probably time to suck it up and get a proper quarantine setup going. My wife has a Mr. Aqua 12 gallon long that she's not using (because she doesn't like it anymore) that she said I can take for that, so I'm going to clean it up, make a lid etc for it, and try to set it up for quarantining various things.

the most surprising thing about it to me is that we didn't really add anything new to the tank recently except a ball of gracilaria in the refugium, so it must have come from that... I guess I'll have to be more diligent in the future about considering vectors like that

as for the new pink streaked wrasse: as mentioned, so far so good. she stays near the rocks (which is to be expected, I think) but, she comes out to the front of them and pecks at them frequently, so she's hunting and eating. Seems to be in perfect health otherwise, at least as far as my wife can tell (I can't seem to see any of this stuff yet somehow so I rely on her abilities and experience in this area a lot)

anyway I'm not giving up. I'm determined to get everything back on track and learn from this so I can keep it that way

Sorry to hear about this. It happens to us all but that doesn’t make things easier while you’re going through it.
Any concerns about putting on the Pink Streak while you’re still treating the tank for flukes?

 

[commod0re]

Sorry to hear about this. It happens to us all but that doesn’t make things easier while you’re going through it.
Any concerns about putting on the Pink Streak while you’re still treating the tank for flukes?

Indeed it does seem to be something of a rite of passage doesn’t it? Thanks for your kind words

I am somewhat concerned for the wrasse, but the problem is I don’t have anywhere else to put it right now. We did get sent two from Dr. Reefs, and they both survived shipping, so the other one is in my wife’s little tank for now and also acclimating very well so far. If something does happen to the one in the big tank, we still have that other one as a backup. In the meantime I’m not sure there’s much else I can do except observe and hope, and pause on adding anything new until things are definitely all good again

 

[TheWB]

Indeed it does seem to be something of a rite of passage doesn’t it? Thanks for your kind words

I am somewhat concerned for the wrasse, but the problem is I don’t have anywhere else to put it right now. We did get sent two from Dr. Reefs, and they both survived shipping, so the other one is in my wife’s little tank for now and also acclimating very well so far. If something does happen to the one in the big tank, we still have that other one as a backup. In the meantime I’m not sure there’s much else I can do except observe and hope, and pause on adding anything new until things are definitely all good again

Yeah, sounds like you’re doing what you can do. I’ve got a 20 long with an AIO insert that I just cleaned up recently. It used to be an holding tank for extra coral in my garage but it gets too cold out there. We had a power outage and lost everything in it a couple of years ago. Eventually I’ll be using that as an observation tank for new arrivals once I find a place to put it.

How was your experience with Dr Reef? I have good luck with fish from Saltwater City and Barrier Reef but I’ve toyed with the idea of ordering from him. You probably couldn’t have got the Pink Streak locally without doing a special order, nobody ever has them. Might as well get a quarantined one if you have to order it, right?

 

[commod0re]

How was your experience with Dr Reef? I have good luck with fish from Saltwater City and Barrier Reef but I’ve toyed with the idea of ordering from him. You probably couldn’t have got the Pink Streak locally without doing a special order, nobody ever has them. Might as well get a quarantined one if you have to order it, right?

yeah I sometimes see pink streaks on the list on the wall at saltwater city but I’ve never actually seen one while there lol. That’s exactly what I was thinking too: why not try a quarantined one if I have to order it anyway?

The experience was really good. I won a gift card on here in a supporter giveaway, and ordered the fish during their father’s day sale as well so I didn’t actually pay that much out of my own pocket. They didn’t actually send the invoice for that until about a week or so before shipping, too. They source two fish for the quarantine process and for sensitive species they ship two as well (for no additional cost), in case one doesn’t make it. In my case both fish arrived in good health, so we put one in each tank, and both started exploring and eating within a day. so, in the end it was kind of an amazing deal actually lol