Daelie's Reefer 250

[daelie]

Decided to try a little macro video of a few different corals, mostly SPS with a few LPS mixed in there. First try, a little trouble getting the white balance and everything else to work properly, but I'll work on it.

 

[Daniel@R2R]

Beautiful pics and great work on the video!! Thanks for sharing your reef with us!

 

[daelie]

Been a while since a little bit of an update, I've added a few new SPS corals, and still need to get a few newer pictures since I only took a bunch while they were acclimating, but I picked up this great little piece of RR Canada Wolverine that was completely browned out and had a little tissue necrosis from shipping. Alk consumption is going up, and for some reason my nitrates are testing above 50 ppm on both Salifert and Red Sea tests, but there's been no issue with SPS, as the Wolverine has begun coloring up from the brownness in which it was shipped, there may be something interfering with the test results, just based on what the tank is doing. I have a few pics of a couple other recent editions and some oldies in the tank as well. I had 2 doa's in my last order, a red dragon and purple dragon acro, both horrible shippers apparently .





Here's the wolverine's progression so far over about 2 weeks.







After I cut away the dead tissue and starting to heal:







And finally starting to color up, hopefully won't be much longer until it's a nice stunning yellow







A new addition: Toxic Avengers Acro, showing a few different colors







Yellow Slimer







A top-down of my maxima







Bonsai Acropora







Tyree Pink Lemonade Acro







Red Planet







Rando Green Acro







and some Christmas Colors, just to be festive:

 

[daelie]

I'm never really satisfied with the aquascape and I'm constantly tinkering with it haha, so a new tank shot. Added a few new corals which I haven't placed anywhere quite yet, and everything already in the tank is growing pretty well over the last little while. Hopefully by the time these acros grow in I'll have something fully decided where I want to put everything.

 

[daelie]

Side view of the tank, coming along nicely!

 

[daelie]

A couple extra shots. I increased the photo period to 10 hours from 8 a few weeks back, so far everything still is looking pretty good since the switch. Nitrates still remain somewhere in the 25 ppm range while phosphates are around 0.03-0.06.

 

[daelie]

Having an awful issue with what looks to be some cyano or spirulina. It cropped up recently but I haven't changed a whole ton in the system over the last few months. Am going to do a round of chemiclean to see if that can take care of it, so I took a few pics just in case of some of the corals. Siphoned off as much as I could right before dosing to limit the actual die off.

 

[Tahoe61]

Noticeable improvement on the scape, beautiful Acropora garden.

 

[daelie]

Noticeable improvement on the scape, beautiful Acropora garden.

Thanks, I'm really never quite satisfied with my scape, but this is the closest I've come to something so far that I'm really enjoying looking at everyday and can picture it looking quite nice once the acros all grow up.

 

[daelie]

Some new additions to the zoa/paly family!!

 

[daelie]

Lost a few things to RTN/STN a while back and things have been recovering ever since. I noticed a decrease in polyp extension a good while ago, so I did my normal round of tests and everything seemed to be pretty ok except for potassium had dropped significantly by about 100 ppm. After a few extra tests, it seems that my HW Marinemix was mixing up at around 290-300 ppm so water changes were in fact hurting the system a little bit.

It was hard to find much info on exactly what potassium's role was, but something else during that time I noticed that my alk consumption "appeared" to have gone way up, to the point that I was increasing the doser almost every day to the point that dosing had doubled to maintain the alk near 7. At one point, I said to myself that there's no way this is right because things aren't noticeably growing faster and things, in fact, looked a lot worse. So after the potassium issue got corrected, my alk began shooting up within a week, so I had to dial the doser back around somewhere near where it started before I had issues. A couple acropora RTN and STN, and was able to save pieces using Furan-2 that are now in my frag tank regrowing out, but best guess is that while increasing the doser to maintain the alk number, I overdosed on trace elements that are also part of the 3part dosing. Just speculation, because by the time I was going to do a triton test, I had already done a few massive water changes using water from the SPS tank in my LFS which has basically matched parameters. He basically did a water change and saved his old water that I would assume would be somewhat depleted especially on trace elements, and I did successive 50% water changes. Within a few days, almost all the acros in the display began showing polyp extension again and things have been looking better over the last month, only one acro still looks terrible, but hopefully things keep heading in the right direction. I added a couple new things acro wise to test as well, since new things will go downhill a lot faster than mine will recover properly, and those are showing really nice PE, as well I added a new scoly a few weeks ago that has been doing great.

 

[daelie]

Things still looking better by the day. Took a quick macro to show a friend a few zoas he'll be getting as a donation to free up some room.

 

[Maritimer]

Lucky friend!!

~Bruce

 

[daelie]

Things have been coloring back up nicely since the whole STN/RTN crapshoot. Pretty happy with the tank right now and I haven't been worried about coming home to a piece RTNing in quite a while, things have restabilized and growth has restarted on most pieces save a couple that still seem dormant.

 

[d_adler]

I would love to see an update! Awesome tank! Following along

 

[daelie]

Ah an update.

In July, we moved, so it took me and a couple guys working our butts off to get it it drained, moved and reset at the new place. All in all we had it running again, roughly 5-6 hours later. I used an already set up (on the floor) 40 breeder, to house a bunch of corals from the display to keep them in some flow and the entire contents of the frag tank.



After moving, I sent off a triton test to see how things were going since my last triton test and the RTN/STN that I saw earlier. I had a reading on tin earlier that I wasn't sure what to think of it, but there were still some corals, mainly anything that wasn't a tort or tenuis, that were suffering. I had checked all my pumps and everything after the first reading, and didn't see anything, but this test had shown an increase in tin, again. Even during the move I had ended up doing a pretty significant water change, which probably brought the levels down to what I was seeing on the test. I realized there was something I missed, and then I saw it. The bracket that was holding my lights on the tank was rusting around the plastic screw holes. I have since hung the fixture from the wall, and used both triton detox and TLF metasorb to hopefully get rid of it.

Within a week, my old red planet colony that had been dull and almost dry looking, started showing some signs of green around the base, and has been getting progressively better. So that's at least one positive thing, and who knows if the bracket was the only thing doing it. Right now, it's fully possible that the metasorb is masking whatever may be leaching into the water. Only time will tell I suppose.

With that, here are some pics of how the tank is looking, with sand added since the move because I enjoy that aesthetic a little bit more (Tropic Eden Reefflakes).

 

[Maritimer]

Absolutely spectacular! That maxima is gorgeous, as is the ... Forest Fire? ... nearby.

What is that last LPS, black & red & almost blasto-looking?

~Bruce

 

[daelie]

Absolutely spectacular! That maxima is gorgeous, as is the ... Forest Fire? ... nearby.

What is that last LPS, black & red & almost blasto-looking?

~Bruce

Thanks! It's a forest fire, indeed.

The LPS is a blasto actually, here's another shot where you can see it's green mouth.

 

[Sahin]

Tank and sps are looking awesome. What are the nitrate and phosphate levels currently?

 

[daelie]

Tank and sps are looking awesome. What are the nitrate and phosphate levels currently?

Thanks, Sahin.

Nitrate sits around 5-10 ppm, but there were periods where it was 50 ppm and I didn’t see too much of a difference.

Phosphate is very close to 0 on my Hanna ULR. I don’t have many fish because I seem to be decently picky to what I want to put in. I feed them a lot but I’m still having to dose phosphate every few days to keep a reading near 0.01 ppm.