OP
OP
Hey all!
It's the wife here. Looking for some help to keep this thing in good condition. Birdman is out serving his country, which is why y'all haven't heard from him in quite a while. I've been trying my best, but besides the aquascape architecture and water sampling, I'm flying by the seat of my pants here.
First, I'll do a quick update post, then follow it up with some questions/requests for help, so TLDR doesn't get as many people.
To catch y'all up (I had to go read back through this to see what all he'd told you):
- The suicidal anemone finally got sacrificed to the porcelain god. She never really found a good place to attach, and her foot really wasn't sticky at all, so she was constantly floating off the rock and landing upside down. She'd often drift back in to a tiny, dark corner underneath the big shelf on the right, and we'd have to gentle get her back into the light. She'd been slowly losing color and inverting her stomach out of her mouth, and after we'd had her about two months, we noticed she'd stopped actually eating, was bleaching, and there was a haze spreading through the tank water. I tried my best, but didn't learn enough in time to save her. In hindsight, I think the biggest factor was low alkalinity. We'd been sitting in the 7s range, but later learned that for anemone, 8-12 is a better range. Started dosing alkalinity towards the end, but I think she was already too far gone. I did send her on her way before she was able to wipe the tank. I'd found enough horror stories on here about dying anemones taking the whole tank system down with them when they went, and wasn't willing to let that happen.
- We've lost the four fish livestock we had, two Picasso clowns and two blue hippo tangs. The first was our bigger Picasso, who jumped out of the tank. We think it was due to not having a ground rod, and him getting shocked. Picked up a grounding rod and moved on. The two tangs went in relatively close succession. I think we rushed the quarantine period on those guys, and only about a week after introducing them to the display tank, they got something, either HLLE or ich. One was gone pretty quickly. The other, who was super shy, I was able to isolate a bit and tried to keep him going a little bit longer, but only another week and a half. The second Picasso seemed to have avoided the plague (my naiveté), until his flesh started showing the same issues as the tangs. This time I went all out, moved him to the quarantine tank, dosed with Coppersafe, and continued monitoring. A week later, found him on the floor. Apparently I didn't learn my lesson the first time - we'd forgotten to buy a grounding rod for the QT! @(*#&$(*&@(#*&$
- Before hubby left, I did pick him up a few frags (we've been slow to add stuff to the tanks because we're trying to get a good routine with predictable stead state results before we throw a ton of money into an unstable system). I wanted them to have a chance to grow a bit while he was gone, so he'd come home to something more lively than our aquascaped tank! More on those in the follow on questions post.
It's the wife here. Looking for some help to keep this thing in good condition. Birdman is out serving his country, which is why y'all haven't heard from him in quite a while. I've been trying my best, but besides the aquascape architecture and water sampling, I'm flying by the seat of my pants here.
First, I'll do a quick update post, then follow it up with some questions/requests for help, so TLDR doesn't get as many people.
To catch y'all up (I had to go read back through this to see what all he'd told you):
- The suicidal anemone finally got sacrificed to the porcelain god. She never really found a good place to attach, and her foot really wasn't sticky at all, so she was constantly floating off the rock and landing upside down. She'd often drift back in to a tiny, dark corner underneath the big shelf on the right, and we'd have to gentle get her back into the light. She'd been slowly losing color and inverting her stomach out of her mouth, and after we'd had her about two months, we noticed she'd stopped actually eating, was bleaching, and there was a haze spreading through the tank water. I tried my best, but didn't learn enough in time to save her. In hindsight, I think the biggest factor was low alkalinity. We'd been sitting in the 7s range, but later learned that for anemone, 8-12 is a better range. Started dosing alkalinity towards the end, but I think she was already too far gone. I did send her on her way before she was able to wipe the tank. I'd found enough horror stories on here about dying anemones taking the whole tank system down with them when they went, and wasn't willing to let that happen.
- We've lost the four fish livestock we had, two Picasso clowns and two blue hippo tangs. The first was our bigger Picasso, who jumped out of the tank. We think it was due to not having a ground rod, and him getting shocked. Picked up a grounding rod and moved on. The two tangs went in relatively close succession. I think we rushed the quarantine period on those guys, and only about a week after introducing them to the display tank, they got something, either HLLE or ich. One was gone pretty quickly. The other, who was super shy, I was able to isolate a bit and tried to keep him going a little bit longer, but only another week and a half. The second Picasso seemed to have avoided the plague (my naiveté), until his flesh started showing the same issues as the tangs. This time I went all out, moved him to the quarantine tank, dosed with Coppersafe, and continued monitoring. A week later, found him on the floor. Apparently I didn't learn my lesson the first time - we'd forgotten to buy a grounding rod for the QT! @(*#&$(*&@(#*&$
- Before hubby left, I did pick him up a few frags (we've been slow to add stuff to the tanks because we're trying to get a good routine with predictable stead state results before we throw a ton of money into an unstable system). I wanted them to have a chance to grow a bit while he was gone, so he'd come home to something more lively than our aquascaped tank! More on those in the follow on questions post.
