I kept my skimmer from my older tank as a spare. Trying to skim as wet as I can. It’s a newly cycled system so being cautious as to how much food I’m putting in. I just added a few shrimp and 4 pretty cool urchins in the main tank. Hair algae is getting pretty funky in there. @rds did you ever have an ugly phase? All the photos look pretty pristine.
What kind of urchins, blue tuxedo?
I was skeptical but I rubberbanded nori to a rock and placed it in his pacing path (he’s been swimming nonstop on this track around the tub), and after a few minutes, to my amazement, I saw him take a few bites, and then come back and have more. Hallelujah! Thanks for the tip!!Sorry to hear about your fish!
Instead of putting the nori in the clip, rubber-band it in a piece of live rock. That’s how I trained mine (when I used to have one many years ago) to eat the nori, and I soaked the nori in garlic, selcon, and other vitamins for a couple of hours.
I have one blue tuxedo urchin and a purple short spine urchin. The other two I don’t know what they are but one of my LFS had them in. The red one he called a “radiator urchin” but I can find no reference on the internet to it. It’s got these really cool bright blue lines on it that show up as reflective white on the photos. The other one is also a mystery to me. If anyone can shed some light on it, that would be great.
So glad to hear this!!! I also put NLS pellets inside the nori and he eventually started eating pellets! You should try this next!
I was thinking of putting some frozen foods inside a wrap of nori. Like a delicious crepe with a surprise inside! Hope my fish don’t get spoiled by this cause I’m definitely not doing this long term!
Even a better idea!
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Sorry for the lack of updates! When you go into a fallow period, it kind-of feels like a pause in reefing. I do have some updates though.
If you don't mind me asking, did you just temp acclimate the mollies before putting them in the tank?Now about fish.
The old standard for ich fallow period was 76 days, set in stone by humblefish himself.
He has advocated for a new fallow period of 6 weeks as long as tank temp is >80.6F and no “anoxic” zones. I haven’t seen any reports of failure from this, but this recommendation hasn’t been around for that long. So I think I’m going to aim for about 8 weeks fallow before putting fish back in.
Now, to be fully transparent about what’s going on, I started copper treatment on my fish one more time before going into the DT. After treating my first batch of fish, I bought some new additions thinking I would treat them and add them to the tank all at the same time. But given the deaths that I had initially with copper, I decided to add 6 black mollies to the tank to observe and see if I even needed to treat. I inspected them every day for 2 weeks and didn’t see one spot. I felt confident enough to transfer the new fish with my previously treated fish in the 150 gal rubbermaid.
Big mistake. Another example of me thinking I know it all, and cutting corners. I had left the mollies in the 40breeder and two days after transferring the fish, I turned on the light to the mollies tank, and the mollies were COVERED in ich. Like it wasn’t a few spots. It was like a nightmare. This photo doesn’t do it justice how apparent ich is on a newly converted molly.
So that left me feeling pretty crappy. I stared at my Achilles for a long time with an underwater viewer and he still looked spotless, but I knew that there was a decent chance ich was now in the holding tank.
So I bit the bullet and decided to treat again.
The good news is, that this time around has been MUCH better than the first time. Most importantly, all the fish were healthy and eating in the Rubbermaid tank for several weeks. They were used to the tank, and it had a robust biological filtration built up. Secondly, I used copper power instead of cupramine.
I did dose directly into the holding tank with about 100lb of live rock. There is a lot of absorption of copper and I was testing three times a day, and pumping copper into the system. But it’s now super stable at 2.25, all fish are still eating well, and I’m about 1 week in at therapeutic. I have had no issues with ammonia and copper given the live rock.
So I learned a number of lessons through this. I think that I like copper power over cupramine. I think rushing to get your copper therapeutic right when you put your fish in the tank is going to increase fatality rates. And 2 weeks is not enough time for a molly assisted QT.
No, you’ll have a high death rate doing that (I’ve tried). In the past I went to 6 hour acclimation to salt at 50% died. This time I took about 36 hours and they all survived. Just used a heater and a bubbler in a bucket.
