Mark's "Carefully Neglected" Reefs(Red Sea 625xxl and E-170)

Mastiffsrule

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That’s is a nice set up. Scary heater story.

I did not know fungias preference was pale ale;Joyful

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Sley1

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The overflow cover has some recessed lines in it that make it look like you can pop out a rectangular cutout. But I had to cut in with a hacksaw before I could twist that section back and forth to weaken the uncut line and pull it out. Hard to describe.

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The only issue is that my light mount screws are huge on these euro mounts. And so the cover doesn’t sit completely flush. But I’m ok with that since it still does the job of keeping fish and algae growth out of the overflow box.

Regarding the smaller E-170, the goal was two fold. After tearing down the 225 in the sun room and building the 625xxl in the basement, my wife commented that she missed having a tank in the main living area(music to my ears). I have some latezonatus clowns that I keep in a beat up 40 breeder in an unfinished storage room, that I think would look great in a dedicated bubble tip anemone tank upstairs. I can’t put them in the big reef, because war would break out with my 15 year old perculas.

I see exactly what your talking about with the cover. Thanks for the info. What a great idea for the the 170, that will be a cool setup, you know your smooth sailing when the wife is asking for a new tank[emoji3]
 
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Mark

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Updates! Removing those plate corals definitely threw something out of whack, or it's the pollen. Out of nowhere I have a bad case of Cyano. I always seem to get a case of Cyano in the spring. Going to do some water changes, run a little GFO, and add some nitrates to tip the competitive scale back to the macroalgae in the refugium.

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Ran out of B-Ionic today in the Apex DDR. I'm going to give Seachem Fusion a try. I love ESV, always have. But I like the idea of using a more concentrated solution to reduce dosing volume and refill the DDR less. I also like that Fusion is available locally, so I can pick some up easily if I forget to notice I'm out of 2-Part.

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The baby cardinals are still going strong in the refugium. For anyone needing to hatch baby brine, but don't feel like a complicated setup, I highly recommend the countertop hatchery from Brine Shrimp Direct: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079C6BN2B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It doesn't use an air pump. It works like a maze, where you put the eggs on the outside and the hatched shrimp work their way to the center(the only part that allows light in). They are attracted to the light. This effectively separates them from the hatched egg shells(which fry can choke on), and they end up swimming around in the light above a little spoon with mesh bottom. Simply lift the spoon out, water drains out leaving the shrimp, and dump them in where the hungry fry are.

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Finally, my wild-caught true percula momma clown is old enough for a learner's permit. I was digging through some photos and realized I picked her up in 2004. Here's a pic from 2005:

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About 8 years ago she beat up and evicted her partner, and I had to arrange a new marriage for her. I had a baby darwin clown in a nano that I figured was worth a shot, and they have been happy together ever since. She still spawns frequently, despite her age. I need to get them a proper anemone again!

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Small update. The 625L tank has been running great on auto-pilot all summer. Switching to Reef Fusion has been a good decision. I was able to reduce my dosage while keeping Alk/Ca where I wanted. I'm overdue for giving the Gyre pumps a cleaning.

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The smaller 170L tank has been a bit of a headache. First Cyano, then Dino's. Still trying to get through the uglies. I swapped out a GHL doser for a Kamoer F4 Pro doser on the 170L, which has been a welcome change. The app is much easier to use, and the small stepper motors are working well.
 
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Long overdue update. It hasn't been a good last few months.

625XXL update:

The Reefer 625 suffered a mysterious fish die off during the holidays. There were no recent additions, and the tank was cruising on autopilot. So, no disease indications or new vectors. The only thing I noticed was salinity had crept up due to my 2-part dosing and lack of water changes. The lack of water changes was due to a busy life and the fact that I would suffer a dino outbreak after EVERY water change. This is a tank running a refugium and UV, btw. The interesting thing was that all my oldest fish survived.

I removed the dead fish that I could find, and did a water change... Which led to a dino outbreak... again. But it's happened enough times, that I knew it would subside after a few weeks. But then a massive Cyano bloom happened. In 25 years of reefkeeping, I've never seen it this bad. It was like a thick gelatinous mat. Yuck. I removed as much as I could, dosed some chemiclean, and followed up with a water change.... which brought back the dinos.... again.

I'm hoping to stabilize this tank again soon. I'd like to bring back water changes, but they do more harm than good with each dino outbreak. I'm going to try some of these bacterial scavenger additives for now, to see if that will help. I'm also switching salt brands. I've used Instant Ocean for my entire reefkeeping tenure, but perhaps a different salt will let me do small water changes without a Dino bloom(doubtfull). I know I can get this tank back on track. I also may have to rehome my hepatus tang. He's developed a weird habit of splashing water over the sides of the tank. I'm not cool with that.

E-170 "nano" update:

I suck at smaller tanks. Always have. I tend to do well with bigger tanks where I can keep a refugium and larger herbivores like tangs. This tank is too small for tangs, and I don't want to run a refugium sump on it. While I had good experiences doing carbon dosing back when we were all experimenting with vodka 10+ years ago, this time around hasn't been as good. This tank gets dino's at every water changes as well. I definitely notice that you can knock out dino's by nutrient dosing and making green algae dominate. But again, the tank is a bit too small to support a crew that will eat the resulting green algae. So it's a sea saw between dino's and green algae. I'm going to try bacterial scavengers additives on this tank as well. If this tank continues to frustrate me, I may tear it down and just focus my energy on the larger tank.

Final Thoughts:

It was a few years ago, that there seemed to be an uptick in the reef community posts around Dino's. In the 25 years of my reefkeeping, dino's came and went very quickly in the early stages of a tank. We never thought much of it. But now we are seeing blooms persist and drive aquarist to frustration. I'm curious what changed. Some folks argue that it is due to less tanks being set up with real live rock. But my current tanks were set up with TBS live rock. My tanks are quite diverse in microfauna. I've tried pod additions, nitrate additions, UV, etc. It's easy to get Dino's to back off, but I can't seem to eliminate them entirely.

I may ditch the substrate in the future. Looking back, I tended to have less issues in my bare bottom reefs. But I keep going back to sand, because I like the look and the critters that benefit from it. We'll see.
 
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Time for another check in. I've thought a lot about the dino issue, and figured out what was going on with my tank. I documented my case in another thread: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/defeating-dinos-by-controlling-the-fate-of-iron.694703/

The TLDR version is that I think iron limitation helps remove competitive advantage away from Dino's. And I think iron scavenging along with nitrate dosing will push the competitive advantage to more beneficial algae. This has worked for me at least. I was already running UV.

In other news:

- I removed the Hepatus tang. The splashing was getting out of control.
- I tried to increase bacterial diversity with some Florida keys mud, but ended up introducing bacteria associated with "Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease", which killed some old LPS corals that were older than my kids. :-( More on that in this thread: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/e...ated-with-new-data.684209/page-4#post-7377495
-I converted the 170L Red Sea AIO to a freshwater tank. Much less work, much quieter in the main living area. And I can allocate more energy and funds into the main large reef tank. Like I said in my last post, I've come to terms with me sucking at nano reefs.
-The Heteractis Malu anemone has been doing really well. They are my favorite anemone now. They don't get too large and they stay on the substrate, which makes them easy to cohabitate with corals. And they don't split a bunch of times like RBTA's. I'm a fan....

Lastly, I don't miss SPS one bit. I love having a Softie/LPS tank. I find the coral movement much more enchanting, and I find the corals themselves much more interesting to observe. I do have 4 SPS in there, but they were hitchikers from the old tank!

Recent pics of the reef and now the freshwater AIO:

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I am so bad about updating this thread! Sorry. So quick update on the Dino's, I was able to eradicate them finally with a week's worth of high temps. I raised the temp to 82 degrees and left it there. A week in, the Dino's abated. I kept the temperature the same for a couple of months, since it wasn't hurting anything. We used to keep reefs at that temp during the metal halide days, so I wasn't too worried. I got the idea from a youtuber, and I wrote about it a bit here: https://reefbuilders.com/2020/05/11/dinoflagellate-aquarium-treatment/


At that point, it seemed like my reef was back on autopilot for a while. Then in the last month, I slowly started to lose fish. None of the fish exhibited any symptoms. And the deaths are weeks apart. My theories are something bacterial or some disruptive predator like a Mantis. The only doubt around the Mantis, is that the fish are not damaged in any way.

I'm debating pulling the remaining fish and putting them in my q-tank. I would do a holistic treatment on them to cover all the bases. If there is a predator or disrupter in the tank, I would think it would come out and be more bold with the fish removed.

Despite fish losses, the corals are growing bonkers. My main issue is salinity and trace element creep from two part additives. Now that I'm not afraid of water changes fueling Dino's, I'm going to resume water changes to keep salinity and trace elements in check.

The freshwater tank is doing well too. Low-tech planted tanks are the epitome of careful neglect working well. :)
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Subscribed . . .

Super sorry to hear of all your hassles over the last year, but good on ya' hangin' tough. Do you run carbon? I only ask because my "gut" wonders if chemical warfare isn't playing a role in your mishaps. You have some huge colonies of corals that can be tough chemical fighters.

Gotta say though . . . love love love the tidy cabinet. I'm always looking at my basement sump room and shaking my head and I don't dare show a picture of the wire rats nest I have on my 22 gallon Fiji cube. You're inspiring me to try and clean it up at least a little.

Anyways, thanks for the update. Hope it gets better here on out!

Joe in NY
 
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Subscribed . . .

Super sorry to hear of all your hassles over the last year, but good on ya' hangin' tough. Do you run carbon? I only ask because my "gut" wonders if chemical warfare isn't playing a role in your mishaps. You have some huge colonies of corals that can be tough chemical fighters.

Gotta say though . . . love love love the tidy cabinet. I'm always looking at my basement sump room and shaking my head and I don't dare show a picture of the wire rats nest I have on my 22 gallon Fiji cube. You're inspiring me to try and clean it up at least a little.

Anyways, thanks for the update. Hope it gets better here on out!

Joe in NY

That's a good thought. My big Leather is around 14" across now. I do run carbon passively, but I wonder if I should up my game and use a media reactor. The irony of this, is that I decided to do a softie dominant tank because I wanted less headaches. Then I get random fish deaths, Dino's, etc... lol.

As for cord management, it's great 90% of the time. The 10% where it sucks is when you have remove a device to clean it or replace it. :)
 
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I forgot to mention, I'm also moving back to ESV B-Ionic. I wonder if the more concentrated Reef Fusion is not ideal. Since reading that it's not a 1:1 ratio, I'm wondering if the ionic imbalance could be contributing to my headaches.
 

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