Matt's Innovative Marine 100 EXT

[mattzang]

random green acro that was a freebie

rainbow stylo and purple stylo

oddly enough montis seem to be doing the worst in this tank. i never had issues with them in my last tank, but this tank not so much. it might be the cyano/dinos/algae or whatever tho

another freebie, seller said it was a green aussie table that grew super well for him

miyagi tort

ora red planet.. upon post gluing.. i kinda put it right in front of the octopulse lol. gonna have to move it i think because it's not happy.

wwc yellowtip lots of green, guessing nutrients causing that?

from top: pc rainbow, wwc yellowtip, bubblegum digi, green slimer

aussie gold tort off to the left, but i glued it kinda facing downwards, so not much color there

 

[mattzang]

sending in an ICP test so figured i'd test stuff to see where i'm at and how accurate or garbage my test kits are

po4: salifert 0.0? 0.03 maybe.. clearly i need to add more fish
calcium: hanna 504 not sure i trust the reagent, it's old
magnesium: salifert 1390-1410
salinity: hanna 1.024 gotta up that a bit

didn't test nitrate as icp-analysis doesn't test for that for whatever reason. same with alk

 

[mattzang]

 

[mattzang]

Settling in nicely with no aggression. And burgess loves pellets!

 

[mattzang]

Nori clip doubles as a great lrs feeder

 

[mattzang]

 

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[mattzang]

so i keep slowly losing frags one by one i think due to the algae. the ones i am losing all seem to be in the mess of the algae and then get bleached tips, which afaik is usually alk burn, but my alk has been pretty steady at 8 so i'm going with death by algae. i'm tempted to turn the lights off for a few days, but i do still have a few living frags that i'd rather not kill off if possible. if anyone has thoughts on how long you can just have lights off with corals for i'd be interested

on the qt front i got some zebra turbo snails a couple weeks ago, but invert qt is basically 6 weeks, so those are a month out. i also did a reefcleaners order last week and it shipped monday, but has apparently been lost in the mail as it still hasn't arrived even today. not ideal to order stuff online during blackfriday week, but my local lfs have had pretty barren invert selections so what can you do

i also got a small one spot foxface a little over a week ago. he made it through the hydrogen peroxide baths and is now in observation QT, but he's also at least a month out from being added to make sure i don't add fish disease to my list of issues

there's also some cyano that i wouldn't mind going away. not sure if it's related to the death of frags, it does appear on them but only after they're done for. i could do chemi clean, but i try to not use chemical treatments and prefer things to just go away on their own, but i also prefer my tank to not look like doodoo

 

[mattzang]

did 3 days lights off on the tank to hopefully slow the algae a bit at least until i can add the foxface and some snails next month.

i was bored and got to tinkering with iphone picture settings so hopefully the blue video isn't so horrible. i think i overdid the vibrant levels or something, but i think it looks a bit better. i really probably should get a new phone, but i want a ps5

 

[mattzang]

so not fun update, i got velvet somehow. lost my sunburst anthias and burgess butterfly. had to take the rock apart to catch all of the fish and go fallow. the rest of the fish are in qt and seem to be doing well, but this will be a bummer of a couple months

 

[mattzang]

Picked up some Fiji pukani dried out rock. Gonna replace as much of the caribsea life rock as I can as that stuff just isn’t good. It’s so dense and heavy compared to this stuff

also going to buy a couple actual live rocks from a local reefer to toss in there

once that’s done I’m gonna order some live sand and live mud from iPsf and then I’ll start the clock on the fallow period.

I did add a few more corals a couple acros but mostly 4 toadstools

I might add a few other softy types too to tide me over until the tank decides it will allow sps

lastly adding a bunch of cuc soon to hopefully deal with the algae

Dinos also seem to pop up here and there but not overwhelmingly so I’m gonna see if the new live stuff will make it go away

 

[mattzang]

 

[mattzang]