Mike and Terry's 300g Reef

Aquaph8 · Feb 3, 2015

:dribble::dribble::dribble: my goodness

prsnlty · Feb 3, 2015

Mike&Terry said:
Thought we'd share a picture update...

What is the name of the second little guy here? I don't recall ever seeing one before. Love it!

Chris Aldrich · Feb 5, 2015

Awesome shots, Mike & Terry! I had to share the C. truncatus picture on our FB page. It's begging for a caption. :wink:

SeahorseKeeper · Feb 5, 2015

I don't know how I missed the last round of pics. They are absolutely stunning!! :)

spspirate · Feb 6, 2015

Great shots!!!!!

Mike&Terry · Feb 6, 2015

prsnlty said:
What is the name of the second little guy here? I don't recall ever seeing one before. Love it!

Hi Jacky, the 2nd pic is of our female Genicanthus bellus angelfish.

Saltwater Smarts said:
Awesome shots, Mike & Terry! I had to share the C. truncatus picture on our FB page. It's begging for a caption. :wink:

Thank You! Yes, it is begging for a caption, LOL.

SeahorseKeeper said:
I don't know how I missed the last round of pics. They are absolutely stunning!! :)

spspirate said:
Great shots!!!!!

Thanks so much Brett, Krista and Andy!

3Twinklets · Feb 6, 2015

Mike&Terry said:
Our Trapezia's gravitate to pocillopora, stylophora (larger colonies), and seriatopora (in that order). They don't seem to care for hanging out in Acro colonies. I'll have to see if I can get a pic of the Trapezia that resides in the large pocillopora that sits on the front right side of the tank. :bigsmile:

-Terry

I don't ever see mine out. The only way to see them is to search the back of the reef with a flashlight

Mike&Terry · Feb 10, 2015

3Twinklets said:
I don't ever see mine out. The only way to see them is to search the back of the reef with a flashlight

This is an old pic, but shows one of our Trapezia sp. crabs in a Pocillopora sp. colony that resides on the front right side of the tank. He's at least double that size now, LOL.

KoleTang · Mar 1, 2015

That choati looks great. Was it hard to get eating? Did you get it locally?

prsnlty · Mar 5, 2015

He's a beautiful fish! Thank you!

And that is a gorgeous picillopora! I hope mine grows up to be so beautiful :D

Went shopping on LA today and picked up a couple of acros. Wouldn't you know they were out if stock on those crabs lol... I have been trying to get some for a long, long time!

Mike&Terry · Mar 5, 2015

KoleTang said:
That choati looks great. Was it hard to get eating? Did you get it locally?

Sorry for the delayed reply... The choati came from Kevin Kohen at LiveAquaria and had been in his personal tank for 6 months. We were lucky as she was well adjusted to tank life and eating anything we offered.

Mike&Terry · Mar 25, 2015

Thought we would share an overdue update on our reef, starting with the bad news first...

A couple of weeks ago, one of our detritus eating sea cucumbers released toxin and we ended up losing 3 fish (C. loricula, C. cf lanceolatus, and G. bellus). We had been out that morning when it happened and came home to find the Flame Angel dead (it hadn't been very long as his eyes were still clear and the cleanup crew hadn't found him). We removed him and immediately noticed that several other fish were not looking good - our two Earl's Fairy Wrasses were sitting on the sand bed in one of the caves, our Regal was hiding and looking stressed and the Desjardini was not acting like himself. We also noticed that the cf. lanceolatus wrasse and Bellus angelfish were missing. It did not take long to figure out what happened. We did a large water change and added (2) Phosban 550 reactors full of ROX carbon to the sump and then went hunting for the missing fish. It took about an hour, but we found the wrasse dead and the Bellus barely alive. We followed up with 2 more water changes over a 36 hour period while we anxiously waited to see if the remaining affected fish would recover and thankfully they did. None of our corals or cleanup crew were affected.

Now for the good news... We've been playing with our Panasonic DMC-TS3 camera and shot some underwater video which gives a different perspective of our reef.

[video=youtube;VQMHrpBxUYM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQMHrpBxUYM[/video]

falconerr · Mar 25, 2015

Sorry to hear about your losses. Hope things get better. Love the new video and the past pics. Also yes I need to come by for a visit just been super busy.

ThaBeast · Mar 25, 2015

Beautiful reef!
Looks like you have been running led for approximately a year now, what are your current opinions on growth and color under led, especially in regard to acros & stylos?

TUSI · Mar 25, 2015

Absolutely stunning

prsnlty · Mar 26, 2015

Loved the video, I watched it a few times already lol!

I'm sorry you went through that, wow :(

How do you know the cucumber did it? Curious because i too have a cucumber (yellow) and he's been slower to get around lately. Then something happened. My juvenile orange shoulder who was very active and well was belly up in just a few hours... then my kole came up sick. They had huge bellies and that was all that looked different. Plus I've had snails dropping like flies. Parameters are all good. So when you said your cuc did that to your tank it made me think in other directions.

Mike&Terry · Mar 26, 2015

falconerr said:
Sorry to hear about your losses. Hope things get better. Love the new video and the past pics. Also yes I need to come by for a visit just been super busy.

Thank You! Your "goody box" will be here when you are ready... :smile:

HndMafia said:
Beautiful reef!
Looks like you have been running led for approximately a year now, what are your current opinions on growth and color under led, especially in regard to acros & stylos?

Thank You! That is a good question. From our observations the growth rate under our LED's seems comparable to 14K MH's and faster than what we observed under 20K's. Stylophora pistillata with pink coloration will keep their color lower in the tank than they did when we ran MH's. I should also mention we run our tank at a lower temp than most folks (75 F avg.) which does impact growth rates, but we're fine with that - less pruning.

TUSI said:
Absolutely stunning

Thank You so much! We are big fans of your reef!

prsnlty said:
Loved the video, I watched it a few times already lol!

I'm sorry you went through that, wow :(

How do you know the cucumber did it? Curious because i too have a cucumber (yellow) and he's been slower to get around lately. Then something happened. My juvenile orange shoulder who was very active and well was belly up in just a few hours... then my kole came up sick. They had huge bellies and that was all that looked different. Plus I've had snails dropping like flies. Parameters are all good. So when you said your cuc did that to your tank it made me think in other directions.

Thank You Jackie!
From your description, it is doubtful that the sea cucumber is involved. Our fish that died looked perfectly healthy and none of the snails were affected. The bloated belly could be a sign of inflammation due to some type of bacterial infection or perhaps roundworms or other internal parasite. Have you asked Humblefish in the Fish Disease forum his thoughts? I hope you are able to figure it out.

Detritus eating sea cucumbers rarely release toxin and when they do, it's due to injury or severe stress from being picked at. We found that our oldest sea cucumber (he's been with us since 2003) had maneuvered itself into some really tight space in our rock work - they have an insane ability to restructure their bodies to fit into really small, tight spaces. Our rock structures have solid bases with fiberglass rods that hold the rocks in place and while strong, their is a small bit of flexibility in the rods. We believe the cucumber more than likely caused a small shift between rocks, got wedged in (perhaps injured) and reacted by expelling a portion of it's gut and hence the toxin which we found and removed.