Most boring tank thread ever...

[swiss1939]

Yeah I have to take it off. But it is minimal effort. This is temp tank, so it's the minimal amount of construction I needed to get the light mounted, cause this isn't permanent.

Lots of small life finally started to emerge for my small rocks. Nothing big, but I got a baby narcissus smaller than a millimeter on the glass now:

And what is probably a cerith snail that is a few mm long:

 

[swiss1939]

Two weeks in and with lights on finally. Now I'm starting to see stuff climb out of the rocks. Today I spotted the smallest crab I've ever seen. I'd say his body is about 3mm wide. Probably not reef safe, but I have no corals in this tank except what came on the rocks (hidden cup corals). So he's staying in for a while.

Think he's a really tiny one of these reef cautious hitchhiker crabs on the tbs website: https://tbsaltwater.com/blogs/it-depends/tbd-crab

 

[swiss1939]

Really hard to photograph, but here are two pics of what I believe is a nudibranch that has been traversing my tank. Spotted him about a week and a half ago.

He's white with two longer antennae at the front and a few more shorter ones at the rear.

 

[swiss1939]

Couple more.

 

[LegalReefer]

Couple more.

Looks like a fleshy limpet to me, not a nudibranch. Could be a nudi tho! Super cool either way, I love seeing all the critters that come out of the live rock

 

[swiss1939]

Looks like a fleshy limpet to me, not a nudibranch. Could be a nudi tho! Super cool either way, I love seeing all the critters that come out of the live rock

I'm pretty positive it's a nudibranch. It's got the two front antenna and smaller triple antenna that you can see more clearly on the first photo I forgot I posted of it.

https://www.reef2reef.com/attachments/1000013884-jpg.4210052/

It looks exactly like this upside down one.. Albeit mine is pale white.

Google Image Result for http://seaslugs.free.fr/image/chromo_alius/chromo_alius_bh2a.jpg

 

[swiss1939]

Two weeks with lights on, and I've sufficiently stocked the fridge with food for some snails. Couple bumblebee and Trochus snails added to start mowing the lawn. Diatoms and some green hair algae growing. Not crazy overloaded thanks to starting with live rock. I also can now finally call this a fish tank instead of a rock tank. Canary has been sent into the coal mine.

 

[swiss1939]

More trochus snails went in to help out with the two that are doing a fine job cleaning up the bare bottom, but needed assistance. Also added some turbo snails which are working on the glass. Here is some video of the first clown in there now that she's starting to get comfortable in her new home, and mostly eating whatever I give her now.

 

[swiss1939]

Three+ weeks of light, and 10 days of clownfish with light feeding. Diatoms and minimal gha receding thanks to the snails. Nitrates at 0.5. doing good so far with the live rock start!

Gonna add a tailspot blenny as soon as my LFS gets one in. Then maybe I'll introduce the second clown to start the pairing. Trying to decide if I should wait to get the rest of the fish in before adding second clown or not. Want them to get along with everyone.

I also thought there was a small glass anemone on one of the smaller rocks since I got it, but after a month of it getting accustomed, I actually think it's a sole polyp of hidden cup coral. Can't get a good picture.

Photo of the receding gha and diatoms.

 

[swiss1939]

Copepod and phytoplankton cultures started.

 

[swiss1939]

Moved on from the phyto and copepods for now. Ran them both for over a month. Dont need either full time right now. I fed all the copepods to my tank and the phyto was turning bad from over feeding it near the end, so I dumped it.

Also finally caught both the large hitchhiker crabs that came with my TBS rock. One of them ate my large feather duster. The other I didn't see eating anything live, but he looked like he was thinking about it a few times. I caught that less aggressive one easily with the net when he climbed up the canister filter inlet pipe trying to get closer to my clownfish who sleeps between that pipe and the glass much higher. Just put the net below the pipe and wiggled it till he fell into the net.

This one was a bit harder. I starved him out for a month and then put a frozen clam in my net and left the net conveniently in front of his lair. 25 min later he climbed right into his death trap and he was gone in a second!

 

[swiss1939]

Had a mishap with my tank and lost 3 fish (about $120). But everything stabilized after a few weeks. I got another order of TBS live rock, this time 8 lbs Premium. One of the rocks had some bright red sponge on it that was really interesting, but the sponge died as I just couldn't figure out where to hide it so it would get the right amount of light. But after a few days when I was looking at the dying sponge and wishing I could have kept it alive, the rock that sponge was on, slammed shut and sediment went flying everywhere! Turns out the rock is a large bi-valve! I think I have narrowed it down to either a turkey wing ark, or a mossy ark. I am leaning more towards a mossy ark clam. It's really hard to tell cause its covered in barnacles and other sponge material that is still decaying.

Here is a video of it. Got it to slam shut at the end of the video.

New video · Friday, Jan 23 🎬

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I also started putting my DIY rock into the various tanks slowly. This was not the cause of the fish mishap. That was my mistake which i'll never make again!

 

[swiss1939]

This tank has so far been the easiest start I've had with salt water tanks. TBS Rock really makes a difference! Algae has been minimal and what has shown up has been pretty easy to get rid of through clean up crew.

I will say though, I've seen the negative side of using canister filters as your filtration... I was originally changing water once every other month but as I started adding livestock, the phosphates have been getting out of control. Even with multiple water changes a week, it was not reducing. So I've had to start using GFO in the canister filter, and rinsing/squeezing each of the canister filter's sponges out in clean salt water, and scrubbing the ceramic media to remove as much matter as possible. It's more work than necessary. The Vevor canister filter was dead silent for 5-6 months, but the last month its started to get noisy even after cleaning the propellor. It's also clearly starting a minute leak at the connector for the hoses because its got salt creep on each of the hose connectors at the top of the canister. So I ordered a reef octopus HOB 100 skimmer to replace the vevor canister filter. I will keep it and use it as needed as a UV filter since it has UV, but I've basically transitioned away from leaving UV on all the time, to only turning it on for like a day or two after putting new livestock into the tank.

I lost a clown, blue damsel six line and an urchin from ammonia spike overnight one night due to a stupid mistake. All the inverts and coral hitchhikers from the LR survived. Current stocking is 2 peppermint shrimp (trying to see if they will eat the aptasia that came in from my leather toadstool plug), emerald crab, black clown, blue damsel and rose bubble tip anemone. Plenty of snails and hermits of various sizes, plus the TBS hitchhikers which includes multiple crabs including a porcelain crab (got rid of all the not reef safe crabs that were attacking stuff they shouldn't have), various sponges, tunicates, limpets and smaller bi-valves, including the large ark clam, countless small featherdusters, and for coral hitchhikers ive got a few different clusters of hidden cup corals on the premium rock, plus the occulina robusta cluster that I got on the first batch of base live rock which started small and has really started to grow, seemingly very happy. There is also a tiny cluster of about 3 heads on a small rock which I think is the same occulina robusta. It almost melted away early on, and I though it was completely gone as it was just skeleton for a long time, but it has made a full comeback at the same time the larger cluster really started to grow. This 3 head cluster is the second to last photo.

 

[swiss1939]

Rose bubble tip didn't make it. But everything else is doing real well. Hidden cup corals are looking great and very happy. Turkey Wing ark. Tons of feather dusters. Mountainous Star corals. Etc.

 

[swiss1939]

Tank been up almost a year. Longest SW tank I've had so far. Its on autopilot. I change 5 gal of water once every 6-8 weeks and that is pretty much it. Starting a tank with real live rock makes a huge difference. I also noticed that once I added a small amount of sand bed (just enough to cover the glass), and switched from canister to HOB skimmer, the tank really stopped having major swings. Last addition of live rock was 6 months ago. And about 4-5 months ago I added a bunch of my own DIY oystercrete rock slowly over a month or two, to make sure nothing would get killed.

I've had some deaths prior to it really becoming stable.. mostly down to adding things before I should have. So I stopped adding things for the last 5 months and waited for it to tell me it was ready.

6-7 months ago added a leather toadstool from a local seller, and some cheap frags from WWC auction and they all died off except the toadstool, which has doubled in size and is thriving. I also tried that rose bubble tip which died off (extremely disappointing). Not sure if the RBT died due to water conditions (probably cause my phosphates have always been rather high), or if it was due to high flow.

Phosphates I was originally trying to combat with phosban media, but I treated very minimally, with only a little in a media bag in the HOB skimmer for a couple months just to try to help give the tank some fight. At the same time about 6-8 months ago I bought a Santa Monica filtration HOG.5 hang on glass upflow algae scrubber. That took a month or so but is now probably handling most of the Phosphate in the tank. Prior to that really working overtime, the rock itself had some algae. Now the rock is really minimal turf algae only on the DIY oystercrete. I chalk that up to the algae slowly eating away any phosphate remaining in the oystercrete. I'm perfectly content with how it looks and am happy to let it do its thing with the eventual goal for the algae to fully leach any remaining phosphate out of that rock. But overall, the tank doesn't seem to mind any of this. Just tested a fresh batch of salt water mixed from my RO/DI filter which I needed to replace the filters in.. 0.08ppm phosphate. The tank itself tested at 0.66ppm phosphate. Every time I test it seems to be around 0.6ppm. I stopped caring because the algae does not increase, and all the fish and corals look happy.

I also really stopped testing phosphate once I trusted things weren't going to die constantly from whatever levels it was at. Instead I just test salinity every so often to make sure it isn't creeping up from the skimmer or any other evaporation. I've really settled into the belief that I shouldn't chase anything and don't touch anything. Just maintain the status quo with the semi-regular water changes. Everything is stable at whatever levels they are at. And the corraline algae has been spreading like wildfire on the real live rock, and has now started taking over some of the less dense DIY oystercrete which was more porous than some of the thicker pieces I made. The thicker pieces are the ones with minimal turf algae. The porous stuff does not have much algae on it other than the corraline which is starting to spread completely.


current stocking:
- black clownfish that has matured and lost all its immature color and mostly uncaring about anyone else around
- yellow tail blue damsel which is constantly ticked at everyone else encroaching on his space and tries to bully the clown regularly
- tailspot blenny that puts the blue damsel in his place, but gets put in his place by the black clown.
- orange spottedy goby that keeps to himself off at the other end of the tank where none of the others seem to want to be. Occasionally fends off the blue damsel when it comes over and gets ticked off at it for existing.

tons of hitchhicker crabs, snails, turkeywing clam, and a couple peppermint shrimp.

I also just finally decided to add two frags from my LFS to test the stability and confirm it is ready for more coral. Bought a birds nest frag and a montipora. One of the previous corals I tested from WWC that died was a montipora. So I am using that as a baseline.

All the hitchhiker corals I got from TBS live rock have been thriving; Hidden Cup Coral and Mountainous Star coral.


I will be looking to purchase my own place starting July/August so this tank has about 6 months before I have to break it down and move everything. Which was always the plan.. just a temp tank to mature some DIY oystercrete rock. I couldn't fit half the rock I made, so once I move and set up a long term large tank, then I'll add the additional rock I made.