AlphaCasual
Community Member
Slow day at work so I figured I would finally write up a build thread to document and show my progress. I started back in March this year when someone gifted me an Evo 13.5 boy what a rabbit hole I have fallen down since then. I have taken care of freshwater fish in the past, but marine is something that has always interested me. Prior to getting a tank I had probably spent at least a year watching and researching via youtube and various things I saw on reddit.
To start things off I ordered 9lbs of fresh live nano rock from @LiverockRocks overnight to my door. They were super helpful with everything, answering all of my questions and dealing with my in general noobiness. The rock arrived promptly and in amazing quality with tons of life covering it all over. I plopped it into my tank and let it sit for a few weeks before adding fish.
Here is a video maybe a day or two after I added the live rock. You can see all of the cool life that came on it, this was super exciting to me as I honestly never really considered all the different organisms that make up our oceans. I had multiple different nudibranchs, limpets, anemones, zoas, crabs, so so so so so many brittle starfish and lots more.
14 days later I went to my LFS and picked out two fish to attempt to get to pair together. At this point I had also added 5 scarlet leg hermits, 2 nassarius and a trochus snail as a cuc.
The fish were sold to me as a frostbite clownfish, and a hailstorm clownfish. After doing research I think that the one is not a frostbite but a black ice clownfish.
After maybe another week of dealing with the fluvals garbage lid, I ripped it off due to cooking the top of the water and purchased a kessil 160. At some point I added the garbage fluval nano skimmer, boy what a piece of junk that thing is.
It was right around this time that I also noticed that I had cirolanid parasites. Yes that is correct folks. Somehow I managed to draw the shortest stick of them all and get an rare parasite in my first attempt at marine life. If you don't know what a cirolanid is, its an annoying little pest that will latch onto your lovely fish and suck their blood like a vampire. They are small quick, and only come out about 2 hours after you shut off the lights at night. I would've never known I even had them until it was too late but I stay up late every night so I managed to catch one bouncing around one night.
https://youtube.com/shorts/3h_3rrZL2dM here is a video of a few of the parasites I pulled out (side note I can't embed a youtube short in this forum so sorry)
Every single night for almost 2 months I would spend 2-3 hours a night watching my tank and sucking these little devils out of the substrate/off the back wall. I had to pull multiples off my fish and this was causing me intense stress and really messing up my sleep. There is not a lot of information on how to deal with these on the internet due to them being so rare. To note, I don't fault TBS for the parasites, I don't expect them to have someone staying up til 3 am to watch the storage tanks for parasites at night. I found some very good information written on http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-02/bp/index.php as well as a few of the experts on r2r provided insight as well. Shoutouts to @Jay Hemdal and @vetteguy53081 for all the help you provide to people here, seriously amazing people.
Honestly if my tank wasn't a nano, I don't think I ever would've got through the cirolanid problem. After about 2 or 3 weeks they bred and then I had to deal with BABY cirolanids that were slightly larger than your regular copepod. Somehow by the grace of Poseidon himself I managed to suck all those little buggers out via stinky water trap and a turkey baster. It has now been over 6 weeks since I have seen one so I have returned to normal sleep finally. For anyone else dealing with this, if you do not nip the bud in the problem right away, you are likely going to have to tear down your whole tank as there is no way to deal with them once they are breeding in your live rock.
Finally after having not seen a parasite I started to add some corals!
Here is a journey of my trip to harrys. I picked up a fire shrimp and a cleaner shrimp, the cleaner shrimp DID actually help with the parasite problem and now my clowns have no problem letting him clean them. The fire shrimp has since died mid molt. Rip fire shrimpy.
I go to a local coral warehouse named Harrys Marine Life, they have all kinds of cool corals and pretty decent prices. I believe they wholesale to places. I started with a hammerhead, candycane and alveopora. I left them on my sand bed for 2 weeks to make sure I wasn't going to kill anything.
Alveopora glamour shot
After a few more weeks I got in touch with a semi local reefer here on r2r @Kobin and he hooked me up with some gorgeous corals. Super nice guy with a very pretty tank as well.
Got a Koji wada, grandis paly, sunburst zoa, and a trojan horse mushroom from him. The koji is probably my favorite coral, it really reminds me of a cherry blossom tree.
Here are some garbage cellphone pics. I also added a bubble coral from harrys at some point, I think that was the same trip I got the fire shrimp/cleaner shrimp.
At some point I had a bit of a GHA outbreak, dosing with ocean magik and my limpetts made quick work of it.
As of two weeks ago this was my tank
I went ahead and re organized my aquascape cleaned up the tank and got some new corals last weekend.
I picked up an elegance coral *think its gonna die*, favia of the gods, and another favia that I cannot remember the name for the life of me, but it's cool looking and orange. I also picked up a really pretty rock flower anemone and I feel like I might want to add another at some point. I spot feed every other day with a mix of reef roids, mysis shrimp, and I have started to add AB+ to this as well. Bubble coral is mad because hermit stepped on it. At some point the trojan horse mushroom let go of the rock it was attached to and drifted around my tank. I found it last night (as of the date I post this) so I wedged it between some rocks and we will see how that goes.
Tank build breakdown:
Fluval 13.5 (glued the stupid little hole shut to create better flow across the media)
Kessil 160a
Aquatic Life 115 skimmer (this thing is amazing, strong recommend over the fluval one)
Fluval m-50 heater (was noob still)
Inkbird ITC-306a WIFI I have this synced via IFTTT to my air conditioner so that if the tank ever gets to hot, the AC will kick on to cool the water. This was super smart and way cheaper than actually buying a tank cooler.
Sicce .5 nano pump
Fluval cp1 circulation pump (works fine but I want to switch to a nero 3 for size and function)
Instant ocean Reef Crystals
Media:
3d printed media basket I made with PETG *is reef safe*
Chemi pure blue elite
Purigen
Carbon
Filter floss
Food:
Hikari Marine Small 2x a day
TDO Chroma boost Small 2x a day
Hikari frozen Mysis shrimp every other day
Polyp booster 15 minutes before lights out
4ml RedSea AB+ after lights go out
Mix of reef roids with mysis shrimp every other day.
Freeze dried mysis shrimp I feed to cleaner shrimp as snack
Nyos Wild Goji berry (only one clown eats this)
Nyos True algae (inverts will munch on this after it drops down)
This is my first ever thread like this, and I'm not really one to write a bunch down but I will update this and answer questions whenever I make changes!
