New SPS Tank for JBNY

[JBNY]

Some corals that are doing ok. Hopefully thing are turning around for the better the LPS have been doing pretty well for the last 3-4 months. At this point I am just having problem with acros. but at least one is doing well and while not showing any growth yet, it is coloring up and and not receding.

 

[JBNY]

Quick video update.

 

[JBNY]

It’s been a while since I updated this thread, so here’s the catch-up since early April.

The tank is finally starting to look like a reef again. The rock doesn’t look like new dry rock anymore, the back glass is mostly covered in coralline, sponges and biofilm are showing up, pods are everywhere, and the water has stayed clear with UV and ozone running.

So visually, it looks a lot more settled.

The acros, however, have been kind enough to remind me that looking settled and being ready for sticks are not the same thing.

I tried a few more Acro frags from locals. They looked fine at first. PE was decent, nothing looked angry, and for a little while I thought maybe the tank had turned the corner. Then the same pattern showed up again. They look okay for a bit, then recession starts around the tips or edges, and then they slowly go downhill. Around that same time PO4 hit a low morning floor again and nitrate was lower than I wanted. That combination keeps showing up with the acros.

The LPS didn’t care at all. So I changed direction a little. So for now I am going just add other corals and enjoy the tank as it matures to able to hold acros. I added more hammers, torches, blastos, chalices, Cyphastrea, zoas, and Leptoseris. Those have all been stable and growing, and they’ve made the tank feel a lot less empty while the SPS side waits for the tank to grow up a little.

I also bumped feeding up quite a bit. Fish feeding is heavier now, and every few days I’m feeding a slurry with mysis, Calanus, pellets, PhytoFeast, Oyster Feast. I’m trying to get more usable particulate food moving through the tank and build the food web instead of just chasing nitrate and phosphate with dosing.

Nutrients are holding now. Nitrate and Phosphate dosing are both off at the moment. PO4 has been staying around 0.09-0.13 and nitrate was last around 16.9. Alk is being kept around 7.8-8.0 dKH with Core7 doing the main work and a little kalk at night.

The other big issue was bubble algae. It got bad enough that manual removal wasn’t going to be realistic, so I used Brightwell Razor Marine. I did the full dose and maintenance phase, and it worked very well. Bubble algae is probably 95% gone now. I didn’t see coral stress or livestock issues from it, and the remaining patches should hopefully get handled by the emerald crabs and foxface. I’d use it again if I had to.

Fish activity is much better now too. The tank has firefish, flame angels, orchid dottybacks, a Lepidozygus school, dispar anthias, lyretail anthias, a small hippo tang, a foxface, and I just added a Copperband. It finally has that constant movement that makes a reef feel alive.

There are still normal young-tank annoyances. I’ve got some diatom-looking patches on the sand, aiptasia is still present with Berghia and now the Copperband working on it , and I’m watching for any bubble algae rebound. But overall the tank is in a much better place than it was a couple months ago.

So that’s where it is right now. Fish look good, flubber looks good, nutrients are holding without N or P dosing, bubble algae is mostly beaten back, and acros are on probation until the tank proves it can keep them alive.

 

[JBNY]

Thought it worthwhile to show how well Brightwell Razor worked on riding my tank of bubble algae. I had a really bad infestation of the small bubble age the one that is too small to manually remove. I had a foxface and emerald crabs already int he tank, but was losing the fight pretty badly.

Here is what it looked like intially.

Then after the dosing and maintenance round, a little over three weeks.

No issues with fish or corals, I would total use it a again if needed.

 

[Ernie Mccracken]

Looking good, hopefully you are turning the corner here.

Are you a big bacteria guy? I wonder if dumping a few bottles of PNS products would speed up the maturation process.

 

[JBNY]

Funny, you say that I just started using the PNS probio about three weeks ago and I just put in an order for their Deep Cycle earlier today.

 

[Acrononomus]

Awesome thread! Enjoyed reading it , very detailed. Hopefully acros will start to be ok in a few months ..

 

[JBNY]

I did a video update for the tank.

The short version is that the tank is doing well, but Acropora still aren’t reliable enough for me to say this is an SPS tank.

By mid-June I had accepted that the tank was biologically mature in the broad sense, but not mature enough to consistently establish acros. The pattern has been pretty predictable. A frag looks fine for a couple of weeks, then recession starts at the tips, and eventually the rest of it follows with STN.

I’ll still put in an occasional test frag. But for now I’ve shifted toward Montipora, zoanthids, chalices and a lot more LPS. Those corals are responding well, so that’s where the stocking is going until the tank has a few more months behind it.

One thing that really stood out while putting the video together was how much the tank has changed visually. When it was first set up, large sections of the rock were stark white. Now the rockwork is covered in coralline, including areas that were completely bare eight or nine months ago. I’ve had older tanks where getting coralline to spread everywhere was harder than it should have been, so I’m very happy with how quickly it has taken over this one.

The bubble algae problem is also gone. At its worst, there were literally thousands of tiny BB-sized bubbles covering the rockwork and frag plugs. It wasn’t a few patches I could pull during a water change. It was becoming the aquascape.

I treated the tank with Brightwell Razor using the initial daily dosing period, followed by dosing every other day. After about three weeks, roughly 99% of the bubble algae was gone. A few weeks after that, I couldn’t find any at all. I saw no negative reaction from the fish or corals.

In the past I spent months manually pulling bubble algae every weekend. This time I poured something into the tank and watched it disappear. I’m not sure reefkeeping is supposed to allow victories that easy, but I’ll take it.

Right after the Razor treatment, the sand bed went through a fairly heavy brown diatom phase. I didn’t treat it or start changing things. My guess is that killing off that much algae released enough material to temporarily feed the diatoms. They lasted about a week, then burned themselves out. The sand has been clean since.

The biggest improvement is that nutrients are finally holding without supplementation. Nitrate has been staying around 11–15 ppm, phosphate around 0.09–0.11 ppm, and alkalinity has remained between roughly 7.8 and 8.2 dKH. I’m still dosing Triton Core7, but I’m no longer adding nitrate or phosphate just to keep them detectable.

The tank has now been stable at those levels for about a month. It took much longer than I expected to get there. Overall, I’m happy with where it is. It isn’t the SPS tank I originally planned yet, but the reef is filling in, the corals that are in there are growing, the nuisance algae problems are under control, and the chemistry has finally settled down. For now I’m going to keep adding the corals that clearly like the tank and let the acros wait until the tank is ready instead of when I decide it should be.

 

[IPT]

Sick, you are the man! I remember reading about your TOTM and the many, many other contributions you've made (back in the RC days and recent ones well). So glad I stumbled onto your build thread!

Thanks for sharing all of your build details and experience. I've been at it for decades, but never at your level and there is always something to learn. Thanks to the internet and people like you we get to learn it! Shared wisdom and shared experience goes such a long way if one is wiillng to take the time to actually listen to and implement it!

I'm originally from LI (Glen Cove area). Would be nice to still be back there to have more active reef clubs and reefers, but I've been up in Alaska for 20+ years. Not the same caliber up here for reefing, but it is a whole other caliber level for daily living.

Seems like you like the ATI stratons. I think they probably do have great spread. Once you hit your stride with the tank do you have a PAR goal in mind? Are you a believer in high PAR (so long as the nutrients and flow are on point)?

Looking forward to checking in on this thread and your build.

 

[JBNY]

Sick, you are the man! I remember reading about your TOTM and the many, many other contributions you've made (back in the RC days and recent ones well). So glad I stumbled onto your build thread!

Thanks for sharing all of your build details and experience. I've been at it for decades, but never at your level and there is always something to learn. Thanks to the internet and people like you we get to learn it! Shared wisdom and shared experience goes such a long way if one is wiillng to take the time to actually listen to and implement it!

I'm originally from LI (Glen Cove area). Would be nice to still be back there to have more active reef clubs and reefers, but I've been up in Alaska for 20+ years. Not the same caliber up here for reefing, but it is a whole other caliber level for daily living.

Seems like you like the ATI stratons. I think they probably do have great spread. Once you hit your stride with the tank do you have a PAR goal in mind? Are you a believer in high PAR (so long as the nutrients and flow are on point)?

Looking forward to checking in on this thread and your build.

Thanks! I love looking at the tank during the winter, so I can imagine having a reef up there makes those Alaska winters a little easier.

I do like the Stratons. The spread is excellent and they blanket the tank much more like the MH/T5 setup did than most LEDs I’ve seen. With halides, my sweet spot was always high 400s near the top of the rockwork, then letting it fall naturally from there. For this tank I’m aiming for roughly 400–450 PAR in the upper third and around 180–200 at the sandbed. That gives me enough light for acros up high, while still leaving plenty of room lower down for everything else.

I’m fine with high PAR when the tank is stable, nutrients are available and the corals have enough flow. But I don't feel it worth it to chase 600–700 PAR just because I can.

 

[JBNY]

One thing that really shows how much the tank has matured is the coralline growth. In the first picture from December, a bunch of the rock is still bright white. In the second from last week, it’s almost completely covered. The tank looks dramatically different now.

 

[IPT]

Holy cow!! Time for some sticks :).

 

[JBNY]

The tank continues to look good overall. Coralline growth has really taken off and there is still very little nuisance algae in the display, so visually the tank looks about as settled as I could ask for.

I picked up a bunch of new corals from the WWC July live sale, including four Acro frags. These were basically another test to see if the tank was finally ready to keep Acropora consistently instead of the same old routine of looking fine for a few weeks and then slowly falling apart.

I also sent out an ICP-MS to see if there were any low-level contaminants or trace element issues I was missing. Nothing significant showed up. I bumped iodine up slightly based on the results, but everything else looked pretty reasonable. The RO/DI sample came back undetectable across the board, which was also good to see. Iron was undetectable in the tank, so I started adding a very small amount of iron to my SPS trace blend rather than dosing it separately.

I also added an Aiptasia-eating filefish to help clean up the remaining Aiptasia. He settled in without any issues and started picking at them almost immediately.

The big news though is the Acros. The four frags from the July order are all still doing well, and more importantly I'm finally seeing real growth around the bases. No tip recession, no slow decline, just healthy looking tissue and new growth spreading onto the plugs and rock.

That may not sound terribly exciting after keeping SPS for this long, but after spending most of the last year trying to figure out why Acros wouldn't establish in this tank, seeing them actually start to grow is a pretty big deal. I'm not declaring victory yet, but this is easily the best sign I've had that the tank may finally be turning the corner.

 

[xiaoxiy]

That's definitely an encouraging change of pace!

 

[jackson6745]

It has begun!! Im looking forward to seeing this tank with big acro colonies!

 

[Mellotang]

Nice job being patient

 

[tripdad]

Any update on the acros?

 

[IPT]

Yeah, I am curious as well. How's it going?

 

[JBNY]

Thanks for all the good words everybody!

Mostly good changes in the tank over the past few months. The biggest one is that the acros are doing well. After seeing growth on the first few, I started adding more. A few good deals on frag bundles later, my one or two test pieces had turned into about 25 frags. Color is very good, some are growing, and I’m not seeing recession on any of them.

Most of the growth is still just laying down a base. It seems slow to me, but looking back through my notes from previous tanks, this initial phase took a few months then too. Apparently I remember the colonies better than the waiting.

I haven’t needed to increase my regular Triton dosing yet, so there’s growth, but not enough to make much of a difference in consumption. Calcium and magnesium were a little low when I checked a few days ago, so I brought them up. If they drop again, I’ll adjust the dosing. For about two months I’ve also needed supplemental alk on top of the Triton to keep up with demand. That’s been keeping things very steady at 7.9 in the morning and 8.1 at night.

I sent out an ATI ICP-MS test in July. Most major elements were within ATI’s ranges, with low iodine, manganese and fluorine, undetectable iron, and elevated lithium and silicon. Zinc and cobalt were both measurable and within range. Nitrate was 14.23 ppm and phosphate was 0.14 ppm. I made a one-time iodine correction after getting the results. The accompanying RO/DI sample had no detections across the tested panel, which I was pretty happy to see.

After I sent out that ATI ICP-MS test in July, at the end of August I added Grow More EDDHA-chelated iron, 6% Fe, to my SPS blend. I chose it because the EDDHA holds iron strongly at reef-tank pH. The idea is to keep it dissolved longer rather than have it quickly precipitate out. The blend adds about 0.2 µg/L of iron per day, spread across the dosing schedule. It’s a small, regular addition. I can’t say how much it has contributed to what I’m seeing with the acros.

I also started MicroBacter7 on August 7 at 6.6 mL daily. Also arounf that time phosphate started climbing above 0.15 ppm, so I switched from spirulina mysis back to regular mysis and paused the PNS ProBio slurry feeding to cut back on nutrients.

Then nitrate went the other direction, dropping to 3.1 ppm on October 6. I briefly stopped the MicroBacter7 and dosed potassium nitrate for four days. I stopped the nitrate dosing and resumed MicroBacter7 on October 10. Nitrate was back to 14.2 ppm on October 12, so I’m watching where it goes from here.

On August 29 I added 12 royal grammas, three female lyretail anthias and three acro frags. The fish additions didn’t go nearly as well. I lost all 12 royal grammas and the three female lyretail anthias. They had all been quarantined and were eating before I added them, and I thought the acclimation had gone well. I didn’t see any aggression, but I started losing a few each day. Nothing else in the tank was affected, including the 11 anthias already in there. I’m really not sure what happened.

September brought another 11 acros and four LPS from a WWC flash sale, followed by 11 more acros from the local LIRA swap last weekend.

I also took apart and cleaned the Abyzz A200 return pump and Ultra Reef skimmer in September. Both were due for some attention.

At this point I’m starting to think about getting the tank growing well instead of wondering whether the next frag will hold its tissue. That doesn’t come with any immediate equipment or dosing changes. I’ve changed several things over the past few months, so I’m not going to credit one bottle or feeding change for the improvement. The acros are holding their tissue, the color is good, and bases are spreading. Now I’m watching for growth to pick up and keeping an eye on nutrients.

Pics of frags.