our zoanthid dominated island waterfall

[reefwars]

tank is crusing along well


lost my bannerfish though which wasnt a big surprise ive never had much luck with them before but was hoping it would be diff but alas it was not


as well my squamosa over the last week has been shut down , i couldnt figure out why but was home most of the day today and found out the issue ....turns out my pair of neon gobies are eating him , they are attacking him every five mins so ill have to set up a small trap and get the little buggers out its not worth losing $800 in clams for $40 in fish lol

on the pus side my large maxima tear drop on the right of the tank has recovered fully from the pinched mantle after some freshwater baths , and the gobies dont seem to be interested yet i the maximas only the squammie lol


here are some pics , i need to invite someone over that has a better cam,era than my s5 does but till then it gets the job done

 

[reefwars]

 

[revhtree]

Looks awesome! Love it!

 

[joshporksandwich]

Looks awesome. Biggest zoas I've seen!

 

[reefwars]

Looks awesome. Biggest zoas I've seen!

haha thanks , well sadly the tank doesnt seem ready for zoas yet i lost my hallucination (that hurt fyi) and a couple other gems....stupid doser spiked my alk to 14dkh i mark my jugs with a v, a, m or c and i filled up the vinegar chamber but noticed a white residue and immediately knew what happened lol so anyways zoas werent too happy

same for rics i have 100 ready to go but im afraid nowlol

 

[VelasCorals]

Wow that tank looks great.

 

[reefwars]

Wow that tank looks great.

Thanks it's filling in nicely , will look much better soon with our ric garden and zoanthids added to it

Done on fish I believe lol

 

[Graffiti Spot]

Beautiful man, can't wait til it settles in enough for all thoes nice ZOA's you have to get moved over! What camera have you been using to take the ZOA pics in your other threads? They look great!
Side note, take your time moving stuff over. As you have experienced bad things happen when you are trying to create an instant masterpiece Well its not instant (with all the hard work) but you get the point. Hopefully everything else fairs well from the all spike. I know some corals take a few days to show signs of alk spikes, some even more. How are the sps doing and what varieties did you add? I think a nice colored staghorn would look great in the right spot.

 

[reefwars]

Beautiful man, can't wait til it settles in enough for all thoes nice ZOA's you have to get moved over! What camera have you been using to take the ZOA pics in your other threads? They look great!
Side note, take your time moving stuff over. As you have experienced bad things happen when you are trying to create an instant masterpiece Well its not instant (with all the hard work) but you get the point. Hopefully everything else fairs well from the all spike. I know some corals take a few days to show signs of alk spikes, some even more. How are the sps doing and what varieties did you add? I think a nice colored staghorn would look great in the right spot.

Thanks for the kind words , the Alk spike was surely user error but it slowly crept up as I was dosing bicarbonate and the jug of Alk had a V on the cover so I filled it as vinegar (goes to show 12 yrs later and I still make errors lol) so coral wise I didn't notice much at first but a few acros were the first signs of coral damage and I initially found the mistake when I was watching the sump and my vinegar line had a white cloud.....fwiw vinegar should never have that lol broke out the alk test after a quick taste on the finger and knowing there was no vinegar in there then seen my high dkh. Goes to show pay attention to detail lol I made the mistake of putting wrong cap on Alk bottle and I should be just lucky I caught it before a gallon of Alk was added.

Im not a big stag fan , I do ATM still have a RR diablo not the brightest anymore with the spike but its been a hardy piece since I got it this tank was designed with gorgs and lps for the bottom of the tank with zoanthids and some select sps pieces to fill the top, adding our clams was pretty random but turned out nice

The camera is just from my phone , however I have gotten good at taking pics by building a egg crate rack with magnets attached and then I'm able to move the rack with frags to waters surface and then its flow turned off and all blues are turned off and under white lights I bring the camera right to the waters surface so about 1-3" from the camera and that's it

I'll crop out other polyps if I can as it's a tightly packed scene or sharpen so it's not blurry etc.

Looking for a natural colored look while showing their brightness and not needing to ramp on the blue lighting

Were Getting better at it for sure , I borrow the camera from my work whoch is a cannon dslr and even the underwater one but still my s5 and older android took better pics with the skills we have which is obviously none as we can't figure out the nicer cameras and use them properly yet lol

Cheers

 

[VelasCorals]

Are those lobos not killing anything? When I keep them they always end up taking out a coral near them.

 

[reefwars]

Are those lobos not killing anything? When I keep them they always end up taking out a coral near them.

hi actualy the very top one is an australian scolymia and the three below it are indo lobophyllia , the second lobo and the last one are off the same colonie so no issues there and the tiny orange one is further in the back sweepers on these are about 1 1/2" max so lots of room

if too close can def be pretty aggressive

thanks

 

[luxauterna]

Beautiful and creative setup!

 

[Lena]

Very beautiful setup. Bright in colors and fantastic idea.

 

[reefwars]

things are doing well , we added the rest of our ricordias puts us at close to 100 shrooms lol as well we added a very large sebae anemone to the family had to move the tube anemone to the back in the dark to make room for the sebae




rock is becoming covered in coraline and everything is healing nicely from the dosing going awol


still at 40mls of vinegar and no readable nitrates or phosphates , still on original batch of gfo and the tank has only seen a couple water changes




flow is a bit of a ***** but we are working on it , still have the koralia in there until we decide what top do




here are some pics and a video coming once it loads





































all blues on :

 

[zoous]

Wow. Very Cool. Like the Waterfall. Nice Job.

 

[reefwars]

we took a video of the tank enjoy




video:

[video=youtube;w7a2KloYg_c]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7a2KloYg_c&feature=youtu.be[/video]

 

[reefwars]

 

[reefwars]

 

[reefwars]

here's a quick video we took the other night enjoy

video here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llvlKZcayzg

 

[reefwars]

little late on the update but here goes


over the last while we added a bunch more inverts so our list now includes cleaner shrimps(6), anemone crabs(2), anemone shrimp(3) , harlequin serpent star(1) , fromia sea star(1), candy pistol shrimp(1) , blue legged hermits(20) , emerald crabs(1) ,halloween hermit(1) , pom pom crab(1)....plus more im sure im forgetting lol






the problem was though as nice as it is having shrimps running around with no fear of predators they were picking on the clams and just about anything else that moves lol


we dealt with this for a while but the clams were getting worse so......




enter the guard dogs!!!




we added a full grown pair of scott's fairy wrasses

















so now the shrimp are in hiding...caves, ledges etc. not as active but the reef overall appreciates it and these two seem to show no interest in the shrimps and are the show fish of the tank (**** costly lol)






we added a large sebae anemone a while ago but was hit or miss one day it would attach the next it wouldn't , after killing the flow for a few weeks we decided to pull the bugger out so that space is now empty and we are debating on doing an acan garden in that spot or reserving it for something else down the road lol




we haven't added much for corals but a few more zoanthids around the top


we are fully stocked for fish atm


3 x full grown pj cardinals
2 x trojan clownfish
1 x citron goby
1 x sailfin blenny
1 x baby kole tang
2 x scotts fairy wrasses






here are some pics of how it sits today , we finally did another water change last night of 5g to freshen things up a bit.


water results have stayed consistent and still no measurable po4 or no3 and this is even with me babysitting 9 fish in my sump, no new gfo as of lately either.




tank is maturing on schedule and without a hitch




pics:


















































will post some full tank shots here next




hope you enjoy!!




ruth and denny