Perseverance Reef

[Fishy888]

We had an awesome Thanksgiving, and even the fish got some turkey! The pieces were very small. Not that I normally feed my fish poultry but it certainly won’t hurt occasionally. It may actually give a different nutrient profile that’s beneficial, even though turkey and other fowl aren’t exactly found on the reef. But we do have chicken of the sea so there’s that.

I ordered the wave maker today. It won’t get here until Wednesday. Still, that gives me time to do some maintenance in advance of the wave maker’s arrival.

I have a LED light that went over a freshwater tank that I pulled out of storage today which I’m going to put over the sump. That’ll be in addition to the red grow light already over the sump. I need the additional light over the sump for sure. The grow light was meant for a 20 gallon sump’s refugium section. It does its job pretty good considering the size and depth it has to penetrate but more is definitely needed.

I also need to clean the wave maker I currently have. Since I got some salt today I need to mix it and start doing a series of small water changes. My skimmer also needs to be retuned especially since I’m about to restart my carbon dosing as I need to drop nitrates. My phosphates aren’t bad but my nitrates are still out to lunch.

So far my corals are doing good, especially given the high nitrates. The water changes will help a little but I have a ways to go to get them down. I’m at ~60 ppm NO3. No, that’s not a typo. I wish it was!

The fish and inverts are doing great. The nems are doing great too. No, they didn’t get any turkey. I promise.

 

[tbrown]

 

[Reefering1]

I know my fish love the "flower of Mary", crumble into the water.
Boy are they mellow for a while after that...

 

[Fishy888]

I know my fish love the "flower of Mary", crumble into the water.
Boy are they mellow for a while after that...

You just have to make sure you have 420 ppm or your fish might grow legs or worse yet wings.

 

[Fishy888]

Tomorrow my wave maker will arrive. I’m excited for the changes it’ll bring! I’ve been dealing with cyano lately. Mainly the red kind but I still get some black and even green here and there. Having more flow will help scour the cyano out and fairly quickly!

Cyanobacteria hate flow! It not only rips them off the rocks but it also forces detritus, uneaten food, waste etc out of the sand and off of the rocks. Since cyano can feed directly on these things, much like a mushroom feeds directly on wood, having them gone means less cyano can be supported.

Acros love, love LOOoooOooOve flow! This wave maker alone will be able to generate 96x turnover by itself at full blast! It’ll be interesting to see how the fish respond to the flow. I have about 40x now. That’s fine for a few small frags but they won’t stay small much longer if I get my way. They’ll need the flow!

Once I start seeing growth I have a few different acros I want to get. I love the Oregon blue tort! That’d be the next acro. I also want to get a red planet. They’re beautiful! The purple slimer is another must have! I’d also like to get some gold and yellow corals as well. They don’t have to be acros though.

 

[Fishy888]

The wave maker is here! It’s amazing! It’s strong enough to push crushed coral around on the opposite side of my 6’ x 2.5’ tank!

Yesterday there was cyano everywhere. It’s an endangered species in there now!

It helps that I did a thorough cleaning of the old wave maker. It’s on the opposite end now. I have the new wave maker set as master and the old one as slave. Come to think about it I need to make the return pump a slave to the new wave maker as well.

The first thing I noticed when taking it out of the box was the weight of it. It’s much heavier than the SCP-120 and it’s much wider. It’s insane how much water it can push! The power supply is bigger and seems better made than the one on the SCP-120 as well. The MCP-180 came with a controller that has a LCD. It’s pretty nice!

I have my pumps talking directly to the app but I want to get a 2.4 GHZ router so I can communicate with my gyres and return pump over the web if I’m going to be gone a while.

 

[Fishy888]

It’s only been a few days since adding the new wave maker but I already see a subtle shift in the right direction. Cyano has disappeared from just about everywhere now. A couple of my acros now have the best PE I’ve seen them have yet. The nems are catching food the fish don’t eat. If the nems don’t get it, the shrimp do!

There are still some things I need to address tomorrow. I’m going to do a partial water change. Then I’ll add some live rock in the areas where the sand has been blown away.

I’m going to do some testing as well, especially since I started carbon dosing (vinegar) again. Hopefully my nitrates have dropped some. Not that I want to drop them too fast but I definitely need them to come down. I need to check my phosphates too. I don’t think they’ve gone up appreciably but I need to know for sure.

 

[Fishy888]

While my corals are doing well for the most part, my GARF bonsai is starting to RTN on me. The weird thing is that my RR The Vinh has the best PE yet since I got it. My forest fire “digi” almost died off at one point but has come back like gangbusters! The tri-color Valida also has its best PE since I’ve had it. My fruity pebbles never really opened up this whole time but yet it’s still alive. The anacropora is also doing ok considering how many times my conchs have knocked it over.

That said I’m still pretty happy with how my acros are doing. Honestly I wasn’t sure if they’d even make it this long, especially in the hands of an acro novice. That several are doing well still makes me feel better than I otherwise would. In fact I feel pretty encouraged. In another month or two I’m going to get a couple more beginner acros, assuming the ones I have continue doing well. As for the bonsai, I’m going to try to frag it and hope for the best.

There are certainly things I can do to make my parameters even more stable. I’m working on those. The biggest thing I need to do right now is to get my 60 ppm nitrates down and to keep them down! I’m going to be doing a series of middling sized water changes. Maybe 33% changes. Or I could bring out the sledgehammer and do a 50% water change, then a series of 33% changes. I just don’t want to wreak havoc with all my other parameters.

My solution to my nitrate issues will be to continue carbon dosing, effectively removing the bacteria in the water column with the water changes, and thus the nitrates the bacteria has consumed. My skimmer can only do so much with ozone running.

All the fish, nems and other invertebrates are fat and happy. There’s a good chance that I’ll be getting a black widow anemone, possibly this week.

 

[Fishy888]

The RTN on my bonsai has slowed down considerably. My Fruity Pebbles now has several polyps out. That’s the best PE it’s had since I got it.

I got my Black Widow BTA yesterday along with three RBTAs.

Here’s my Tri-Color Valida this morning.

This is the Fruity Pebbles.

These two corals have taken the longest to open up but they’re doing it! It’s days like today that I feel great about the direction my system is headed in.

Later today I’ll do some testing and see where things are. I’ll be doing a water change as soon as I get my bucket of salt.

My fish and inverts are all doing great. They have good appetites and look nice and healthy.

 

[That Crusso Kid]

Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas!

 

[DarthRaiderBob]

Merry Christmas, have a wonderful day

 

[Reefering1]

 

[Fishy888]

Merry Christmas to you all as well!

 

[tbrown]

Merry Christmas!

 

[Fishy888]

Now that Christmas is over, I did a 33ish% water change. It’s been needed for a while now, compounded by the fact that I accidentally left the lid on my gravity fed ATO partly ajar, dumping a full cup of vinegar into the system.

My acros seem to have responded positively to the water change.

I accidentally cut off the top of the second image, so the top polyp doesn’t show, but it’s also out.

It’s been a bit since I last posted an update. So far, three acros are still doing really well. One has STN issues. No other acroporas made it sadly. I attribute this partly to shipping stress, but let’s face it. My nitrates were sky high. Even though conditions are quite stable, with nitrates 60+ ppm only bad things can happen.

The water change will have lowered my nitrates some more. I’ll test them tonight but I want to give it a few hours since I stirred the substrate and all when I started draining the system.

I still feel pretty good about my system being able to handle the acros that have been doing the best. It’ll get even better once the ‘trates come down more. My goal isn’t chasing numbers, but anyone would agree that 60+ ppm is far too high.

 

[Fishy888]

I’m seeing signs that my acros are starting to encrust. The tri color valida and the fruity pebbles especially. I noticed the whitish outline like coralline gets when it’s growing but it’s not bare skeleton either.

At first I was worried that they might have started to STN on me. I compared images I took about a month ago to images I took on Saturday. They’ve started encrusting. Those were the last ones to open up and now they’re starting to grow.

I also discovered that I have a couple of asterina stars after all, and a white micro brittle star. All this is highly encouraging. I love the diversity of life in this system, and there’s much more to come.

Last week I went to petsmart and bought a container of red wiggles to raise for fish food, and two gold nugget mollies. After acclimating them over a 2 day period, they’re at 1.026. I’m going to keep some babies (I definitely have a male and female), but most will be live food for the reef.

 

[Fishy888]

What a difference a month makes…

December 24th

January 26th

The vinh still hasn’t begun to encrust yet but I’m pretty sure it will soon. It still looks pretty good though.

A month ago I had a spike in Cyanobacteria but coralline has exploded in growth. Very little cyano remains but it should be all but gone soon.

I added another light over the sump a couple of weeks ago. I think the algae is starting to grow faster now which likely has reduced nitrates enough to allow the uptick in coralline growth.

I plan on doing a 75% water change tomorrow. It’s definitely time. Before I do it though I’ll test for nitrates and phosphates, as well as ALK and CAL. My MAG test kit is expired so I can’t test for it currently. I’m probably going to buy a Hanna MAG checker soon. I’d like to get the ALK checker too but it’s going to have to wait.

I’m also going to test everything again about 6 hours or so after the water change. I’ve noticed lately that I’ll do a water change and I notice great PE but within like 3 or 4 days it decreases. Not all the way but enough that I think the big water change will make a big difference.

Of course I’ll make sure the new saltwater matches the reef’s parameters. That’ll help drive down the nitrates further. It’ll also help get any bad bacteria out and any contaminants I can’t test for.

 

[Fishy888]

Finally my azure damsel got two more friends yesterday. As you can imagine there was some slight aggression but they’re shoaling now.

I also added another species of micro brittle star as well.

Unfortunately my phone isn’t charging currently so I have to rely on my iPad to take pics, at least until I fix the phone. That brings me to a very awesome thing.

I’ve been talking about my fruity pebbles, rr the vinh and tri color valida a lot lately but there’s another acro I haven’t discussed in quite a while. That’s because I thought it was done for. It turns out I was wrong. The coral in question is my GARF bonsai.

It went through a period of RTN, then it went to STN. I left it in though, knowing that SPS can come back sometimes. I really didn’t expect it to. I almost took it out a couple of weeks ago. I’m glad I didn’t now!

Since I’m using an iPad 8th generation, the resolution isn’t the best ever, but the bonsai is starting to encrust back over its skeleton. If you look closely at the image, you can make it out. For the first time since early December, there are several polyps out. They’re easier to make out in the image than the white border where the coral is encrusting.

The long and the short of this is to never give up on SPS entirely. It can come back months later, even when the skeleton is completely white. This assumes you have a mature enough system that pest algae is kept at bay and parameters are reasonably stable.

There have been many ups and downs with this system, but it’s the most successful reef I’ve ever kept. Perseverance is paying off. This reef has a fitting name for sure!

 

[Fishy888]

For the most part everything is doing great! The acros are all growing nicely. The fish and inverts are fat and happy.

Speaking of inverts, it seems I’m still finding inverts I didn’t know I had! I just found a slug.

Please excuse the grainy image, but under the circumstances it’s the best this camera can do.

The slug is about an inch long from antennae to tail. It’s much like the kind of slug you’d find in a garden, but more compact.

All my snails still have their shells so it’s not merely a snail that had its shell ripped off. If that were to happen I’d think the snail would instantly die. I’ll research this guy some more.

In the meantime, I’m excited to keep finding new life in here! Hopefully there’s at least one more in here somewhere. I’d love to see these reproduce.

 

[fishguy242]

Stomatella snail...