Pico Pico: The 3 gallon experiment

[Narideth]

Such a nice build thread. Would love to see some more pictures with the deep blues and orange filter!

What does your maintenance routine look like? I do regular weekly 1-gallon water changes on my 3-gal.

Thank you for the compliment!

I'm looking to get a new light on this tank - the current one doesn't have strong blues in an adjustable manner like a previous light did. I can't really capture more of the deep blue/filtered images until I do.

Maintenance has been all over the place due to the things that have happened. The last hurricane (Milton) had all of my tanks off power for 5 days, and while the temps were fine, I was alternating my battery powered bubblers throughout the three marine tanks that needed them most. before then our power was off for 2 days during Helene. The weather has wrecked havoc with proposed stability.

I've lost some of the firework cloves but the rest seem to have come through it alright. Otherwise, I do a 2/3 tank change about once a month if things were -normal-. I moved the Captain America palys that have the mystery purple and orange zoas on the same plug to a different tank, and they're recovering their colors quite nicely. I think the current light on the tank may be too strong for some of these lower light loving corals. The hammer that suffered from the nutrient spike seems stable in a different tank as well. It's been a crazy couple of months.

 

[Narideth]

A long-delayed update.

Unfortunately, despite several months of trying to re-stabilize the tank after the yasha goby died and polluted it with the body I couldn't find, the Pico reef has been retired. Half of the corals ended up slowly dying off before I made the executive decision to move them to a different tank.

I don't have the money or the energy to strip down and relaunch this pico reef, nor to upkeep three different marine tanks on top of all of the other aquariums, so I simply disassembled the in-tank filter and relaunched this nano aquarium into a freshwater planted tank for a scarlet badis and his weekly brineshrimp hatchery. A different experiment but one that gives me a little less stress, hah!

Maybe I'll revisit it someday in the future, but for now, we bid adieu to the tiny paradise.

For those curious, here's a farewell video of the new resident fighting his own reflection in the middle of a feeding.