Planet 235 Upgrade - The Requiem Reef

[skyrne_isk]

That maculiceps. Easily my favorite tang. Holy cow it’s a beauty!

Thanks for saying so @skey44! He’s such an interesting guy, will have to take a video of him jousting with my gem tang. It’s never too serious, but he totally changes color to almost all white/gold when they spar… and the rest of the time he keeps darkish which pops his freckles. I had no idea tangs did this at will!

 

[skyrne_isk]

Here’s what’s in QT at the moment:

8 Azure damsels
1 Red sea bicinctus male clown
1 Orange spot filefish
1 Japanese female masked swallowtail

I have 3 of the damsels already through QT and in the display and they are model citizens so am going for a school. It seems like chromis and anthias just endlessly transition to males and kill each other in my tanks so these I am trying for dither fish.
The three I have give no issues to my resident perculas and are highly underrated IMO.

The bicinctus male is probably on his way to being a female. I keep these clowns in the sump and left the lid off the sump for a couple hours and found this on the basement floor .

The female had jumped out. So I ordered another wild pair hoping for a trio, but they were DOA. In all reality this one is probably now a girl so I will need to try for two males. Will have word next week on what’s available.

The orange spotted filefish I am most happy with. I had a pair and got them started on masstick - which is tremendous. https://premiumaquatics.com/product...evH38LvmgvHMVUctm0YRl37f8vVSq1s6zIixL1PWfwX-O

The other OSF sadly wouldn’t touch it and died after a week, but this one is on it and now will go after mysis pieces that are small enough and suck them down. Most of the mysis in the video were too big for him, but I am seeing him actually take down small pieces which is great! I also HAVE to capture his response when I add the masstick.

So the process is I mix the dry masstick and then freeze it, then smear it on a rock and put the rock into QT. Once the OSF notices the food he flips his dorsal spine straight up like this:

Which reminds me of a video game or
comic book.

You can sort of see it here, but when I get a shot of it you see he flips the spine up and then zooms over to the masstick. Hilarious.

 

[skyrne_isk]

Alright, here’s a clear shot of the OSF’s surprised face

 

[skyrne_isk]

Going back in time to a couple equipment upgrades I have made to lighting. I have a giant green efflo that is about a foot across and since the ends of my aquarium were not well lit - instead of continuing to grow flat the efflo was growing bowl shaped on the edge to capture the light.

Here is the offending coral - with the main problem being flow was getting cut off to the rest of the tank ( and more later on the problems this would cause).

So to remedy this, I bought 4 LED bars off Alibaba. 18 diodes per strip, and I think they were all 450nm. I spent maybe 20 bucks on ebay grabbing some various warm white, UV, and cyan diodes and got the colors mixed the way I wanted them without too much trouble. Was super simple to unsolder and resolder new diodes in place.

Here is the basic form factor of the lights, just a simple aluminum casing with channels for screw heads to slot into.

The trick for mounting them is I didn’t want to rebuild the entire light canopy, so these needed to be bolted on to the outside ends of the wood box.

I was concerned the 1/8 aluminum stock at the big box stores wouldn’t be robust enough so I picked up a piece online that had thicker material. I think it was 1/4” - and I reasoned would be a decent heat sink. So I ended up with a 5 foot section of 2.5” angle aluminum, cut it in half, and transferred the LED casing channels to the angle aluminum. And ended up with this, where you can see I have one side done.

There’s no dimming or anything, but it’s really not an issue for supplemental coverage.

Picked up 2” aluminum standoffs from Amazon and staggered the layout as I was concerned a straight line of standoffs might not keep the assembly perpendicular to the canopy (weight, sagging, etc). Here is how the standoffs were mounted.

I used a template to transfer this layout on to the angle aluminum.

And here is the finished product:

200ish PAR by themselves toward the middle of the strips just under the water. Not too bad for what I was looking for. This gives you an idea of the coverage they give. I hadn’t intended to go wall to wall with SPS but you know how it goes…

 

[skyrne_isk]

The other lighting upgrade I made back in March was to switch over to Reefi Uno Pro 2.1 for my main lighting. As you can see below, I use angle aluminum running down the middle of the tank to hold the primary lighting sources - which prior the upgrade were 2 120W LEDZeal Alpha 120 fixtures and a 250W halide pendant running a 14K bulb. Since these fixtures are all different sizes, the track holds the halide pendant, and I riveted together a cage to hold the LEDs in place and fit in the same track.

It's a shame I don't see LED Zeal around more, they were really fantastic lights for me. About the layout and selection can be found here:
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/ledzeal-alpha-120-spectrum-selection.664150/
I did some PAR testing with the Photone app (free, for the most part) and saw one of the LED units was running 500 directly below it on the water surface and the other was up around 800. My assumption was some of the diodes were wearing out after 6 years of use. I wasn't sure if the diodes would be easily replaceable or not, so went with the Reefi lights to ensure I wouldn't be out of luck if it didn't work out.

but first I had to put together cages for the Reefis, below will give you an idea. Not hard work, just a bit tedious!



First impressions on the Reefis were they had far superior coverage to the circular can style Alpha 120s, fantastic spectrum too. With the LED bars added to the canopy in my last post I also needed better coverage from my primary lighting source - hence the upgrade.

Reefis were also 1000% easier to program... the Alpha's use a pretty crappy app that is finicky and the Reefi use a simple browser that is very intuitive. But a big bummer on the Reefis was that one unit suddenly stopped working last weekend so it has sent back in for maintenance. Daniel was super responsive to my message (like within an hour or so) and I am not dissuaded on my purchase. In the interim I put the brighter of the two Alpha 120s and took the opportunity this morning to work on the dimmed diodes.

If you look closely, you can see some the diodes are black and some of the lenses are browned a little bit - likely from running too hot. The Alphas have both active and passive cooling, so my next step was to see how I could access the board.



Turns out accessing the board was super simple, the bezel unscrewed with then a lens cover that slid off.


After pulling the lenses off I got a better look at the diodes. They still worked but had internal lenses that were all highly darkened. After I pulled them off there was not very much thermal paste behind them at all which I suspect caused the inner diodes to run too hot.



I had ordered some 450nm 5W LEDs from eBay some time ago and these diodes were all royal blue. Swapping them out was super easy with a soldering iron (flux is your friend here) and below is the end result:


I decided to leave lenses off the middle 4 diodes - both to eliminate some of the hotspotting that happens in the middle of any array and for any help with heat management.

Here is the light with a couple sheets of paper to make the colors visible once I was all done:

Not too bad for an hour long Memorial Day project!

I plan on keeping the Alphas around - as a can form factor it’s nice to have the option for a pointable light source for highlighting should the need arise.

 

[skyrne_isk]

Last (hopefully) equipment-related note for while:

I currently run 2 MP60s and 2 MP40s but recently had some issues with STN on some of my bigger colonies. Clearly the flow was being interrupted too much by growth and limitations of the perpendicular alignment of the Vortech pump design. Below is an example of the aftermath... this had been one solid colony about 10" across.


I am not sure if the dry side of the front MP60 was wearing out as well, but it would regularly error code when coming back on from feed cycling. So I sent it into Ecotech for repair and picked up a Tunze 6255 to run in its place and so I could try out some directional flow.

My initial thoughts are that I am very impressed with the output - it certainly outproducing the MP60 and I am running it between 20-60% on a wave mode. The Tunze controller is a little fiddly, it doesn't have as much fidelity with setting the duration of the wave in the shorter settings as Ecotech. I tried the auto wave detection function which.... didn't very well. Not sure if I had too many other pumps also running at the same time but setting the wave up manually wasn't too tough at all.

What does crack me up is this lawnmover blenny. When the MP60 was in use in this location in the tank he would always go INSIDE the wetside to mess about while the pump was off during feeding. This stresses me out because I am always worried he is going to get cocky and then end up blendered when the pump kicks back on. Looks like old habits die hard because here he is doing the same thing in the Tunze. As far as personality goes, the cheapest fish is my favorite :p

 

[skyrne_isk]

Update from earlier today in QT. Notice anything ?

 

[fish_collector]

OMG your maculiceps is such a beautiful fish. One of our best LFS in the Phoenix area had a few of them recently. I'd like to pay them a visit this weekend and possibly get one of them if they are still there.

My starry blenny does the same thing when a wavemaker is shut off for feeding. It scares the crap out of me but hes never been caught up in one when they come back on.

 

[skyrne_isk]

A couple updates:

Daniel from Reefi repaired a ceramic capacitor that went bad on one of my newish (3 months) units. One of the reasons I went with Reefi was their stellar reputation on customer service and responsiveness. My experience is literally the same as seemingly everyone else has had. Another thing on Reefi: I sent the unit out on 5/20 and had it back 5/30 - so ten days round trip for getting it to the west coast and back! And he had my email responded to within and hour or so - in my own work life I don’t come close to an hour response time on email

On the other end of the spectrum is Ecotech. I sent my MP60 in on 5/23 and called them Monday to get a status. What I heard was they were working on units sent in during the second week of May. We’ll see how long it takes - but good thing I bought the Tunze.

On the livestock front, here’s what I’ve now got in QT.


Not sure if it can be seen, but there are now four Japanese Masked Swallowtails in QT! Which is about twice as many as I had planned but sometimes that’s just how it works out. I have been enamored with these fish ever since saw them from @Mike&Terry threads. Just an amazing fish to have and am excited to finally get a few in. They weren’t often available - I want to say I have been looking off and on for two years until a number of them became available from several suppliers. So no “pair” yet but I am sure a male will develop out of the four girls I have now.

Three seem to be in really good shape, one is a little listless and some slightly elevated respiration. So she got a freshwater dip yesterday and we will see how it goes.

 

[skyrne_isk]

OMG your maculiceps is such a beautiful fish. One of our best LFS in the Phoenix area had a few of them recently. I'd like to pay them a visit this weekend and possibly get one of them if they are still there.

My starry blenny does the same thing when a wavemaker is shut off for feeding. It scares the crap out of me but hes never been caught up in one when they come back on.

Thanks for saying klc! I see folks often pick the eventual murder bot Achilles and Clown Acanthurids for their tanks (which of course are stunning). But for my money give me the Maculiceps. He’s super well behaved and the color flashing I see him do throughout the day is super neat!

 

[skyrne_isk]

I feel like I post about everything but the display, so here’s a good morning on the reef.

 

[fish_collector]

I had the same experience with Reefi, I had 2 with issues on separate occasions and Daniel got them repaired rather quickly.

 

[fish_collector]

Thanks for saying klc! I see folks often pick the eventual murder bot Achilles and Clown Acanthurids for their tanks (which of course are stunning). But for my money give me the Maculiceps. He’s super well behaved and the color flashing I see him do throughout the day is super neat!

I agree 100%. I’m in the planning stages of a 10’ ish tank for the house we’re building. I’ve got an old glass 20” tall 240 I’m going to use as a sump so water volume should be healthy. It’s my ambition to keep a few large uncommon adult tangs along with the SPS I have in my frag tank. I’ve also got darn near 2000lbs of Pukani rock just waiting for a tank to go in.

I’m following your thread now.

 

[skyrne_isk]

Super sad this afternoon. Walked by the tank this afternoon and saw my female percula clownfish had died. No major changes to the tank last night or to other fish so am assuming old age at this point.

Here’s the oldest pic I had on my phone, but am thinking I had these fish in my old house - which would have back around 2010 or so.


Can easily say my favorite fishes are not the ones I spend the most on, but the ones I have the longest.

And really rough because she just laid eggs last week. Here is her last clutch, still alive (if you can see them).

 

[skyrne_isk]

Update on QT:

Doing okay in there. Lost 4 of the 8 Azure damsels, someone went on a rampage - lots of bite marks and fins bitten off of dead fish I found. These have been in a QT together for well over a month not sure what the deal is.

On the masked angels, 3 out of the 4 are doing great. Two of them were breathing slightly elevated and so they got a FW dip. Of these two, one isn’t eating and prefers to stay snout into the MP10 so am assuming there is something with gill involvement (ick, velvet not sure). But it has to be mild as no one else has any symptoms. I took copper to 2.0ppm as of 6/5 so it’s just a waiting game on the one angel on how quickly the active parasites drop and if this happens quickly enough before she starves. It still astounds me when I see big setups and folks who don’t QT. Still exponentially better to deal with all this in QT with less than display reef water quality than to hope better conditions can let fish naturally fight disease.

I did get another pair of wild red sea bicinctus who are doing great in QT. But the male survivor of the original pair I had is definitely in girl mode. The original wild pair was pretty good sized and the female jumped out on 5/15. So in my case the transition to female happened in just a couple weeks. Now whether that’s just behavioral for now or if the physical changes have taken place I have no idea. But the plan to have a trio isn’t happening and the original boy/girl is still in QT just in a timeout box until I figure out what to do with her.

 

[skyrne_isk]

And since videos are a lot better than words, here is QT at feeding time. It looks like one of the angels is already on the way to becoming a male - it’s the grouchiest one whose back/flank is darker than the others. At the end of the clip is the angel I don’t feel good about. She doesn’t lay on the bottom but she either stays under the MP10 or swims into it. Odd.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

And since videos are a lot better than words, here is QT at feeding time. It looks like one of the angels is already on the way to becoming a male - it’s the grouchiest one whose back/flank is darker than the others. At the end of the clip is the angel I don’t feel good about. She doesn’t lay on the bottom but she either stays under the MP10 or swims into it. Odd.

Thanks for sharing the video with us! Have you noticed any other aggression with the angel or just during feeding?

 

[skyrne_isk]

Thanks for sharing the video with us! Have you noticed any other aggression with the angel or just during feeding?

A little aggression from the presumed male to be… just a body length dive in the direction of the other angels. That female never leaves from under / near the MP10 and I don’t think she’s getting a more/worse attention either….

 

[skyrne_isk]

An update on QT:

I moved the angel that won’t eat and the angel that is probably on her way to being a male to her own QT. It's not a great picture, but definitely a bacterial infection on the abdomen. Not red and bleeding (like on the male who previously died in QT) but scales missing and some uneven skin. I have little doubt it's a combination of less than great water quality (it is QT after all, comes with the territory) along with copper acting as an immunosuppressant. Perhaps these fish are just coming in with latent bacterial problems - I run a UV and have never had to deal with bacterial problems on fish in QT, ever. Blooms / cloudy water sure here or there but not like this. And given how fast the male died (<48 hours from skin lumpiness to death) I was quick on the trigger to treat this and not let the fish try and recover on its own.

I checked my logs and they went into 2.0ppm copper on 6/5. Per humblefish, Cipro is the top line treatment for bacterial infections with the following protocol: "Best administered via 1-2 hour bath treatment. Dosage is high: 250mg per gal. Repeat every 24 hours for 7 days". So this fish has 2 days of baths so far. Eating was really strong on day 2 of the bath, I will probably skip a bath day if he refuses food.

There is some interesting advice on when you have ick (or velvet) + a bacterial infection here:
https://humble.fish/community/threads/the-bacterial-infection-predicament.1330/
But it basically says you can cut copper treatment on an ACTIVE ick/velvet infection to 5 days for velvet and 8 days for ick, tank transfer, and then treat with antibiotics. I don't have an active infection of any parasites, so will need to give some thought for how to navigate the other side of this bacterial infection (fingers crossed I get there).

Anyone have thoughts on if I need to back through copper if I have a mini tank transfer protocol running on these fish? And with the limited picture quality let me know how serious you think it looks.

 

[skyrne_isk]

So bit of a downer on the QT front: the two angels in antibiotic didn’t make it . Am not thinking bacteria am actually leaning toward uronema. The ABX made no noticeable difference and the angel without any lesions just never ate. The filefish ate fine but still wasted away and died.

On the upside, the Red Sea bicinctus and two remaining angels are doing well and eating out of my hand Enjoy!