Reef under Siege - Waterbox AIO 50.3

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Ugh. Really?

Like, seriously? Sonofa...

Looks like I need to prioritize acquiring some peppermint shrimp and hope they're up to the task.

 

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So the hydroids are still here... I'm scrubbing the glass any time I notice or think to do it. Just haven't had anything like a chance to do anything else about it yet.

Despite - or in spite of - regular water changes and the addition of both SeaChem De-Nitrate and PhosGuard, I haven't been able to make much of a dent in my NO3 (~25) and PO4 (0.5) numbers.

I could do another 50% change, but good salt isn't exactly cheap, and the process of making that much water is a royal pain.

I also really need to get at some of this GHA, and especially do an H2O2 dip on the frags suffering from the worst of it. But I really dislike sticking my hands in my tank, and I worry I'll get this wrong and kill one or more of my corals in the doing.

 

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Well, okay, various things have gone on here since I last update this thread, including the addition of a pair of tuxedo urchins, 3 peppermint shrimp, and 1 berghia nudibranch (which promptly disappeared into a rock, ate a single aiptasia head the next day, and hasn't been seen since). I've been struggling with NO3, which I can't seem to get below 20 or 25ppm (without doing more 50% water changes, which are not only extremely laborious for me to do with the equipment I have, but also I'm running rather low on salt), nor PO4 below 0.5.

And that's despite running a liter of De-Nitrate in the fuge, Phosguard (recently switched to RowaPhos)

But the thing that really prompted me to update this was not even the growth of my favias (which I think are doing pretty good, but would maybe be better if I could get my nitrates and phosphate down some more) or my pocillopora, but when this picture I took on June 12 of this year cropped up on one of my displays, I kind of had to do a double-take:


Above was a month after I'd gotten it at an Atlanta Reef Club fragging workshop in May, just finally starting to show some signs of growth (I've only recently seen any polyps at all on that original section).

Versus where it is today, just 3 months later:

Recently I remarked I can almost see how fast its growing, particularly up and over that little peak of rock that was originally holding it in place. Having that picture come up randomly on my Nest device really drove it home.

Of all the corals I brought home that day, this showed the least activity for the longest time, and I wasn't even sure it was alive for the first few weeks. Now though, it's grown at 1 - 2" in just about every direction in just over 2 months!

All the rest of my corals are doing well also, I've since added some red mushrooms, some random blue/green/purple mushroom, and a King Kong Yuma as well. The rock had 2 little mushrooms and one larger one about 1.5" across when I bought it, and I've now got at least half a dozen of the things running around the tank.

My Nirvana zoas however... are all extremely leggy and long, instead of clustered up close to their rock/tile/plug like I understand they should be, and my Space Chaos zoas did not make it after some hair and bubble algae made them mad, and I apparently made them madder during removing it and a brief H2O2 soak that they never recovered from, and eventually bailed :(

I have two heads of aiptasia in the back just kind of sitting there, not bothering anyone. I got a berghia nudibranch, it ate the smaller third head that was near my pocilliopora's where I dropped it, then disappeared into the rockwork and was never seen again. Not sure if I should try another one or not.

 

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An update:

Most of my corals, as mentioned in my last post, are doing quite well... aside from the Space Chaos Zoa I sadly lost. That and the fact that ALL my zoas are looking super leggy, and I guess I hadn't been giving them enough light? But they were all kinda like this when I got them as frags in the first place. Still, as new as the tank was/is, I took quite a long time ramping lights up, trying to minimize risk of algae growth, especially as high as my NO3 (~25ppm) and PO4 (0.5) have been.

Still... I had bought a Jebao doser. I already had a thing of All-For-Reef I'd never opened. I got some Reef Code A + B when I realized my Alk was creeping low. But then I dosed the alk, it shot up, and it didn't look like I was going to need to dose it much after all.

Boy was I wrong. It seems some of my corals had been sulking at least a little, presumably because of the lower alk... because once I added it, the stony corals TOOK OFF, and promptly started sucking it right out of the water.

And there, I'd had a couple of occasions to wonder if I hadn't jumped the gun on the doser and bought something I maybe didn't need, and if I shouldn't consider putting it up for sale on the local reef club.

Until I started doing daily alk tests, that is, and watched the trend on my Apex logs. I couldn't believe it: it was dropping by as much as .2 or .3dKh a day! I haven't yet figured out exactly how much I should be dosing to keep it ultimately stable, as I'm taking it carefully, but right now I'm adding 6ml/day, 1ml per hour, during the DT's night-phase, and I'm thinking I'm going to need to bump that up by 1 - 2ml more.

As seen in my prior post, my monti has really taken off. My pocillopora have all nearly doubled in length in the 4 months since I got them, and all have not only covered the base of their frag plug, but branched at least once, if not twice. Every head on my candy canes has split (or is splitting) since I got them.

All the discosomas are doing well, also. I started with one 1" red disco on a shell with 2 little babies on it, now I have at least 6 of them in the tank, with one almost 3" across, and another about 2", and my King Kong Yuma appears to have a baby of itself hiding on the frag plug near its base.

Now if I can just finish designing this algae turf scrubber, get it printed properly (it's going to take me at least a kilo of PETG - over 900g just for the main body), and all set up... maybe... just maybe, I can finally get these nitrates under control and not have so much hair algae growing in my fuge.

 

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Aaaaaand, yep, Ca is dropping notably now too with the increased Kh uptake. Looks like I'll need to add about 20ml of Reef Code A for the next few days - according to the guidelines on the bottle, with my 64-gallon total volume, I shouldn't add more than ~24ml/day, so I'm playing it safe and going lower.

Once I can get Ca and Kh both right where I want them, I can start dosing All For Reef instead.

In the meantime, yesterday I got 4 more mini-brittles (2 more in the fuge, 2 in the DT), 40-some-odd collonista snails from one local reef club member, and a Rainbow Stylo frag that I got for free from another as an SPS canary to see how they'll fare in my tank.

 

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Just for you @Crabs+Shrimps-69 - I dug this up while looking for something else, Mr. Pepper photobombing my coral pics :D

Bonus pic - Mrs. Pepper:

Dr. Pibb is in the refugium where I haven't been able to get a particularly good pic of him lately.

 

[Crabs+Shrimps-69]

Just for you @Crabs+Shrimps-69 - I dug this up while looking for something else, Mr. Pepper photobombing my coral pics :D

Bonus pic - Mrs. Pepper:

Dr. Pibb is in the refugium where I haven't been able to get a particularly good pic of him lately.

Nice shrimp!

 

[ThisIsTheWay]

I notice you plan on adding a wrasse to your tank, but won't it pose a risk to the inverts?
Or are pink-streaked wrasses more invert safe than others?

Pink streaked (aka cryptic) wrasses stay small (similar size to possum wrasses). I've got one and it's definitely shy but at most it'll terrorize some amphipods.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Just for you @Crabs+Shrimps-69 - I dug this up while looking for something else, Mr. Pepper photobombing my coral pics :D

Bonus pic - Mrs. Pepper:

Dr. Pibb is in the refugium where I haven't been able to get a particularly good pic of him lately.

Great picture of your shrimp!

 

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Some changes are happening, slowly but surely!

I have macros (Pom Pom Gracilaria for the fuge and Atomic Broccoli for the display) coming this weekend, so hopefully my "display refugium" can start looking more like a display tank, and less like a really hard to clean algae turf scrubber soon, where I can get an export engine that will actually out-compete (I hope) the FHA. Said fuge, however, is also one HECK of an amphipod farm: they are EVERYWHERE.

I've moved quite a few corals around recently to try and make better use of my space and reduce the possibility of coral warfare - my King Kong Yuma has been sulking since early December, best guess is because nitrates bottomed out to 2 (from 10) for a minute, though at first I worried my switch from Reef Code to All-for-Reef might have been the problem. It's still alive, at least, and hopefully I'm on track to it recovering now that I moved the favia and the hammer that were near-ish to it elsewhere, and am planning to leave the lights low another couple of weeks to see how it does. I've got two babies from it hanging out on a frag plug that are at least surviving.

I actually hadn't realized until just now seeing the pic above how much my stylo has grown!

And speaking of growing well... holy moly, that purple monti just exploded since I got it in June of '25 ! I knocked one decent piece off on accident, had to break off another that was encroaching on my candy canes, gave those away to some local reefers, and then had to break off ANOTHER big chunk that was also growing towards the candy canes... which I now have on a frag rack. Pic is before the recent round of fragging, and also before the most recent FHA pruning. The original frag I got June of last year is outlined in red.

I also sold 3 of my 4 Nirvana zoa frags. They never really took off in my tank, sadly, but I couldn't bear to part with them all, and am hoping maybe returning the one to a frag rack and getting them into higher lighting might help. At least, they never died off or melted or anything, they just never encrusted the way they're supposed to, growing all leggy instead. Any way, I got a decent offer from a reefer starting over again, and just hope they'll do better in a new home.

I'm finally trying to order fish. Specifically, a blue stripe neon goby, a green clown goby, and a pink-streak wrasse, but my LFS hasn't been able to find the latter two so far... but I have a gift certificate there, too, and want to get all three at the same time, since of the fish in my plan, they're probably the only ones I can safely QT together (saving a lot of time and hassle), and they're the ones who are most shy, and need time to establish territory before I add anything more territorial like clowns. Dwarf trochus have been impossible to find locally. As have the macros I REALLY wanted (Blue Hypnea or Birds' Nest Gracilaria and Dragon's Tongue).

I'm also working on some more rock sculpture I can place under my existing rock work (which was never what I intended to use/do, but got rushed into, to my dismay) to ideally create more habitat and get some of said rockwork closer to the lights.

That's more or less it for now. Oh, I lost my porcelain crab a while back - no idea why, to be honest, I'm pretty positive I kept it plenty well fed, and I keep track of my parameters pretty close and never saw anything corresponding that would be responsible, but... I'll try again when I've got the fuge in better shape algae-wise.

 

[Crabs+Shrimps-69]

Said fuge, however, is also one HECK of an amphipod farm: they are EVERYWHERE.

Because I have no fish in my tank I also get a lot of tiny crustaceans like amphipods. I like them though, since they're cool to watch and provide an extra food source for the shrimp.

 

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Added some Atomic Broccoli macro to the display, and Pom Pom Gracilaria to the fuge last weekend. Also a small torch coral (front/bottom right of second pic), which failed for some reason. Looked fine just an hour after dipping, but later that night was already suffering, and by Tuesday was gone. Tank parameters pretty close to sellers, so... ‍I hate for anything living in my care to die, but I hate not knowing why even more

Water in the fuge is full of schmutz because I just scraped the glass so I could get a clear pic There are easily hundreds of amphipods just in that one big chunk of Pom Pom, much less the pod hotels and all the rocks and rubble and substrate.

 

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First ever ICP-OES test came back today, just a week after the 1 year anniversary of water in the tank. I... could be more pleased:

Last I tested Si on March 17 it was 0? Maybe my test kit is bad or I did it wrong. I can't imagine it went from 0 to this high overnight... but my DI resin is a year old now, and a bit more than half color changed, so I guess I need to order new filters regardless.

I also have NO idea where the aluminum or bromine is coming from... or how to get rid of it, off-hand, except massive water changes.

Hopefully I can find someone nearby that might sell me the amounts of trace elements I need, rather than have to buy whole bottles that will sit on the shelf and eventually go bad.

 

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So, my mentor - who lives in the same town - reminded me that even though our water is not especially hard, it carries a lot of silica, which apparently is one of the tougher things for DI resin to deal with.

The long and short of it seems to be that DI resins have their preferences, and silica isn't one of them. Apparently it will load up the resin - without causing its color to change - but then as soon as something more strongly ionized comes along, it will knock the silica loose... so, what I'd think of as the "nastier" stuff still gets filtered, but at some point you start dumping out more and more of that silica that was originally captured.

I just re-tested. Having now looked harder, I can see why I might have called it zero at a glance, especially under different lighting conditions... but even knowing the ICP result, I would swear the Salifert test sample absolutely was not above 0.1, while the math would seem to indicate it should be reading 0.45, according to the ICP? A good reminder, then, of the limitations of colorimetric hobby test kits.

Anyway, the aluminum... my best guess is the Phosguard I was running for a while, and perhaps left a bag of in too long? OTOH I don't think I have any more in the filters, but in an AIO checking that for sure isn't an especially easy task, and I'm saving that for my water change tomorrow.

The bromine, my only guess is it came from the short while I was dosing AFR? But, it would seem some of my other problems (low iodine, fluorine, molybdenum) are thanks to NOT running the AFR??

I was obviously lagging on my reef chemistry, and just didn't think I had that much in the tank that would be sucking down something faster than my water changes would replenish it, other than Kh and Ca, that is.

So, I've been set straight, lol. I was given a bottle of iodide and explicit instructions, along with enough Mb for the single recommended corrective dose, and the ~75ml of fluorine (to be split into 3 separate doses) that ATI recommended from my mentor (who does Reef Moonshiners, so he has ALL the elements). I'm going to go back to dosing AFR instead of 2-part for now, and re-test in 2 or 3 months to see where things are.

 

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"Penne" the exquisite firefish ('cause it's a tubular little yellow noodle) left QT and became the first fish in my fish tank at about ~11:15pm today. Will update with a better photo when I get one with lights on full.

Next up, a Blue Neon Goby I hope to bring home somewhere around the 24th.

 

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Neo the Blue Neon Goby and Leo the DaVinci Clownfish went into the tank just after midnight last night - my display tank has never been so active and alive as it has been all day today. No aggression, nobody seemingly stressed, everybody out and exploring. Even Penne the Firefish, after a few minutes of flagging at Leo when she first saw him in the morning, has actually not only been out more than usual (though that was true yesterday as well), but has been out in and exploring the rest of the tank, farther from her cave, than ever before.

Managed to catch all five fish in my tank in the center of this photo:

Now just three more fish to go (in the plan, anyway): a Pink-streak Wrasse and a Court Jester Goby whenever they show up; and a captive-bred Mandarin, probably some time either in late fall, or right after the first of the year.

Still dealing with some hair algae issues, but its coming under control. Had a massive bubble algae outbreak in the fuge, I removed most of it manually, but its starting to repopulate there and a few places in the display, too. I'm very hesitant to risk a pitho crab in either tank, however. Considering it, but still very hesitant - less so about the fuge, where the only coral is a pulsing xenia, but, still.

I need more corals tho. I think I might need to get rid of the Purple Montipora entirely, it just takes up too much space in my little tank, and it regrows faster than I can give it away. Just a matter of finding - and affording - ones I especially like and want, especially in the high contrast patterns or reds/oranges/yellows I favor.

That, and the couple of major inverts still on the list: an electric scallop, a maxima or crocea clam, maybe some more feather dusters (in addition to the one in the fuge), a blood red fire shrimp for the display, another spotted porcelain crab for the fuge, a rock flower nem or two, and the sexy shrimp for the fuge.