Sphinx's 125

sphinx15 · Mar 10, 2023

"Oh, I'll just grab it once he drops it"

It's been 8 days now...

Gumbies R Us · Mar 10, 2023

sphinx15 said:
Actually yeah!

Where to start, it's been a minute...
Current status?

Mostly everything has be trucking along pretty good. I'm finally seeing some good stability and overall the health of the tank seems pretty good. I have had some not insignificant issues over the last couple months though.

The first was aiptasia. I had a few pop up here and there ever since swapped everything to the replacement tank and I thought I was doing a decent job of dealing with it, Aiptasia-X, removing some rocks, some epoxy here and there etc. Apparently, I wasn't doing nearly as good of a job as I though because, seemingly over the course of a week, it was on basically every surface of the tank; it was even in the seams of the Loc-line of the returns. Not in huge colonies but it was apparent it was going to become a problem quickly. I decided to try some berghia nudi's and added 10 to the tank. They didn't seem to do much at first but after about two weeks I noticed a few of the aiptasia I had been watching were gone. I thought after this initial, if slow, success they'd slowly work their way across the tank. Then, literally three days later, not a single aiptasia to be seen; it was wild. Never actually saw the berghias after I put them in but can't argue with the results!

I also had some sort of mini crash at some point. I'm still not sure what happened, I never saw anything in my testing, but I ended up losing almost all the monti's, one of the turbinarias, my hammer and my duncan. The duncan and turbinaria are slooooowwwlyyy making a recovery, but no luck with the monti's and the hammer ejected and I never was able to find it. Hopefully it was a one time deal. I did send off an ICP test that came back all clear so I don't know. Most of the rest of the corals did fine during this time and the pipe organ absolutely exploded in size.

The most depressing thing by far though was velvet. Fortunately, the QT setup did exactly what it was suppose to and it never made it to the main tank but still... I ended up losing three wrasses and a copperband. It's amazing how quickly velvet acts...definitely no fun. I will absolutely be running a QT for everybody who gets added in the future.

I haven't made any progress/changes to the tank or equipment recently. Still haven't done the doors, but they are on the list I swear . I did whip up a little filling wand a couple of weeks ago and it's currently my new favorite thing, no more holding hoses!

Sorry for the lack of updates, it's been a stressful and hectic past few months. I'm hoping to have a bit more time to put into the tank and get things going again. I also want to get back into keeping this updated, I just spent a few minutes reading through this today and it was a fun to look back on everything. So check back for some more updates soon!

Your tank seems to be doing really well!!