SPS Dominant Drop-Off

PlantsBirdsAndFish · Sep 7, 2019

Hello! Just posting my nano reef here as an opportunity for the more experienced reefers to critique my progression on the challenge of keeping SPS long-term in a nano reef environment.

I will document some the progression on this thread apart from the thread on my own page. A detailed description of the setup can be found there as well. The tank is about two months old and is just getting over a second diatoms bloom brought on by adding an acrylic baffle in the sump for the refugium.

I'm still on the fence about adding any soft corals as there is very limited space and this is my deep dive into the world of keeping acropora. My experience stopped after I tore down my 3 year old 10 gallon mixed reef whos most difficult corals were some very hardy montis.

My game plan is to take things slow. I would like to start slowly increasing the bioload with a few lps corals on only the sandbed until my tank is mature enough to add a bubble tip anemone. I may add some more lps around the edge between the sand and rockwork but pretty much everything being mounted on the rocks will be sps. I am going to stick to my guns and go slow this time, so don't expect a whole lot of excitement in this tank for the first year!

Anyway enough rambling, here's the tank:

Streetdoc77 · Sep 19, 2019

Updates ?

PlantsBirdsAndFish · Sep 19, 2019

Streetdoc77 said:
Updates ?

Crap yes I could've sworn I added the updates to this thread perhaps it was another.

Rainbow Bubble Tip Anemone

Mystic Sunset Montipora

Dragon's Soul Favia and Red Halo Micromussa

I will add more updates soon as well as another video in the series! Just been busy with school. Sorry!

BeejReef · Sep 19, 2019

Very cool!

I could envision a few flowy corals up there on your back shelf to give the tank some movement behind the high end acropora trying to grow out of the water! Torches, gorgonian? Are you still considering a softie?

PlantsBirdsAndFish · Sep 19, 2019

William DeCoursey said:
Very cool!

I could envision a few flowy corals up there on your back shelf to give the tank some movement behind the high end acropora trying to grow out of the water! Torches, gorgonian? Are you still considering a softie?

Yes. I wanted a true mixed reef. That includes softies, lps, sps (plus acros), nps, an anemone and a clam just to name a few. The top shelf is the perfect place for a tridactna

PlantsBirdsAndFish · Oct 4, 2019

Update

Starting two nights ago, I began dosing nitrates and phosphates to combat the dinos I'm dealing with. Last time I did a water change my tank was covered in a thick layer of dinos and a little cyano. I blew the dinos off the rocks then did a 30% water change while vacuuming the sand bed. I replaced the filter floss again the next morning as it was already dark brown and ran carbon. While it did make the tank look better it did nothing for the dinos' comeback. Worried about my chaeto being choked out and worried that my still-acclimating first batch of corals would die due to the stress, I decided to raise my nitrates and phosphates to 3 ppm and 0.06 ppm, respectively, over the next month or two.

As shown in the pictures below, by moving the monti off the sand, increasing the intensity of the lights by 15%, and elevating the phosphates to 0.01 ppm (nitrates still undetectable), it is finally rapidly regaining color. It was slowly gaining it's color back after I took it off the sandbed and increased the lighting, but the polyps were still not out. A little over a day later with the elevated phosphates the polyps extended and the color began to come back more rapidly.

I'm not saying this is the reason it started to come back, but I have tried to be good about keeping all parameters consistent except for nutrients over the past month or so. It is far from a controlled experiment, but the results are compelling at least to me. I will keep you guys posted as I progress through this rough patch. Thanks for all your time and support. Happy reefing!