Haven't updated in a while, so here it goes. I've had some real ups and down over the past couple months... first the bad. To help battle my aiptasia, I got a matted filefish. He wiped out every trace of aiptasia in the tank, but I should have taken him out once the job was done. When he ran out of aiptasia, he started picking at my LPS & polyps, wiping out a red lobo, several zoa colonies, and did some real damage to a wellso & scoly. Then, while working around the house I had some airborne contaminants (sawdust, drywall dust, cleaners) make their way into the tank and finish off the zoa colonies that were barely hanging on. All in all, I lost colonies of goochsters, rastas, CARs, Dragon Eyes, Sunny D's, fruit loops, and RPEs. A polyp or two of each remains so given enough time they'll grow back, but it was tough to see years worth of grow dwindle within a couple days. To top it all off, I lost two fish. I came home from work to find my Regal Angel half consumed by a 10" GBTA, and a majestic angel that was in QT didn't make it. The Regal was eating well and had fattened up significantly since I first got him, so I don't know what happened with him. The Majestic looked great at the LFS and was eating from day 1. Shortly after getting him home, he developed a bacterial infection and once that was overcome, broke out with ich. After about a 3 week battle to get him healthy, he perished in my QT tank. :cry:
On to the good news... The SPS didn't skip a beat and growth is still great despite the problems I experienced. I was a bit discouraged after the problems with the tank and started getting lazy with AA dosing so my colors suffered a bit, but after 2 weeks being back on track the coloration is coming back nicely. I moved a bit of stuff around, mounted some frags, and trimmed back some of the anthelia (a never ending project). I also finally added a strip 24 of Royal Blue Crees to my tank that have been sitting in my shed since last summer. They're on a dimmable driver and hooked up through the controller to give a more gradual dawn/dusk cycle and to give a bit more "pop" to the tank. It's a pretty ghetto fabulous setup, but it does the job. To replace my regal angel, I was tempted by my LFS to purchase a Sohal that they got from another reefer. I had pretty much ruled out adding more tangs due to the aggression of my yellow tang, but with the size (about 7") & aggression level of the sohal, I couldn't say no. They had the sohal in their system for a couple weeks and he looked extremely healthy, eating like a pig. Due to his size, I went against my better judgement and added him striaght to the tank without QT. {Pauses for the verbal onslaught from everyone} I was afraid that putting a 7" tang in a 45g QT system would only add unneeded stress and would probably result in more problems than it was worth in this case. On to the pics...
The ghetto rigged LEDs:
The new beast:
And a couple partial tank shots:
