Tank birthday, 47+ years

[Paul B]

I just baked a bunch of corn muffins and while they are cooling I thought of something. (Yes I like to bake and do other things, But only Manly things, shoot me)
I was looking at some threads and I realize there is something that goes on in our tanks that is never discussed.
Cycles.
If you keep a tank long enough you will notice these cycles. 5 years may not be long enough. My tank has been getting cycles for it's entire life, some cycles last a few months and some last a few years. There are times my tank was filled with leather corals and SPS, then it will all shrink with in a week or two and SPS corals will grow like crazy. In a couple of years they may die back and hair algae will take over, then flatworms or Godzilla Larvae.
I believe these cycles are caused by three different things. The first is coral wars. Corals live in cycles that are controlled by the moon. In most homes the corals can't "see" the moon, only the TV so I assume they get confused, especially if you watch a lot of Lady GaGa video's. Corals exude chemicals to either attract other similar corals to settle near them and other chemicals to keep competing corals away. Those chemicals stay in the water for varying amounts of time but occasionally it is too much for competing corals and they either shrink or die. Then something else may take over that space and when it grows large enough it may exude it's own chemicals and kill the SPS.
This is the reason for many of the problems in tanks that have been running fine for many years. (yes, skimmers probable remove some of these chemicals but work with me here)

The next cause of cycles are from bacteria. Bacteria run our tanks, not us. Bacteria are very good at what they do as long as we don't interfere with what they do by adding silly chemicals like antibiotics, copper, Prizapro, napalm etc.
But bacteria are living things with all of the problems we have. OK, maybe not "all" the problems, I don't think they get acne, but they can be infected by viruses as we are.
Depending on the Virus some strains of bacteria may die while others may just lose their ability to dance. But whatever happens, it effects the water and not always in a way we want.

The next thing is algae. Many of us wrongly think of algae as a bad thing. But if there was no algae your parents would never have been born and if they were not born, you may not have a job. Algae is a good thing. It makes oxygen, cleans pollutants from the water, and adds some chemicals. Algae also grows inside corals and most corals can't live with out it. If you succeed in eliminating all of your nutrients, you will also eliminate your corals. Adding chemicals to eliminate algae, bacteria or viruses is almost never a good idea as those cycles have a way of working themselves out.
After many years of tweeking I learned that sea water is very stable as long as I don't mess with it, and I never do.
I find these cycles interesting.

I forgot when I took this picture but it must have been in the late 80s or 90s. That giant leather grew in a few months from an inch to a foot high. Then after a few years shrunk down until is shriveled away.



SPS will grow for a few years, then die and allow something else to grow in it's place.



This giant mushroom grew from fingernail size to 10" across in weeks. After a few years it disappeared.



No one wants this. I also don't remember when this was and it was probably caused by something in the NSW I changed the water with. But whatever caused it, I did nothing to eliminate all this algae. I didn't do anything because that was the healthiest the tank ever was with everything spawning and the corals looking great. When that cycle ended in a few weeks and the algae left on it's own, the water was perfect. Algae knows how to purify water and if I would have added some sort of chemical to eliminate it I am certain the tank would have had all sorts of problems.
I probably just pulled it out and ran my diatom filter a few times.



One day I had this.

 

[MisterTang]

Paul, I subscribed to this forum because you were so entertaining on WAMAS that I had to read more of your eclectic posts.

 

[Paul B]

Thank you, I try to always be eclectic, after all I was an electrician most of my life and that is spelled somewhat like eclectic. :cool:

 

[mcarroll]

I would like to plug my tank into an eclectricity socket.

 

[Paul B]

Go for it. :eek:

 

[Paul B]

I am all excited now because my boat is in the water and in a week or so I will start to go collecting. I want to get a new influx of bacteria in my tank and I need to go about a mile from my marina for that. The water under my boat, although teeming with life is not a good place to collect as that water is mostly sludge, gas, tar, fuel oil, anthrax, paint, sewage, some meat from Lady GaGa's dress, and a few high heels from the swim suit models they sometimes have there when there are new boats to show. I go there when they have those shows just for the research factor.
My tank depends on bacteria and that is one important aspect of why it has lasted so long with no problems and it also allows my fish to keep the immunity they were born with. If I have the disease problems many people have I would get out of this hobby and perhaps start a new hobby like guessing the phone numbers of Supermodels or seeing how long I can grow my toenails.
My tank runs with no disease problems as it has for decades and I realize it is because as many people tell me "I am lucky". I guess I am lucky as I have no varicose veins, acne, the heartbreak of psoriasis, gout, nose piercing, athletes foot or any number of other things many people have. My tank depends on bacteria, viruses and parasites to keep it immune.
I will go to that tide pool and grab a few handfuls of mud along with amphipods and anything else I can find and dump it all in my tank as I have been doing since Nixon was President. He didn't have a reef tank as far as I know but if he did he kept it at the Watergate hotel (google it)

http://s258.photobucket.com/user/urchsearch/media/2012-01-02030422_zps2e3e126b.mp4.html?sort=3&o=337

 

[Zack K]

So I am currently on page 10.... this was a few years ago. What are your current parameters? I was sent here because I have high Nitrates and am afraid I am not able to keep LPS and possible SPS coral. What parameters are you currently running?

 

[Brew12]

So I am currently on page 10.... this was a few years ago. What are your current parameters? I was sent here because I have high Nitrates and am afraid I am not able to keep LPS and possible SPS coral. What parameters are you currently running?

He would have to test to be able to tell you that. :p

 

[Paul B]

Actually a LFS tested my water two months ago.
Nitrates 160
Calcium 460
Phosphate 2.0
KH 10

How's that?

Who sent you here and why?

 

[Slickwill613]

Thank you, I try to always be eclectic, after all I was an electrician most of my life and that is spelled somewhat like eclectic. :cool:

Hey Brother, don't sell yourself short. Electricians come from the want ads, Wiremen come from the hall!

 

[Paul B]

That is true. I never came from the hall or a want ad because I was never laid off in 40 years. I quit myself 3 or 4 times when I got an offer I couldn't refuse from a different contractor. :D
Most of those years I was a General Foreman and some of the jobs I did like rebuilding the New York Playboy Club and Penthouse Magazine I would have worked for free, but they insisted on paying me. :p
I was lucky enough to work on those and some other awesome jobs like building the World Trade Center. I installed the fire alarm system in the Empire State Building and used to eat my lunch at the base of the antenna. That was really cool. Too bad King Kong wasn't there then. :eek: I also re built all the machine rooms in the Chrysler Building. That is a really beautiful, art deco building. I didn't know at the time but about 3/4 from the top of that building there are 4 huge "statues" sticking out of the corners of the building, just before the building begins to get thinner. Those statues are replica's of old Chrysler radiator caps and they are all different. They are all stainless steel as is the entire top of that building.
Of course I did some not so cool jobs like the New York City garbage incinerator. o_O
This lower picture is me (in the white hard hat) cad welding at that garbage incinerator. In the lower level the maggots were so deep they almost reached the top of your shoes. Very pleasant aroma as well. The other picture is me hanging over snow covered Central Park on top of the Plaza Hotel where we re built all 2,500 rooms. Ivanka Trump owned it then because she got it in a divorce settlement. :p
See that big mercury light, I had extra and I used two of them in my tank for a few years.

You can see those Plaza Hotel lights here.

 

[Zack K]

Actually a LFS tested my water two months ago.
Nitrates 160
Calcium 460
Phosphate 2.0
KH 10

How's that?

Who sent you here and why?

you should see PaulBs tank.

I thought it was a problem growing Coral such as LPS and a select few SPS at higher Nitrate ranges. I am also at 160 and 2. I have tried everything to bring them down but carbon dosing (I don't like to add foreign substances to my tank) So I was brought here to read up on how you manage it.

 

[Brew12]

I thought it was a problem growing Coral such as LPS and a select few SPS at higher Nitrate ranges. I am also at 160 and 2. I have tried everything to bring them down but carbon dosing (I don't like to add foreign substances to my tank) So I was brought here to read up on how you manage it.

I'm a big fan of vodka dosing. Wine dosing too. I add it to my stomach instead of my tank but it works great to make my DT more enjoyable!

 

[Zack K]

Kes, I don't know about an inspiration unless you are referring to my bald head. But a lot of people prefer hair.
:sing:The tank is still doing very well although the nitrates are now at about 40. I was going to lower them but the soft corals are growing so fast that I want to experiment for a while with the high readings. My giant mushroom for years was a tiny 2". In a few weeks it blossomed to about 9" across and is taking over a quarter of the tank. The leather corals that I could not even find because they were so small are also 4 or 5" tall and are stretching in all directions.
The SPS seem fine but don't seem to be growing anywhere near as fast as they were when the nitrates were 5. My plan is to get the nitrates to 15 with my newly designed denitrificator coil then keep them at that reading.
My tiny clam also doubled in size in a couple of months.
I am certainly not recommending that we let our nitrates get so high. It is usually a sign of deteriating water conditions. This is an experiment like everything I do with the tank.
I am still using the baby brine shrimp feeder every day and 2 mandarins and a scooter bleeny are fat and happy looking, that feeder is one of the best things I ever designed and most of the fish use it including the copperband who fills up every day on live worms.

The main problem now is that being the soft corals are growing so fast, they are covering many of the corals stuck to the rocks that I can't move.
Survival of the fittest.
It is what it is.

What changed between 2012 and 2017[emoji23]

 

[Paul B]

Zack there are a lot of things you will read that says you can't do this or that but this hobby is driven 98.7% by rumors that have no basis at all in fact. I run a reverse undergravel filter and if you search for that you will find all the posts say it can't work, yet my tank is 46 years old. You will read that quarantining is the only way to go yet some of my unquarantined fish are still spawning at 25 years old. You will read that SPS won't live with nitrates over 10 or that you can't keep a tang in a 75 gallon tank. Mandarins are a difficult fish, but mine have been spawning for 20 years with no problems, copperbands it is said are hard to feed, I never had a problem but I think that problem comes from copperbands that were quarantined as they hate that. Algae comes from high nitrates, there is none in my tank. All of those things are wrong but are perpetuated through rumors even though no one has tried them. I did, and do them all with no problems because I started when the hobby started way before computers or rumors. I run my tank on common sense through education I learned by SCUBA diving with the creatures we keep.
I am not sure what happened to my nitrates that used to run about 10 or 15. All at once they skyrocketed up and being my corals didn't seem to mind, I never thought anything of them. It sounds very high to me but if it ain't broken, I ain't gonna fix it. :D

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

I thought it was a problem growing Coral such as LPS and a select few SPS at higher Nitrate ranges. I am also at 160 and 2. I have tried everything to bring them down but carbon dosing (I don't like to add foreign substances to my tank) So I was brought here to read up on how you manage it.

I'm a big fan of vodka dosing. Wine dosing too. I add it to my stomach instead of my tank but it works great to make my DT more enjoyable!

Im kinda set in my ways guys. I still prefer beer dosing. Darker beers like fell in love with during my service in germany. A good Oppenheimer Riesling is also highly recommended. I think it helps to keep the reefkeeper more stable and not worry so much about stuff.


Hi Paul!

 

[Zack K]

Zack there are a lot of things you will read that says you can't do this or that but this hobby is driven 98.7% by rumors that have no basis at all in fact. I run a reverse undergravel filter and if you search for that you will find all the posts say it can't work, yet my tank is 46 years old. You will read that quarantining is the only way to go yet some of my unquarantined fish are still spawning at 25 years old. You will read that SPS won't live with nitrates over 10 or that you can't keep a tang in a 75 gallon tank. Mandarins are a difficult fish, but mine have been spawning for 20 years with no problems, copperbands it is said are hard to feed, I never had a problem but I think that problem comes from copperbands that were quarantined as they hate that. Algae comes from high nitrates, there is none in my tank. All of those things are wrong but are perpetuated through rumors even though no one has tried them. I did, and do them all with no problems because I started when the hobby started way before computers or rumors. I run my tank on common sense through education I learned by SCUBA diving with the creatures we keep.
I am not sure what happened to my nitrates that used to run about 10 or 15. All at once they skyrocketed up and being my corals didn't seem to mind, I never thought anything of them. It sounds very high to me but if it ain't broken, I ain't gonna fix it. :D

I hate doing things to the tank as well. It is a natural ecosystem and it will work itself out IMO. Once I found this forum I always thought it wasn't going to work. I thought tank ecosystems needed to be interrupted by humans to keep things running smooth. Until I found your thread I was stuck on that idea. After reading 50/101 pages of this thread I think I am going to try LPS and SPS and see how it goes.

 

[Paul B]

There is a thread on here with almost 4,000 replies about dino's. 4,000 replies and so far on that thread, no one has come up with a way to eliminate them. Maybe one of those remedies work, I don't know, but I am sure at least 3/4s of them do not. I am not a dino expert except maybe Tyrannosaurus Rex but I am a common sense expert. No matter what kind of dino you have, just suck them out with a diatom filter. Very few people even know what that is because it is very old school, like UG filters. The filter is probably $100.00 but you can keep using it. I have some from the 60s, it adds no chemicals and removes no chemicals and is cheaper and safer than the myriad of chemicals like bleach, hydrogen peroxide, Chemi Clean, anthrax, napalm and all sorts of other un-natural things. It boggles my mind the amount of money people throw at this hobby and how many problems and diseases there still are. I hate it when my mind is boggled. :confused:
Take mandarins for an example. They are the easiest, least maintenance, most disease resistant fish there is, but you have to feed them. When people try to "train" them to eat something that fish was not designed to eat, the fish dies. I would die too if you tried to feed me pellets, flakes or even French Fries. The fish was built to eat tiny living creatures, not Mrs. Pauls Frozen anything. They will live forever on either pods or new born brine shrimp. Then we have copperband butterflies. So many threads start out with: I bought a Copperband and it won't eat anything. I gave it flakes, pellets, mealworms, freeze dried worms, tuna fish on rye with a side of pickles and nothing".
That fish was in the sea a few weeks before you bought it and it was happily pulling worms from crevices. That fish eats worms and clams. It can live on clams and worms for 15 or so years.
Members PM me all the time especially when a thread becomes to complicated and there are to many solutions most of which came from rumors.
The first thing anyone says is to change the water. Does that ever work? No, unless you dropped your poodle in there and he had fleas. o_O
I think it's me. I really feel I am going senile because I just don't get any of these problems, unless I do get them and forget about them as soon as they come about. :eek:
I get in all sorts of trouble when I mention that I think quarantining is the biggest problem for fish because IMO it destroys the fishes immune system. I am surprised the owners of this thread have not banned me yet for my ideas on that but my fish are immune, I can't help it so I know it works.
Many people tell me my methods are to hard. It seems I do way less than most people here. I have no filter socks to mess with, no medications to buy or use, no hospital or quarantine tank to keep, very little water changes, no dosers, no suppliments, no controllers, no sump, no bio pellets, Phosban, GFO, GAC, ABC, Doe Ray Me, etc. It seems that I do nothing compared to most people. I would rather spend my time looking at Supermodels while sipping a little Grand Marnier relaxing on my boat sunning my bald head. :rolleyes:
The hobby runs on bacteria, but most of us can't see bacteria so we ignore them. But the bacteria see us and they are constantly laughing because we pay them to do certain things for us and then we ignore them and prefer instead to use chemicals.

 

[Zack K]

There is a thread on here with almost 4,000 replies about dino's. 4,000 replies and so far on that thread, no one has come up with a way to eliminate them. Maybe one of those remedies work, I don't know, but I am sure at least 3/4s of them do not. I am not a dino expert except maybe Tyrannosaurus Rex but I am a common sense expert. No matter what kind of dino you have, just suck them out with a diatom filter. Very few people even know what that is because it is very old school, like UG filters. The filter is probably $100.00 but you can keep using it. I have some from the 60s, it adds no chemicals and removes no chemicals and is cheaper and safer than the myriad of chemicals like bleach, hydrogen peroxide, Chemi Clean, anthrax, napalm and all sorts of other un-natural things. It boggles my mind the amount of money people throw at this hobby and how many problems and diseases there still are. I hate it when my mind is boggled. :confused:
Take mandarins for an example. They are the easiest, least maintenance, most disease resistant fish there is, but you have to feed them. When people try to "train" them to eat something that fish was not designed to eat, the fish dies. I would die too if you tried to feed me pellets, flakes or even French Fries. The fish was built to eat tiny living creatures, not Mrs. Pauls Frozen anything. They will live forever on either pods or new born brine shrimp. Then we have copperband butterflies. So many threads start out with: I bought a Copperband and it won't eat anything. I gave it flakes, pellets, mealworms, freeze dried worms, tuna fish on rye with a side of pickles and nothing".
That fish was in the sea a few weeks before you bought it and it was happily pulling worms from crevices. That fish eats worms and clams. It can live on clams and worms for 15 or so years.
Members PM me all the time especially when a thread becomes to complicated and there are to many solutions most of which came from rumors.
The first thing anyone says is to change the water. Does that ever work? No, unless you dropped your poodle in there and he had fleas. o_O
I think it's me. I really feel I am going senile because I just don't get any of these problems, unless I do get them and forget about them as soon as they come about. :eek:
I get in all sorts of trouble when I mention that I think quarantining is the biggest problem for fish because IMO it destroys the fishes immune system. I am surprised the owners of this thread have not banned me yet for my ideas on that but my fish are immune, I can't help it so I know it works.
Many people tell me my methods are to hard. It seems I do way less than most people here. I have no filter socks to mess with, no medications to buy or use, no hospital or quarantine tank to keep, very little water changes, no dosers, no suppliments, no controllers, no sump, no bio pellets, Phosban, GFO, GAC, ABC, Doe Ray Me, etc. It seems that I do nothing compared to most people. I would rather spend my time looking at Supermodels while sipping a little Grand Marnier relaxing on my boat sunning my bald head. :rolleyes:
The hobby runs on bacteria, but most of us can't see bacteria so we ignore them. But the bacteria see us and they are constantly laughing because we pay them to do certain things for us and then we ignore them and prefer instead to use chemicals.

Very Well Said

 

[Paul B]

I just finished having breakfast with my wife. I made her egg whites and I had steel cut oatmeal, but who cares. I was thinking about what our fish goes through before we get them. It goes something like this:

The fish, lets say it's a copperband butterfly is swimming around the reef, minding his own business perhaps raising his dorsal fin occasionally if he sees a cute Babe Copperband who looks single. He is sticking his snout in crevices looking for worms for breakfast while also scanning the sea scape for moray eels, groupers, sharks and anything else that would eat him, when all of a sudden he finds himself in a net. He never saw a net and doesn't know what to make of it. He is lifted out of the water, a place he has never seen. He gasps for breath and tries to swim away but his tail doesn't seem to work. Then he is thrown into a small bucket with 6 or 7 other fish, some of which he doesn't even like.
After a noisy ride in a boat he arrives at a beach where some of his fellow fish are not feeling to well so they are thrown on to the sand. But he is thrown into a larger bucket and gets a ride in a rusty Oldsmobile station wagon to a holding facility with concrete tanks where he is deposited with many more fish.

He realizes he is hungry but there is nothing to eat, he also realizes he is scared, but there is no place to hide.
The next day he is again netted and put into a plastic bag which he thinks is the belly of a jellyfish having never seen a plastic bag. Something is added to the bag to make him "woozy", maybe LSD.
Now he is really terrified and he shows his fear by turning a dark gray to mute his beautiful yellow stripes.
He doesn't know it but now he is in the hold of a commercial air liner where he will stay for an entire day. His captors didn't pay for extra leg room either.
Eventually it gets very bright and someone cuts open the bag he is in with a razor blade and dumps him into a dark, Tupperware container that has 2" of water in it and 30 other, different fish that he never met. The water is too shallow for him to even "stand" upright. A tiny hose is dripping odd tasting water into this tub and he is starting to wake up and become more terrified.
Now he is netted and put into a small glass tank.
He has never encountered glass and tries to swim through it. He keeps bumping his delicate snout on the glass and can't figure out why this "water" is so hard. He realizes he is stuck.
His lateral line keeps telling him there is something surrounding him, but he can't feel it.
All of a sudden there are strange particles in the water, weird looking flakes and pellets along with tiny dead shrimp which he has never seen before. He is now really hungry but can't find anything that looks like the food he has been eating every day of his life.
OMG, he realizes he must have died and went to the "other "place besides heaven.

But, No!
He is in a store, an LFS, whatever that is marked $39.99.

Humans constantly walk by on their silly legs ogling at him and tapping the glass.
A net comes in and chases him around until it traps him against the glass and traps him, he again gasps for water as he did before and he really hates when that happens.
Now he is put into the smallest place he has ever been in and it gets very dark.
He is running out of oxygen and he can't move more than a few inches. He is more terrified than he has ever been.

He is thinking he is going to be chopped up with onions, doused with olive oil, stuffed into a small can labeled "Dolphin Safe" and put on a shelf in the canned food aisle of "Super Stop and Shop".

The light returns and a human hand plunges into the bag and takes him out, he knows he will be eaten any second and wishes he could close his eyes, then he realizes, he has no eye lids.
Now he is in a tiny container and it has an irritating blue chemical in it that he doesn't recognize.
After an hour of torture he is placed into a larger, but still tiny tank with that same chemical.
Again some particles are added to his jail cell.

Now if this copperband was going into my tank, he would be released into a natural tank with plenty of hiding places and in a day or so of getting comfortable, eating food he recognizes he would make friends with the other fish and he would go on to live 10 or 15 years of heavenly bliss.

If he is going to some one who quarantines, he will go into a bare tank with plumbing elbows and little else but a bright light.
He will stay there for 72 days all the while saying Jesus, Mary and Josephine, what the heck did I ever do to deserve this!
Will this ever end!.

After the 72 days, he goes into a tank and tries to go about his business without getting into trouble because he doesn't want to be punished any more.