I've been meaning to post this for awhile. I got bored of reef tanks so I stopped posting but got stuck dealing with the minimum requirements on my wife's (not mine at all by choice) 75 gallon tank that she wants to have but doesn't want to take care of.
Its got a skimmer and I change the filter sock on occation and do a 20 gallon water change every two weeks or month or sometimes longer. It never gets any chemicals added other then the salt during water changes (haven't checked them in many months) and has gone through explosions of every kind of algae taking over in the recent past months possibly helped by a goby that went missing and likely was rotting under all the rocks.
Now all of a sudden all the algae is gone except for some green short bushy stuff that looks like moss and grows in out of the way places so I leave it alone for the most part. It also gets a thin green algae growth on the glass, I stopped cleaning the back side of the tank since you cant see through it so it got fully covered. No coraline algae.
Some coral like the green (or maybe it was yellow but it looks neon green) birdsnest coral was always growing like a weed but most others were really slow growers. Some like the goldmeister and zoas had half died off when the algae went nuts.
So my wife decided that dragonets were pretty and so she bought a spotted mandarin dragonet and so she had to get the food for it.
I use a turkey baster to shoot one dissolved in water frozen cube of baby brine shrimp (hikari bio pure) near it once a day. There were also 2 frog spawn or hammer or something or other corals added at the same time that are still sitting in a frag rack though I don't know what that would have changed.
Since I started feeding the dragonet every single coral in the tank has gone berserk, even stuff that had half died off like the goldmeister thing all of a sudden grew back and the colors on everything look like the websites now instead of the somewhat more muted colors some of them had taken on (especially the favia and favites) theres trumpet coral and 3 birdsnest corals including a pink one that never grew until now and some of the zoanthids that had mostly died off are coming back (the pink polyzoa always grew really good though). And a bunch of other stuff.
So enough rambling, the thing I don't get is why does a tank that doesn't get any of the things that you HAVE to add to make coral grow, all of a sudden grow awesome with the only difference being a cube of baby brine shrimp a day. Everything definitely puts its feeders out after I feed the dragonet. Its been several weeks of rapid growth and recovery now, the favia (favites?) are actually becoming a problem they are growing so fast now.
Maybe people should try tossing a frozen cube of baby brine shrimp a day into their tanks and see what happens. It would be interesting to see if that's what did it.
Its got a skimmer and I change the filter sock on occation and do a 20 gallon water change every two weeks or month or sometimes longer. It never gets any chemicals added other then the salt during water changes (haven't checked them in many months) and has gone through explosions of every kind of algae taking over in the recent past months possibly helped by a goby that went missing and likely was rotting under all the rocks.
Now all of a sudden all the algae is gone except for some green short bushy stuff that looks like moss and grows in out of the way places so I leave it alone for the most part. It also gets a thin green algae growth on the glass, I stopped cleaning the back side of the tank since you cant see through it so it got fully covered. No coraline algae.
Some coral like the green (or maybe it was yellow but it looks neon green) birdsnest coral was always growing like a weed but most others were really slow growers. Some like the goldmeister and zoas had half died off when the algae went nuts.
So my wife decided that dragonets were pretty and so she bought a spotted mandarin dragonet and so she had to get the food for it.
I use a turkey baster to shoot one dissolved in water frozen cube of baby brine shrimp (hikari bio pure) near it once a day. There were also 2 frog spawn or hammer or something or other corals added at the same time that are still sitting in a frag rack though I don't know what that would have changed.
Since I started feeding the dragonet every single coral in the tank has gone berserk, even stuff that had half died off like the goldmeister thing all of a sudden grew back and the colors on everything look like the websites now instead of the somewhat more muted colors some of them had taken on (especially the favia and favites) theres trumpet coral and 3 birdsnest corals including a pink one that never grew until now and some of the zoanthids that had mostly died off are coming back (the pink polyzoa always grew really good though). And a bunch of other stuff.
So enough rambling, the thing I don't get is why does a tank that doesn't get any of the things that you HAVE to add to make coral grow, all of a sudden grow awesome with the only difference being a cube of baby brine shrimp a day. Everything definitely puts its feeders out after I feed the dragonet. Its been several weeks of rapid growth and recovery now, the favia (favites?) are actually becoming a problem they are growing so fast now.
Maybe people should try tossing a frozen cube of baby brine shrimp a day into their tanks and see what happens. It would be interesting to see if that's what did it.
