Turtle's Sushi Tank

[SaltyT]

Agree, top pic is transitional male and bottom pic is female. Glad they’re both out and about now :)

 

[najer]

I'll have more tonight in my update but alk is stable now.

So basically it sounds like you have Mrs Sushi trained to perform an alk test on the hour, every hour for a chocolate treat, nice work! :P

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Sunday chore day... been in the yard cleaning up all day but it's time to cool off and do the weekly update.

Well we all know about the new fish. They are settling in well. I haven't seen them directly go after frozen yet, but they are eating. I think I've seen them pick up little bits of frozen from the sand, but that could also be micro fauna. I cannot see what they pick up so I can't say for sure. I'll place another order of pods this week so I'm sure they have plenty of food.

I changed the KHD from addon mode to adaptive mode. I think I might have done that the other week. Addon works with ml changes and adaptive works with percentages. Like if it's +/-1dKH addon would add or subtract a preset ml amount where adaptive changes your current dose by a preset percentage.

I also calibrated my salinity probe, which maybe made it more stable but it wasn't far off. My salinity was low at 1.022-1.023SG. I had to add a litte salt to bump my salinity but that is corrected now and we are holding at 1.026.

Anyway I haven't messed with anything this week other than salinity(which has an effect on all your chemistry). My dosing schedule is currently set for 0.7ml every 6 hours starting at midnight. Tests happen twice a day at 0100 and 1300.

Alkalinity has been pretty stable, staying at 7.5 most of the week. It did go up to 7.8 for a few days and today dropped back to 7.5, maybe that's more demand, maybe that's just an air bubble in the test. Either way it's not a big enough change that I'm going to adjust anything. I'll just see if it stabilizes at 7.5 or moves again.

I don't have much demand right now(coraline is probably biggest alk sponge) so I feel like the floundering around is due to that, but for now everything seems to be doing good.

 

[najer]

If your coraline is taking off watch our mag.

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Sunday State Fair day! We had a blast, I ate a giant corn dog, saw all the things and stuff people made, looked at the animals... it was a good day.

Tank update, not much to report on other than this KHD is about worthless. It does not control alkalinity... at all. Steady falling all week regardless of me telling it to hold 8dKH. I'm just going to set it to monitor and try and adjust the dosing manually. Do not waste your money on this over priced alkalinity test kit.

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Weekly update time... yesterday was busy. We had a gender reveal for baby turtle. It's a BOY! Mrs. Turtle and I are super excited.

Tank has been doing fine. I've studied up on the AFR and dosing it. It takes about 24 hours for the carbocalcium to get broken down and become usable and testable. So adjustments must be made slowly so you can actually see results from the last adjustment, before making another adjustment. I've found it's best to not do anything for 2 days after making an adjustment.

I'm up to 16ml a day on the all for reef. Alkalinity popped up from 7.3 to almost 8 so I backed off thinking it was too much... it happened not be too much. When I backed off alkalinity fell back to 7.7 and has hung there since going back to 16ml a day.

Why 16ml a day now is just enough, when just 6ml before was spiking me over 8.5... I do not understand.

Oh, I forgot to add in the last update but I ordered two bottles of apocalypse pods and two bottles of Poseiden's feast from Algae Barn. I added one bottle of pods to the tank and one went into the refugium. I've been dumping an absurd amount of phyto into the tank and I haven't noticed anything bad, so I'm just going to keep dumping the phyto in.

Found some orange glasses cleaning up the fish cabinet. Not sure I like the filtered effect... tank is super blue, the light was almost at the end ofnits ramp down. It's off now as I'm typing...

 

[fishguy242]

CONGATS ,on the little turtle... :)

 

[Fudsey]

Congrats Mr & Mrs Turtle ! ! !

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Happy Halloween! ;Troll;Vamp;Vulcan

Weekly tank update...

Very interesting week, I noticed about midweek my skimmer overflowing. I emptied about 2 gallons of water before it stopped, the corals only looked a little bothered so I didn't panic. Then started looking at my parameters on the P4 to see if I could maybe see what was going on.

ORP took a steep dive around 11am last Sunday, the same time as we were cleaning the house for the gender reveal party.

Mrs. Turtle says she's absolutely positive nothing got sprayed but said she did use pinesol with the mop to clean the floors. The fumes from it are the only thing we can think that might have caused the problem. We even had the windows and back door open all day because it was a really nice day.

Started making water a few days after work and all day Saturday. Did a large water change today, but not before I dumped in a metric butt ton of Reef Nutrition products. I had some Roti, Oyster and Phyto feast that were near their expirations and there wasn't that much in the bottles...

Ok so maybe it was a lot of food. :D I was doing close to a 40 gallon water change so it wasn't all going to stay in the tank. The corals appreciated the feast...

After the water change and letting the tank circulate the water cleared right up.

The little female ornate leopard has been MIA at least all this week. I'm not sure what happened to her, I never saw any aggression towards her so I'm not sure if she jumped amd one of the furry pets got her, or if it was something else.

The male ornate has been doing really well though. He is eating frozen every time I feed and is out hunting for pods all day.

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Yesterday's water change helped a lot...

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Happy early morning trachy

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Stupid happy evening trachy

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Daylight savings ended, and now it's dark really early... but not in the tank! We picked up some new corals at the local swap yesterday. Carolina Reef Experience was a lot of fun and I picked up some nice corals. There's a trumpet, a goni, blasto, acan, a monti, a couple favias and a torch.

 

[DavidEvan]

What kind of clown is this one?

 

[SashimiTurtle]

What kind of clown is this one?

Honestly I couldn't tell you 100% for sure... but I'm pretty positive they are just Darwin ocellaris. They were trade-ins at a LFS and I've had them for about 5 years now. I'm guessing they are around 7-8 years old based on size when I got them. They've bred a few times since I've had them, back in the 90 when it was in pristine condition.

This is Bonnie and Clyde when I got them back in early 2017.

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Weekly update. I glued the new corals down. Everything looks happy so I'm pretty sure I picked good spots for all of them. Here's my favorites from the show and a FTS.

I did a small water change today and cleaned up the refugium. I siphoned out the sump except for the return chamber and filled everything back up. The refugium is down to mostly dragon's breath and some chaeto, but covered in GHA. I removed all the GHA I could and put back the healthy macros.

Today's water change used up the last of my Red Sea bucket and I've been thinking about switching over to Tropic Marin salt. I also need to order some more of the All For Reef. I'm going to get the powder this time, it comes in a 5L and 10L jar and you just mix with RODI. It's a pretty good cost saving over the premixed 1L bottle.

Speaking of dosing, I think I'm close to getting everything dialed in. I happened to notice that salinity will move alkalinity considerably. I forgot to refill the ATO and the salinity moved from 1.026, to 1.0265. That caused my alkalinity to move from 7.6 to 8.1 over just 2 days(check graphs below). If I hadn't thought about my salinity(even just that minor swing) I would have thought I was dosing way too much. Once the empty ATO was corrected my alkalinity dropped right back to 7.7dKH, just 0.1 off from where it was before. After that, I had a slow increase back to 8.0. I wanted to increase it so I left the dose alone. Now that I'm back to 8.0 I backed off a little and actually turned the KHD back on. I have my dose set up for 15ml dosed 6 times a day in 2.5ml individual doses. Let's hope it stays stable now.

 

[SashimiTurtle]

I missed a week... missed you guys too. I've made lots of good progress tho.

The tank has been looking better than ever, but I had to make a few changes.

The MP40s are on the sides of the tank now. I really wanted them to work on the back, but the flow just wasn't wide enough to cover everything. The center of the tank had a dead spot so moving to the side was necessary.

I also have the KHD dialed in. Took a while to finally get everything stable, but I've been holding 8.0 dkh with only 0.1 up or down. I've got my dosing pump set up for 6 daily doses at 1.7ml per dose. I'm still testing twice a day at noon and midnight.

I was at 12ml a day last week and my alkalinity kept rising until the KHD could pull it back. I dropped back to approx 10ml a day and everything seems to have leveled out.

I reduced the Kessil from 75% at peak to 50%. Mostly because my easy SPS was failing and I figured I'd just stick with LPS. All that light isn't needed so I just threw my LPS program on.

I also moved the bubblegum digi into a few different spots around the same time. There were two frags that I glued close to each other originally. One of them had actually encrusted a little bit so that stayed in the original place, and I moved them to opposite sides of the tank. The one on the left side is looking really good, the encrusted piece also looks good and the piece on the right still looks rough but seems to be doing better.

I'm not sure if moving them, moving the power heads, reducing the light or getting the alk stable was what fixed the problem... but it just might have been a combination of everything.

The neon green monti cap started to lose some flesh. It seems to have stopped with the changes I've made. Hopefully it reencrusts the area that died back and takes off. It and the digi were in a lot of light with very little flow and not so perfectly stable alk.

A friend brought some LPS over to get baby sat. They are going thru some tank issues and wanted to make sure they were fine. Three trachy geoffroyi and a scoly.

Overall, the tank is looking the best it has since starting. Now I just keep up the routine and pick up some more coral here and there... maybe, even a hardy acro. Who knows.

 

[fishguy242]

hi, hope i'm wrong !!!
on the green monti pic,left hand front ,1" do i see white nudi hairs??
love the trachy's... :cool:

 

[najer]

hi, hope i'm wrong !!!
on the green monti pic,left hand front ,1" do i see white nudi hairs??
love the trachy's... :cool:

Good eyes. :)

 

[SashimiTurtle]

hi, hope i'm wrong !!!
on the green monti pic,left hand front ,1" do i see white nudi hairs??
love the trachy's... :cool:

Mmmmm.... now that you mention it I can't unsee it. I haven't noticed them (and I've tried to keep am eye out) until now. I looked right quick before work this morning and didn't see anything, I'll continue to keep a eye out for them. Most recent pic is the one I posted, taken Nov. 17th. Here are some older ones... check top right in second pic.

Both of these are from the 15th

Nov. 14th

Nov. 12th