What Were We Thinking? - Diving into the reefing world build

[Sharkie_Conch]

Quick update. Our hammers got angrier and angrier for awhile. We don't know if it was the light change or the alkalinity issue, but I finally moved them to the frag rack off to the side under less lighting. They recovered a bit. We've been still having a lot of algae and did a major clean yesterday, which made the hammers angry all over again. We shall see what happens.

We finally named our midas blenny Fafnir and our firefish Falcor. Now everyone is named.

Waiting on an order to come in and be quarantined for the two clowns we want to put in the little tank.

One of our sps got angry and started to STN. Steve knocked it over and now is wearing it, which I have to admit is the best outcome for a dying coral? Made me laugh at least.

 

[Sharkie_Conch]

Six months later.

Coral:

We have growing coral! Our atomic humulis we bought super cheap in a live sale is ironically the longest surviving and best growing SPS. It has fully encrusted and started touching the rock. Our favia shrank then started growing. It looks like a melted coral the way it's growing. Our plating Monti started growing. Our pipe organ and firework cloves seem to be happily multiplying. The duncan we got with I think two heads is exploding with new heads.

Our first torch started splitting then up and died. Frustrating. A lot of our zoas melted but one has exploded. One hammer fully recovered. One is prob pretty much dead. One is meh. Gonis mostly seem annoyed.

Fish:

Our OG crew is still great. Mr. Chang is growing, the clowns are wiggling (Meatball is quite the hand hater), Charlie is doing well in the little tank, and Oscar is still hiding a foot and a half from his future bestie.

Fish loss is my least favorite part. I hate it. Every time it makes me (very briefly) reconsider this hobby.

The main tank we've lost:

A firefish that just straight disappeared.
A midas blenny that we found dead the same day the firefish disappeared.
A second midas blenny that we think may have been diseased as he was flashing and acting weirdly then died.
We have a longnose hawkfish who we think has mycobacterium. He stopped eating weeks ago and is beginning to emaciate to the point where we don't know if we should give up and euthanize him or not.

In the small tank we've had a worse time:
The first clown we put in. We think it wasn't as cycled as we believed.
We had a good run with a firefish and then a flametail blenny but both died back to back. We aren't sure why although we think maybe the return getting blocked might have caused less surface agitation than usual?
We have a yellow watchman goby who is suuuuper tiny and he was still alive recently but looked rough. Wondering if he also has myco? He was quite thin when we saw him the other day and also wouldn't eat.

We finally got our clownfish we ordered in September but one just died today out of nowhere. Yesterday he was eating and wiggling. Tonight he died. The other seems ok? And Charlie has had zero problems in there so we dunno if he's just super hardy or what.



Inverts:

Got a bunch of inverts because I love them. The decorator crab went straight to our recovered hammer within 2 days and started munching so we plopped him in the little tank... Where he has been a snail serial killer.

We will prob have to eventually take him to one of the LFS nearby but I kinda love him so not yet.

We put a coral banded shrimp in the main tank and he's hilarious to watch. Oscar of course refuses to give up his cave so they share...we don't understand when there is a perfectly good pistol shrimp not even 2 feet away but what do we know?

Our urchin got an ulcer that never cleared up then he died. I'm still sad about that. We kept giving him nori and hoping he'd recover and he did well for a few months.



I'm kinda frustrated over the challenges at the moment. I hate losing fish. I dislike losing coral though I accept it better than fish. Inverts I dislike losing but accept better as well.

I'll try to come back and do a better post with all the coral before and afters at some point. Those always cheer me up.

 

[Sharkie_Conch]

So we struggled with various issues since the last post and finally decided....maybe we should restart and go about things better this time!

Our Cade 1200 S2 was delivered yesterday and I'll probably start a brand new thread to document the journey.

We still have our 6 main fish that have thrived and gotten chunkier. We have a 25 gallon that was the tank of death for awhile that we let go fallow for 3 months before hopping back in. It's doing better now but still having similar struggles with uglies. It has 3 fish, a pistol shrimp, some rock flower nems, a cleaner shrimp, and some crabs.

Obviously we have a lot to learn, especially to keep things stable for coral. We also have a baby on the way (due in March) which is partially why we decided to jump into an upgrade while I can still pull extra shifts and save the money. Excited to get started in a less impulsive fashion this time around!