Orange sponge? Hmm, you mean the stuff in the first picture?? That's actually a type of coralline algae.

Best regards

Ann

Looking good!

WoW! Ann that tank looks great. Keep it up

have you tried adjusting/changing the flow dynamics around the tunicates? perhaps your flow is too high. my tunicates have also died back to low/no-flow areas. i had done some re-aquascaping and exposed many of them to open water and higher flow (relatively speaking) and they slowly died off.

i'm suspecting they (the ones i have at least) are bacteriovores and other nanoplanktivores. such tiny food sources tend to move very slowly (micrometers) and over short distances (millimeters = lifespan) when aggregated. i just read that somewhere.

Hi Ann,
your tank continues to impress - it has such a "large" feel to the aquascaping and placement of corals and the quality of the pictures remain top notch.
i havent ordered zoos from the US - i may yet do so but i have found some nice pieces and hope to get some more from an ebayer although they probably wont have the colours found in your tank.
As we must be nearing the end of the comp, good luck and i bet you have enjoyed this comp as much as i have. (i am hoping the uk nano forum organises a similar comp!)

Brian

wow i jsut found your thread today. that pico is looking great. nice job.
ADAM

Ann, love the new pictures! Those blue zoas make me so jealous! I wish you were state-side As far as the zoas behaving the way they do, mine do the same thing. Not really sure why but part of me wonders if it's in response to water temperature changing somewhat during the day. Let me know if you figure it out! I think you have one of the best picos in this competition and pretty likely to win! Best of luck and look forward to more updates

looking great as always ann. i may take my sargassum out today after reading about ur research. i am not running any carbon or anything. dont want there to be any probs. w/it. doesnt look like your tank has a problem with it though. doin fabulous. very nice pico.

Reeal nice, easily the best UK nano ever!

Oh, cool. Did you purposly try to get it to frow there or did it just happen to grow there?

Thanks so much for the comments peeps!

tiny, the tunicates are no more sadly. One day they were there looking deflated and the next day they were gone entirely. Eaten or...? I don't know what exactly. One day I'd like to set up a tank specifically for these guys and feed the hell out of it, in the hopes of being able to keep them for longer. I didn't really go all out for them in this tank as I was always concerned about turning it into an algae coated horror.

Brian, yeah this competition has been and continues to be great fun. I never would have set up this Pico without it. The UK comp looks fun too if it gets off the ground but I really am all tanked up and there's no way would I get permission for another one from my better half. Nooo way at all!

Max, it just came on the LR. I'm not sure how well it's doing really, I think that it would actully prefer less light than it's currently receiving.

Karen/Shiva/anybody else interested

The zoas have shown some improvement since I removed a lot of the Sargassum but I don't think that it's directly related to toxins per se. I decided to investigate any and all of the water quality parameters and stumbled on the fact that by the end of the day the pH of the tank has risen to almost 8.6 (measured electronically using an IKS pH probe). Anything above 8.5 is a concern, not that it's something that I've ever come across in my other tanks. I've come to the conclusion that the 'problem' does in fact lie with the algae, it is stripping the water of all the carbon dioxide (see here for more info on high pH and causes). After all there was/is rather a lot of it, there's the kelp and the green paddle-like stuff plus a big ball of Chaetomorpha in the refugium.

To try and 'fix' it I decided to simply aerate the water more (as suggested in the link above). I tried adding an airstone to the refugium, well, that idea lasted all of about 15 minutes. The bubbling drove me crazy and the splashing as the bubbles popped at the water surface was horrendous, so I pulled the airstone sharpish. Instead I decided to alter the lighting schedule over the refugium so that it is reverse lit to the main tank. The benefit here not only hopefully that the pH will be more stabilised as the Chaeto will be photosynthesising at a different time to the kelp etc but also the fan won't have to work quite so hard during the day and the heater will not have to work quite so hard at night. That's the idea anyway.

The day after I changed the lights the pH only made it up to 8.34 but that's not a true value as the lights were off for a lot of the day due to me spending ages faffing around with the hood. No matter how hard I try there is some light seepage into the main tank at night, the refugium sits directly behind the Pico and the hood is an all in one jobbie. How much light is too much for corals at night? Do any of you other Pico-ers have HOBs that are reverse lit and if so how do you get round the problem of light spill when the tank is supposed to be sleeping?

That's all my news for now.

Best regards

Ann

can you position the light show it shines from the rear side of the hob versus over-top? then it's just a question of an opaque background shielding the display area from the lit hob-fuge area. the lighting doesn't necessarily have to be overhead.

if you can't position the light that way i think you'll have to create a false wall between the hob/fuge and the tank running on top of the back frame (assuming you have the opaque background already in place). then it's just the small aperture or the hob return that will let in some light at night.

tiny, I'm way ahead of you there. The light is fixed directly above the 'fuge and there's no changing it without major modifications so I've gone with partitioning idea (hence the reason the hood was off so much when I measured the pH to be 8.34). I've cut up a length of black acrylic to fit in the hood between the fuge and the Pico but because of the pipework, wiring etc I've had to cut access holes. As you can imagine there is some light spill through these holes and the tank seems kinda bright to me. Then again in a dark room any light at all seems bright really, I'm just not sure if this amount of light is too much light. I know some people actually rig up moonlights over their tanks at night but this is not a soft blue light more of a soft white light.

Best regards

Ann

should be good then!

don't worry, the moon's usually whiteish here in the US anyways, not blueish. i think you'll be ok.

i always thought the blue led is more for just replicating the depth-effect color and softening it for us. even a small white led is pretty bright from what i've seen. i think a whiteish light would be more effective as a moonlight anyways. jmo

Fingers crossed then. It's maybe a bit more than a soft white light, say a very bright full moon on a cloudless night effect rather than a partially eclipsed moon on a cloudy night.

Hmmm, what happens to corals if they don't get a chance to 'sleep' anyhow?

Best regards

Ann

Hey Ann! Thanks for the update Now lets see some more pics!! My zoas have been acting kinda funny as well so I wonder if it's the macro algae thats causing the problem *hmmmm*. Hope to see more pics soon

Oh my goodness, I don't believe it!! I just spotted Mr Crabbie for the first time ever. It's been so long since I found that empty exoskeleton that I was beginning to doubt that he truely existed. Well he does, and he's very much alive and quite cuddly looking too. Now that I know where he hangs out I'm going to watch out for him some more.

Best regards

Ann

is he in camouflage? what's he been eating? algae, i hope.

Ann, just out of interest, what's the Alk? How big a pH swing were you getting?

Ann,

Your tank is looking excellent as usual Sorry to hear about the tunicates they are interesting to keep - I've only been successful with them in larger tanks as well.

Hey, looks good. The next time you thin out your macro send it my way.

Tiny, the crab is so well camouflaged that I can be looking right at him and not know that he's there till he moves a leg. I have pinpointed his cave in the rocks now and can find him lurking in there most of the time. I have no idea what he's eating, I don't think that it's a diet of corals. He gets excited (ie comes out of his cave a little) when I add food into the tank so perhaps he's just a scavenger or maybe he's just a friendly vegetarian.

I would be very pleased if he would start to consume some of the amphipods in this tank though as these little devils are fast becoming quite a nuisance. I've watched them actually run into the Blastomussa polyps and pull out food before the coral has a chance to ingest it. That's not all though, twice now I've watched a gang of these critters attack a Stomatella causing the snail to drop it's tail to enable it to make good it's escape. The tail is rapidly devoured by what seems like whole families of amphipods, its really quite scary!

Raven, the alk was 7.4 at the time of testing and the pH was swinging from an average of 8.1 to 8.6, which seems like a big move to me. Now that the refugium is reverse lit the swing is 8.04 to 8.27. I've only tested it the once so far but the corals do seem much happier with the change, with none of the zoas showing the shrivelled up appearance late in the day.

I have a ton of new pics to post.

Best regards

Ann

So here we go. The zoanthids seem to be doing well are all growing with the exception of the little orange ones, I just don't know what makes those guys tick. No new mushrooms to report though the orange Ricordea florida has two separate mouths now so I assume that they'll be two of them sometime in the future. The blue Discosoma mushroom has settled in nicely and I'm hopeful that it'll make babies eventually. The small red dot 'shroom is still, well, a small red dot.

The biggest change is that I decided recently to pull out both of the Blastomussa corals, for some reason they were not entirely happy in this Pico. The B. merleti was always retracted and the B. wellsi though growing well (I counted at least 9 new heads when I took it out) was not thriving as I know it can. As I look back on some of the older tank shots I can see that it too just wasn't expanding as much. I'm not sure if this is good thing or a bad thing really. So anyway I've decided to stick with a mainly zoanthid theme and in the space that the B. wellsi was I've placed a new zoa rock. Don't ask me what these zoanthids look like, they could be just brown for all I know as I've never seen them fully open. I've had them for a while now (they were LR hitchhikers) and they've been in 3 different tanks so far. My large angel tried to eat them in the big tank and then they were oevergrown by Chaetomorpha in the sump and then, they were picked upon by my Sexy shrimp in the nano. Hopefully in this Pico I can give them a chance a life.

One last thing of note is that the growth of bubble algae caused the piece of rock that I had attached the orange mouthed zoas to pop off the rock. Grrr! I have yet to find another spot to which I can try and reattach these zoas.

Here are the new zoas, looking cheesed off which is not surprising considering their past history.



I love the Fungia, this it how it looks at night.



A few other stuff of interest, maybe...

Star light, star bright...... just a shot of the back glass looking very much to me like the sky at night. Interesting beginnings of coralline encrustation.



This worm is doing well, complete with baby black Stomatella giving it's tube a quick clean.



Vermetid snail.



Another foram.



And, big drum roll.............. introducing my elusive lil crabbie friend. Sorry for the overexposed picture he doesn't like to hang around for photo shoots very much.



Just a few tank views to finish off.







Best regards

Ann

i love the crab! he even looks guilty in that pic!

the sargums make the tank look huge to me for some reason. like it's a public aquarium display. a really nice touch imho.

i thought the one blasto was doing really well. i thought the other was just cramped/shaded.

the encrusting sponges look great too! imo, it's the little things like that (e.g. forams, sponges, dusters, etc.) that show a healthy tank/ecosystem. :thumbsup:

<drool> Nice updated shots... keep it up .

Aquaman, thanks!

Tiny, he he! Yeah this tank is just like one of the tanks I saw a few years ago at the Birch Aquarium in San diego. It was enormous and contained a mass of kelp that reached right up to the water's surface. To really compare though this Pico needs a dozen or so orange garibaldi fish to be seen swimming in amongst the fronds of algae.

One of the Blastos was doing well, certainly in regards to growth it was, but it just wasn't expanding as much. I've had it (the rest of it this coral is presently in the sump of my big tank, keeping out of the way of a hungry Angelfish) since 1996 and during that time it has always puffed up really nice and fat.

Best regards

Ann

Looks beautiful as always Ann! I love your blue zoas!!

I love your tank! Im trying to find zoo frags that small, but all of the ones at my LFS won't fit in my tank. Cool zoas.

B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L

freakin awesome! i love the "kelp forest" type of a feeling that sargum gives it! keep up the good work ann

Thank you so much for the kind words everybody.

Best regards

Ann

hey ann, your tank looks great! It's still my idol tank!

my little tank, which is twice your size, looks so much smaller! It's crazy.

I'm having a bit of a problem with growth and polyps opening. Sometimes one or two of my cloves will retract completely for a day, and then come back out. Then I have a new paly frag that hasn't opened since I put it in my tank, and it's been almost a week.

Did you ever have zoanthids that didn't open up for awhile? And do you think there's a lot of chemical warfare that could be going on, ie. with all those mysterious palytoxins and what not?

I'm asking you because your tank is small and filled with zoanthid sp.'s. I'm thinking my tank might be going crazy with a high concentration of toxins or something.

Hey there,

Aww shucks! Thanks a bunch.

Funny you should mention the chemical warefare thing because I think that it's the biggest difficulty with smaller tanks. Something I hadn't fully appreciated when I set this tank up, I was concerned about temperature, evaporation blah blah but never really a secret war thing.

There was definitely something going on with the Seriatopora hystrix and the zoanthids. When they were in together the zoas wouldn't open up fully and would look worse with each passing day but when the SPS was removed they were almost back to normal within a day.

I pulled the Blastomussa corals because there was something not quite right with them. That could have been down to a chemical thing too but it could also have been related to some other tank parameter, lighting etc. To test the theory I would have had to take out the other corals one by one and leaving the Blastos in, not something that I was particularly keen to try under the circumstances. I went for the easier option.

Having said that the zoanthids themselves seem to be fine mixed with each other in that they are nicely expanded for most of the day with the occasional retraction when a hermit or amphipod comes blundering by. I don't think that there is an invisible war going on between them or if there is they are not overly affected by it... yet!

With regards to your Paly frag, what does it look like at night? Any signs of opening up? I have found with my new polyps that they have taken to extending beautifully at night but shrink down as soon as the lights switch on. I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to get round that little 'problem'.

Do you find that there are any obvious changes to the corals when you perform water changes and are you running carbon?

Best regards

Ann

hey ann,

Thanks for the info! I currently only house zoanthids, cloves, this one paly, and a xenia stalk. I only know of zoanthids and palys having that palytoxin.

The paly never opens up, even at night.

I run activated carbon and phosban, and after water changes there isn't any changes.

I'll keep trying =)

My goodness I can’t believe it’s the end of the contest already, time sure has flown by quickly. This Pico is actually only 5 months old since I left it till the last minute to set up a tank for this contest. It has a long way to go before it looks it's best I think.

It has been and continues to be a great tank to keep. I’ve tried my hardest to keep the number of corals down to a minimum so that I can allow what I do have to spread, as a consequence I still think that this tank looks a bit empty.

To recap the specs of the tank are:
Standard UK glass tank (12” x 8” x 8”)
DIY glass ‘refugium’ (12” x 4.75” x 8”)
Micro-jet 450 pump
50W Hagen Tronic Heaterstat
Fluval 1 plus internal filter (containing carbon and polyfilter)
Lighting: 2 x 18W 50/50 compact T5 tubes (over the main tank) + 1 x 18W Daylight tube (over the refugium)
50mm case fan to keep things cool
Aquadoser set on a timer for freshwater top off

Livestock consists of:
Various zoanthid/Palythoa colonies
2 colour morphs of Ricordea florida mushrooms
Ricordea yuma mushroom
Red Discosoma sp. mushroom
Blue Discosoma sp. mushroom
Fungia sp.
Bubble coral, Plerogyra sinuosa (still residing in the refugium)
2 dwarf blue-legged hermit crabs, Clibanarius tricolor
2 Dove snails, Euplica sp.
Stomatella sp. snails
Hitchhiker crab
Sargassum sp. algae
Chaetomorpha sp. algae in the refugium

Growth of the corals has been slow but seems to have speeded up recently now that they (the zoanthids particularly) have settled in properly. Not all of the corals however have shown signs of growth yet, there are one, possibly two, small colonies of zoanthids that stubbonly refuse to do anything at all.

The tank has been easier to maintain than I thought it would be. The nitrates and phosphates have remained undetectable even though a skimmer is not employed which I assume must be due to the presence of a rather large amount of algae in the system. Problems that I’ve encountered (apart from frags being knocked off the rocks all the time) have been an above normal pH which was rectified by switching the refugium to a reverse lit cycle and some chemical warfare issues which were resolved when the Seriatopora hystrix was removed. There was also a possible problem with the Blastomussa corals, I’m not sure what it was but I decided to remove them rather than watch them struggle. Unsurprisingly I lost the lovely pink hitchhiker tunicates that came on the live rock.

Here are the monthly photos showing the how the tank has progressed to date:

13th Nov 05:



9th Dec 05:



4th Jan 06:



13th Feb 06:



16th Mar 06:



5th Apr 06:





Here are a few of the first coral additions showing growth and how the colouration has altered under the new lighting (and tank?) conditions. In most cases the colours are lighter now than they were when they were kept under metal halides (and larger tanks no doubt ).

Left: 9th December 2005, right: 5th April 2006



Left: 9th December 2005, right: 5th April 2006



Left: 9th December 2005, right: 5th April 2006

[img]http://www.reefgarden.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/rzg1.jpg[/img][img]http://www.reefgarden.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/rzg2.jpg[/img]

Top: 20th November 2005, bottom: 15th March 2006

[img]http://www.reefgarden.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/fung1.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.reefgarden.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/fung2.jpg[/img]

Many thanks for taking the time to look at my thread and for all the encouragement you have given me over the last 6 months. It's been great fun!

Best regards

Ann

Really super job Ann Good Luck
Debra

One of my favorite nano tanks... I am thinking about getting some sargassum myself...

Hope you win,
/\/\ax

I'll definitely be voting for you Ann! This tank is fantastic and an inspiration never mind the fact that whenever I look at the pictures of your zoas I drool uncontrollably with envy

suuweeet! i love the before/after color pics.

sargums are probably going to be very popular from now on because of this tank. i think they do make the tank 'look bigger' plus they're more aesthetically pleasing (imo) than chaeto and they seem less invasive than racemosa.

overall great job!

whoa.

Ann, I just love your tank! You've done such a great job of documenting everything. The tank looks beautiful. Good luck!

I can not tell you how impossibly impressed I am with this setup. That sargassum is truly amazing and yes, I'd be sold on it due to the effects on your aquascaping. The live rock diversity is stunning huh tinyreef, it only gets better in this tank apparently. We usually see it even out into coralline and macro, but this time it looks like the ocean. If you told me you were using ocean water I'd believe it, hard to achieve this on artificial mixes in the pico reef. I still need to go re-read your feeding habits, but I truly agree DT's eggs and phyto do wonders in my picos and I think this is driving your diversity. The fact that it works this well so far means keep it up! Love to see how it's doing in another few months, what a staggering display. OOOOHHHHM. (as in a meditation chant )

agreed, brandon, it is an amazing tank and i especially like the aquascaping. often the most difficult aspect of nano'ing imo.

btw, congratulations!

Hi Ann very nice tank, i'm just starting my first pico and reading yours and others posts have convinced me to go for it, i'm thinking about filtration and i would like to ask how did you design your DIY glass ‘refugium’ , making the tank i can do; it's the plumbing i'm not so sure about, can you point me in the right direction for any diy help, or diagram of yours, PLEASE. I too am from the Midlands NOTTS

any updated FTS Amazing nano

I don't know if you still check this for posts, so I'm still going to say it.

Your Pico is the nicest one I've ever seen! I wish I could see it in person because we all know that you can't capture a tank's beauty in a thousand pictures. It's absolutely amazing.

I guess I missed it, but what happened to the sea spider that you found? Did you return him to the tank?

nice tank...wowee. any updates?