First reef tank - Fluval Spec V

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So onto the corals. I got a nice brain coral frag, purple and green:

 

 

I also got a great deal on a four headed branching hammer, as well as a single Fiji trumpet.

 

 

Another hitch-hiker was a single translucent green glove polyp which I separated and placed mid tank on one of the finger shaped pieces of rubble. It hasn't opened yet but I'm hoping to grow it out into a nice colony.

 

Also, as you may have noticed from the photos, I finished the new lighting and power supply, which prompted the coral purchases. I can't believe how big of a difference it makes! The colors really pop now. The only problem is I haven't finished the dimmer so I've only left the two NW's on during the day, and plug everything in for a few minutes when I get home just to look at everything. I need to get that finished so I can color balance and truly enjoy the tank!

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Update time. I stopped by That Fish Place on the way home yesterday and made some frag purchases:

First up a green pipe organ

Next a green tipped orange bird's nest

Finally a green cat's paw

 

As usual I apologize for the poor quality cell phone pics. Hopefully I'll be getting a DSLR soon. The other corals are doing amazingly well. I still have a big plateau on top of one piece of LR that I need a centerpiece type coral for. I'm waiting to fill this spot until I find something I really want to show off. It's a high light and moderate to high flow area and dead center of the tank. Because this will be the most obvious and most highlighted spot I want to make sure it's really striking and something that I really like.

 

On a different note, my chaeto ball more than doubled in size, so I ripped it in half yesterday. I shook out the part I was tossing (in the tank) and lots of pods fell out. Hopefully these will supplement the yasha's diet a bit. Also my nitrates have come down from ~10 ppm to barely detectable. I am also in the throws of a massive diatom bloom, which you can probably see in the pictures. From what I have read the reduced nitrates will help curb this. In the meantime I've been blowing off the rocks each evening and scraping the glass. Hopefully they subside soon because they are FUGLY.

 

Here's a FTS with the new lights all color balanced:

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I woke up this morning to a pod explosion. For funsies I counted them in 4 1 in. squares. I have an average of about 24 visible pods per sq in. There seem to be even more in the sand and on the LR.

 

Is it possible to have too many pods? Do they become harmful beyond a certain concentration?

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My refractometer arrived today. Calibrated it with some DI water from the lab, then I measured the tank water. 1.029 !!! I have been using a RedSea hydrometer and it's been giving me consistent 1.024 on the tank water and 1.000 on DI. I checked the tank 3 times and it's for sure 1.029. Needless to say I was upset. I'm about to do a 10% water change and slowly drip in distilled water, which should bring me down to 1.027 over the course of the next couple hours. If anyone has any advice before I do this please speak up!

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OK, before I did anything crazy I checked again with the hydrometer and 3 times in a row it said 1.0235. I rinsed the refractometer with a little spectroscopic grade IPA (isopropyl alcohol), then retested the tank water. I got 1.0230 4 times in a row. I also recalibrated after cleaning the refractometer and checked the tank 2 more times and got 1.0230.

 

Now I feel like the boy who cried wolf. Thankfully I didn't do anything crazy before checking and rechecking. That being said, if anyone purchases a cheap Amazon or eBay refractometer please make sure to clean it really well before using it. I sure learned my lesson.

 

While I was at it I tested all the water parameters I could and got:

 

T: 81 F

pH: 8.2

Ca: 340 ppm

KH: ~135 ppm

PO43-: 0.00 ppm

NH4+: 0.00 ppm

NO3-: 0.00 ppm

 

All of the corals look amazing. The SPS are beautiful and the polyps are all out but not too extended. The mushroom doesn't reach for the light anymore but is broader than before and the hammer is nice and bushy and swaying in the current. The goby and shrimp seem extremely happy, although they are both eating less which I'm guessing is do to the pod population. All in all everything is very happy and healthy so I'm going to try not to worry about it. I'll just keep my eye on the parameters.

[ninjamyst]

looking good!

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It's been a week so I should update. Everything is showing really great growth. I tested again this evening and ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, and phosphate are all 0. SG is 1.024, alk is 8 dKH, Ca is 400 ppm (slowly bringing this up to a target of 450 ppm). I've been adding reef plus 2x per week, and feeding the corals Zooplanktoos-S 2x per week.

 

The goby now sits outside his bolt-hole most of the day. I've seen him snacking on pods pretty much constantly. He's also eating a lot less at feeding time, but is showing a lot more personality and seems plenty happy, so I think that the live diet is working for him, and a happy coincidence for me. The pistol continues to re-scape at will, mostly at night.

 

 

Both the Bird's nest and Cat's Paw are showing growth already (compare to last week's post). They're a bit closed up in these pics due to a water change earlier tonight.

 

 

 

Finally some hitchhikers have shown up. I've found two tiny aiptasia. I plan on getting a peppermint shrimp tomorrow to hopefully take care of them. If not I'll also be grabbing some kalk and resort tot he paste method of extermination.

 

Here's an extra bad picture of another little hitchhiker that has shown up in a couple places. It looks like a tiny polyp of some sort, but hopefully someone here can identify it for me. Also is it a keep or kill?

 

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I made it to the LFS today after taking the car in for service. Luckily the repair bill was much much smaller than I thought, so I had a little extra $ in my pocket. I picked up a nice green mushroom and some replacement green polyps (from the crab incident).

 

I also made two final livestock additions, a fire shrimp and a Davinci Clownfish

 

The clown won't hold still long enough to get a decent photo, but he's adjusting really well. He's already staked out the open end of the tank and alternates between hovering around the hammer coral and doing laps in the current. The fire shrimp hasn't quite learned to stay away from the goby/pistol pair. It's pretty funny to watch them run him off when he gets too close to their cave.

 

I also wound up doing about a 1 gallon water change in the process of acclimating the new additions. While I was at it I rescaped (I know, AGAIN). I decided that almost 10 lbs of rock in a 5 gallon tank was way too much, so I took out all but two pieces of the dry rock I bought at first as well as a few of the larger pieces of rubble. I moved the brain coral to the sand and opened up the end of the tank a little more for the hammer.

 

 

As far as the aiptasia goes, I took the brain out of the tank and torched the edge that it was on. Unfortunately I hit the edge of a couple of the polyps, but the aiptasia is absolutely toast, so small price to pay. I also have tentatively ID'd the other thing as a tiny feather duster. I haven't seen him since rescaping, though. I have also found a couple of vermatid snails. Unfortunately they are on the edge of the cat's paw plug and growing on the hammer skeleton. Does anyone have a good way of getting rid of these? I added a couple bumblebee snails which I had read will sometimes eat these, but I'm seriously considering going in with a pair of tweezers and just breaking/yanking them off.

[Dark_ice]

Loving the radioactive dragon eye zoas and the clown, tank looks good keep it up

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Horrible update tonight. Last night my apartment was really hot, so I left the lid off the tank with a fan blowing across gently. This morning my goby didn't come out to eat. When I got home this evening I went to put away some laundry from last night and there on top of the hamper was my goby. He was completely dried out, so I'm pretty sure he jumped out last night, probably while chasing the fire shrimp away from their new burrow.

 

Needless to say I'm heartbroken. He was really an interesting fish. I'll probably replace him in a while, but for now I'm just going to let things be.

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I'm long overdue for posting an update, but I have excuses. I took a vacation (cross-country road trip) and have been playing catch-up ever since at work. While I was away I had my awesome neighbor tank-sitting for me. I think she was more nervous about it than I was. Anyway, she fed my nano as well as both my planted tanks perfectly, and topped off like a pro. With the exception of my Betta (who decided to eat a glass shrimp and got impacted R.I.P., which happened after I got home), everyone was happy and healthy on my return. I had a lot of glass cleaning to do and did 10% w/c every other day for the last week, but this was pretty much unnecessary since ammonia and nitrate were both zero and phosphate was at 0.25 (API test, always says 0.25). Ca and alk were down quite a bit though, so the w/c's were mostly to bring those back in line along with some judicious dosing.

 

 

As you can see I also removed the last two pieces of the original dry rock (reasons to follow).

 

After coming back I did notice that the fire shrimp was a bully, so he went back to the LFS. Also, since the Betta no longer needs his home I decided to start a second nano. I got about 6 lbs. of live rock and 10 lbs of carib-sea live land and started the cycle. I added an AC50 fuge with DIY media basket, just like the other spec. The live rock came from a very well established display at the LFS. I initially dosed 1.5 ppm ammonia, which was gone in 48 hours, so I added 2.0 ppm and that took about 24 hours to disappear. After 6 days I had 5.0 ppm nitrates so I added a couple hermits from my other tank and fed a bit here and there. Friday I re-homed the galaxia, green mushroom, and hammer from my other tank, as well as added a small trumpet frag and built a media rack for CPE and Purigen (went in this evening now that it's getting stocked).

 

 

Today I introduced a yellow clown goby, and while I was at the LFS I got a deal that was too good to refuse. I picked up 3 different ricordea frags for basically the price of one, a green, a blue, and a tri-color that looked like it had been through a powerhead.

 

 

I can't get a good picture of the tri-color, and I had to turn off the blues to get decent photos with my iphone.

 

Here's the best part: Both the blue and green are in the process of splitting, with each having two separate mouths and both are nearly done splitting. I'm pretty sure I would have payed more than double if anyone (me included) had noticed this in the store. The tri-color actually looks like a fragging attempt gone wrong. It's tiny, but there are very clearly 4 distinct mouths and it is in the process of splitting around each. I think they threw it in because it looked so ragged.

 

Now comes the questions. I glued the rics to the LR because I didn't know that they were all splitting. Right now I'm going to leave them in place to complete the process and get healthy and adjusted to the new surrounds. When they're done should I cut the new heads off and attach them to rubble liek a normal mushroom? I'd like to space them out a bit to cover the bottom of that piece of LR in rics of various colors. The other thing I was considering is cutting a wedge out of each of the heads once they've finished splitting as I've seen elsewhere on the internet to grow out more frags.

 

Finally, I just found out that I'll be getting new carpet in my place in the next couple weeks. This is actually kind of fortuitous. While I really like the specs I think that I want a larger nano. IMy plan now is to leave both tanks alone until the move. The carpets are a 1 day job, but once it's over I'm planning on keeping the specs in their temporary home and setting up a 20L. Once that's settled I'll start introducing the live rock until cycled, then transfer everything into that and sell the specs. I might keep one of the ac50's as a filter and get a 110 for a HOB fuge, or I may buy a drilled 20L locally and setup a 5g sump. I'm leaningmore toward the HOB route since I don't really have a good place for the sump.

 

Opinions?