Steaming Pile of Spec - Carnage Edition

[Kalanianaole]

Love the tank... it's marvelous!

 

I'd keep that NanoMag out of the tank when you're not using it though as they have a tendency to rust.

Thanks for the heads up. Annoyed with the thing because the "Velcro" teeth on the scrub side have gone flat quicker then I expected and replacement pads are more expensive than they should be.

[SgtBhaji]

Thanks for the heads up. Annoyed with the thing because the "Velcro" teeth on the scrub side have gone flat quicker then I expected and replacement pads are more expensive than they should be.

No problem!

 

I find that leaving it out of the tank and placing a small folded towel between the two pieces helps keep the teeth form getting flattened.

[Kalanianaole]

The Wheeler's watchman was sold to a local refer leaving the pistol was without his goby partner. In the two weeks since, the remaining hi-fin goby and pistol have been ignoring each other.

 

I had to go out of town unexpectedly for a sad family situation this weekend, just got back home a little after midnight. In the moonlight, i saw the hi-fin hanging out on the sand with the pistol slowly making advances, tapping him with the little claw. Nothing like a witnessing a little inter-species courtship to make you feel better.

[Kalanianaole]

I spoke too soon. The morning after the "romance" the hi-fin was looking listless and having trouble centering himself - like his swim bladder was out of balance. He looks slightly "rougher", the way sick fish do when they lose their sheen or slime coating.

 

Has anyone had any experience with pistol shrimp violently rejecting a new goby once their first paired goby is gone? If I didn't know better, I'd say the hi-fin tried to go in the burrow only to be shot with the claw of the pistol and have his swim bladder ruptured. He was swimming, feeding, engaging fine until yesterday.

[SgtBhaji]

I found my pistol carrying the corpse of a Goby it was paired with out of his caves, but I don't know if it was a rock fall or a murder...

[Kalanianaole]

I found my pistol carrying the corpse of a Goby it was paired with out of his caves, but I don't know if it was a rock fall or a murder...

 

Was it crying or smiling?

 

And the way the hi-fin was lurching, I was afraid I'd see a scavenger buffet after getting home from work. Happily, he seems to be on the mend. Still looking twitchy, but swimming and maintaining position better. Pistols are great when paired, but it's hard to tell what they're really up to. For example, two nassarius and two bumblebee snails haven't made it past the two-week mark in my tank.

[SgtBhaji]

 

Was it crying or smiling?

 

And the way the hi-fin was lurching, I was afraid I'd see a scavenger buffet after getting home from work. Happily, he seems to be on the mend. Still looking twitchy, but swimming and maintaining position better. Pistols are great when paired, but it's hard to tell what they're really up to. For example, two nassarius and two bumblebee snails haven't made it past the two-week mark in my tank.

I think it was holding a candlestick.

 

My pistol has a tendency to eat snails too. I'm trying to keep it topped off with shrimp pellets to kerb its desire for French cuisine.

[Kalanianaole]

That's how you play nice, fellas

 

 

Teal acans and red dragon posing

[Kalanianaole]

December updates before I leave town for nine days. Gulp. Upstairs neighbor is a champ and will feed, top off, and dose daily. Still nervous.

 

Did a small water change, put in new Purigen, glued a final few frags and spread a few things out so less warfare while I'm gone. Added nine fruit loop zoas to the base of the rusty gorg, excited to see how that turns out. Purple finally coming back to the tips of the tricolor. All-in-all, things are healthy and growing so fate is sufficiently tempted.

 

Front

 

Back

[kimberbee]

Glad they are finally friends!!

[OCNcheffy]

December updates before I leave town for nine days. Gulp. Upstairs neighbor is a champ and will feed, top off, and dose daily. Still nervous.

 

Did a small water change, put in new Purigen, glued a final few frags and spread a few things out so less warfare while I'm gone. Added nine fruit loop zoas to the base of the rusty gorg, excited to see how that turns out. Purple finally coming back to the tips of the tricolor. All-in-all, things are healthy and growing so fate is sufficiently tempted.

 

Front

How do you keep your glass so clean and clear of salt creep? I'm having issues with it creeping on the lid and the rim of the glass constantly..

[Kalanianaole]

Glad they are finally friends!!

Ugggh, me too. I hope they play nice when I'm not watching. And here's a great video of the goby calming the pistol down - he looks like a dog submitting to a pack leader. The citizen scientist in me (who is not very accomplished) adores watching behavior like this.

 

How do you keep your glass so clean and clear of salt creep? I'm having issues with it creeping on the lid and the rim of the glass constantly..

Elbow grease. I like the Two Little Fishes nano mag because it's not too strong and can get most spots. Still, I have to razor blade some stubborn algae at times.

 

Salt creep is becoming more of an issue as the heat has been on more this winter. The worst is on the front left corner where the peg from the lid draws the water up. I raised that corner to level things out and that's helped.

[OCNcheffy]

I'm actually thinking of going to Home Depot/Rona and picking up some screen to make life easier for cleaning. The lid aesthetically doesn't look super great either.

[teenyreef]

Good luck on your trip. Every time I leave town I fell like I'm tempting fate

[Kalanianaole]

This was a triumph...

 

Ten days away and the thing is still alive. No coral or fish mortality. Hair algae creeping up and after that long with no glass scrubbing it looked like dirty dentist tank from Finding Nemo:

 

 

The upstairs neighbor is a champ and agreed to daily feedings, dose Ca/Alk, fresh water top off, and even two dosings of all my trace elements and Zeovit. He earned his reward bottle of Joe's Kansas City barbecue sauce.

 

Besides the algae, the only other problem was overflow pump almost sucking air due to insane evaporation in this dry weather, so I need to adjust the daily top off amount in the future. All-in-all, ecstatic that corals showed growth, continued color improvement, and there were no implosions while I was gone for so long.

[Kalanianaole]

It was important.

 

Got around to really scrubbing the tank down, doing algae damage control, and vacuuming the hell out of the sand. Part of this involved lifting up each rock and plucking nuisance algae, then toothbrushing the rocks.

 

Before:

https://flic.kr/p/pWMaqu'>

 

After:

https://flic.kr/p/qTMeov'>

 

WHERE THE CORAL GO!

Oh, there. In the Tupperware. Just like its natural habitat:

https://flic.kr/p/qTMhnM'>

 

Yes, while toothbrushing nuisance macro algae off my rock, I dropped the dang thing and shattered the stylo into 10 pieces, broke the tricolor in three, snapped the arco off at the base, and severely angered the rest. Will get a pic of the Frankenstein stylo tomorrow, but so far the super glue and I did a decent repair job to the carnage.

[ninjamyst]

aw man that sucks...happened to me recently with my birdsnest too but only broke it into 2 pieces and not 10...at least now u have more frags =P

[teenyreef]

Oh no!!! So sorry about your corals! I've messed up my tank more than once just trying to get that one little thing cleaned up on the rocks. At least everything should stay healthy and grow back out

[Kalanianaole]

aw man that sucks...happened to me recently with my birdsnest too but only broke it into 2 pieces and not 10...at least now u have more frags =P

 

Oh no!!! So sorry about your corals! I've messed up my tank more than once just trying to get that one little thing cleaned up on the rocks. At least everything should stay healthy and grow back out

Thanks, it's turning out fine. Here's a pic of the the glued-together stylo from last week. It's a little hard to see, but there are seven spots where it's glued together. Luckily the encrusted base stayed on the rock so the bottom was stable. It's doing much better now and probably will do a full recovery. Gives me ideas for dropping bigger colonies and gluing back together in my initials or something random:

 

[Kalanianaole]

Sad update today. The hi-fin goby didn't make it. Pretty sure the after-effects of violent pistol pairing did him in. The disruption from the algae cleaning two weeks ago was stressful and for the first time I saw the rusty goby pair lashing out at him briefly when he went in their corner.

 

The same day I came home to find the goby hanging on by a thread, apparently the lobo stretched two inches to give all the sting it could to my orange fungia. Here's the carnage:

 

 

On top of that, last night I noticed slight tissue reduction on the base of my red dragon and the other acros are still recovering from the algae scrub-down. The scrub-down only achieved part of my goals and much of the tank is still bothered with diatoms or cyano. I put in Phosguard four days ago even though phosphates were already low (though still there) and it hasn't been the magic bullet I hoped it would to slow or reverse the growth. Photoperiod has been reduced by 90 minutes and I cut the intensity of the NanoBox slightly as well.

 

Not all is dour, though. The softies are doing great, especially a hardy strain of sympodium I got from a local reefer. LPS are doing well and I just fragged two heads off my frogspawn to sell soon. Even though I'm feeding a lot the nutrients are staying surprisingly low. The pygmy angel is a champ, getting fat but not growing significantly since I got him. According to KP Aquatics:

 

"Just how reef safe they are might be debated, but because of their small size they don’t pose much of a threat to corals or other non mobile invertebrates. There is a “strain “ of these fish that can get up three inches long, but this strain rarely gets 2” long."

 

I had my doubts about this claim but after two months, this juvenile is looking more adult and definitely under 2". Fingers crossed he stays that way and continues to not nip at the corals, and this tank will be a suitable long-term home.

[Kalanianaole]

And in other happy news, here's a picture of a lobster monster truck:

 

[teenyreef]

Sad update today. The hi-fin goby didn't make it. Pretty sure the after-effects of violent pistol pairing did him in. The disruption from the algae cleaning two weeks ago was stressful and for the first time I saw the rusty goby pair lashing out at him briefly when he went in their corner.

 

The same day I came home to find the goby hanging on by a thread, apparently the lobo stretched two inches to give all the sting it could to my orange fungia. Here's the carnage:

 

 

On top of that, last night I noticed slight tissue reduction on the base of my red dragon and the other acros are still recovering from the algae scrub-down. The scrub-down only achieved part of my goals and much of the tank is still bothered with diatoms or cyano. I put in Phosguard four days ago even though phosphates were already low (though still there) and it hasn't been the magic bullet I hoped it would to slow or reverse the growth. Photoperiod has been reduced by 90 minutes and I cut the intensity of the NanoBox slightly as well.

 

Not all is dour, though. The softies are doing great, especially a hardy strain of sympodium I got from a local reefer. LPS are doing well and I just fragged two heads off my frogspawn to sell soon. Even though I'm feeding a lot the nutrients are staying surprisingly low. The pygmy angel is a champ, getting fat but not growing significantly since I got him. According to KP Aquatics:

 

"Just how reef safe they are might be debated, but because of their small size they don’t pose much of a threat to corals or other non mobile invertebrates. There is a “strain “ of these fish that can get up three inches long, but this strain rarely gets 2” long."

 

I had my doubts about this claim but after two months, this juvenile is looking more adult and definitely under 2". Fingers crossed he stays that way and continues to not nip at the corals, and this tank will be a suitable long-term home.

How frustrating! So sorry about the Goby and the plate coral. My favites just started doing the same thing to my favorite acan.

 

I'm really interested in how your pygmy angel does. I read the same stuff on KPA and was really tempted to try one in my 10g tank but everything I read online seemed to say "don't even think about it". But KPA has always been really reliable and trustworthy in their descriptions. Their stuff is always better than it looks on their web site, which is the opposite of most places

[Kalanianaole]

How frustrating! So sorry about the Goby and the plate coral. My favites just started doing the same thing to my favorite acan.

 

I'm really interested in how your pygmy angel does. I read the same stuff on KPA and was really tempted to try one in my 10g tank but everything I read online seemed to say "don't even think about it". But KPA has always been really reliable and trustworthy in their descriptions. Their stuff is always better than it looks on their web site, which is the opposite of most places

 

The pygmy is doing great. Eats once or twice a day from a mix of protein and spirulina flakes, and once a week with some mysis and cyclopeeze mix. In the several months I've had it, it's hardly grown at all, though it's not skinny and eats well. Makes me think that as advertised the strain they have really does stay under two inches.

 

The rest of the tank, though, is not doing so hot. Cannot get my alkalinity swings under control.

[Guits]

Nice tank! I hope the alk issue is under control now!

 

I've been thinking about getting a pygmy angelfish from KP Aquatics for my Fluval Spec V at some point since they describe it as staying under 2 inches, but I've resisted because I don't have any larger tanks to rehome it to if it gets too large for the tank. Has it continued to stay small? I haven't seen a pygmy in my LFS so I don't have a great idea of how it looks size-wise in person, doesn it looked "cramped" in this size tank?

[Kalanianaole]

Nice tank! I hope the alk issue is under control now!

 

I've been thinking about getting a pygmy angelfish from KP Aquatics for my Fluval Spec V at some point since they describe it as staying under 2 inches, but I've resisted because I don't have any larger tanks to rehome it to if it gets too large for the tank. Has it continued to stay small? I haven't seen a pygmy in my LFS so I don't have a great idea of how it looks size-wise in person, doesn it looked "cramped" in this size tank?

 

15 months later.........

 

Thanks! Yes, the alk issue is now under control:

 

Problem: Alk swings hurting coral growth and (sometimes) survival

Identification: Tested 3x a day and found it swung low during the night. Realized I was adding top off water at night so tested the distilled water I buy in jugs from the grocery store. Surprise, surprise, alk and Ph were off the charts low.

Solution: Dump a capful of Alk into the gallon jug of distilled water and top off before bed or in the morning. Also scaled back calc and am adding 2 drops every few days.

Outcome: Much improved and sustained growth, reduction of mortality, slightly better coloration.

 

As for the pygmy, it was good for a few months until, naturally, I went out of town for a long weekend. I come home and it's nowhere to be found in the tank, in the back chamber, on the counter, etc. I notice a large, pygmy-size lump in my fungia, though. No idea if the pistol happened to knock it out, if it actually fell victim to the fungia as a prey target (never heard of fungia being that aggressive), or if a lack of something important in the diet did it in. Want to give another one a try, but haven't pulled the trigger. It was eating great and seemed to be thriving, but who knows. It grew a little bit in its time with me and if it added another 1/2 inch would have been cramped for sure.