2 Gallon “Cookie Jar” Pico Reef by ReefJar

[Weetabix7]

I LOVE this.

 

I can very much relate to this statement: "I love corals but I really love to see the life in the tank that I never knew existed. There’s always something crawling along or growing that fascinates me."

 

I love the way you are approaching this and documenting it.

Please keep it up, thanks.

[Sk8n Reefer]

What is H202?

[smeagol108]

What is H202?

hydrogen peroxide.

[Sk8n Reefer]

hydrogen peroxide.

Ah, got it thanks

[ReefJar]

Feb. 2016 - UPDATE

 

Hey everyone! Sorry I haven't been updating this thread. I still have my jar and I'll be giving a much bigger update when I get some time to do so.

 

For now I wanted to give you a quick update of the things that have happened. Instead of pictures, I made a quick video with my phone (darn white balance takes some of the pop out of things). Maybe I'll be able to capture the critters some day, I think they are one of the more fascinating parts. It's no Maritza Vase Reef, but it's still enjoyable for me.

Next time I'll clean the glass

 

Here are a few issues I've had:

 

• Flatworm infestation - It looked out of control so I used FlatWorm Exit. The first time I followed the directions, not much happened. The 3rd time, I did 8x the dose and left it over night. Some corals didn't like that too much whether it was from dead flatworm toxins or the FLE.
• I got a couple new corals and after some time I thought I might be able to lower the light. Quickly realized that the light was too intense and some loss of colour happened. I also had birdsnest that started to fade, dropped some polyps and started to STN (I lost it).
• Algae has been great until I tried using Reef Roids. I did my usual water change after but I don't think it was enough. The following days the algae of all kinds started growing out of control (you can see all the algae/bubbles attached and on the pink birds nest :/). Things are on the mend and looking a lot better today.

Things I'd like:

 

• More flow, I think I could use a lot more flow. This jar sits on my computer desk and it's noisy. I've gotten used to it but sometimes the bubbles drive me nuts. I was thinking about getting a MP10, but for now it's fine.
• I went to look at Vases. The downside to my jar is that you need to be looking at it face level. If you are standing, it's so distorted you can't tell what's in the jar. I feel that most vases have a curve that you can still make out what's inside for the most part. Plus it will be easier to "seal". Downside is less room inside to move around.
• More corals, but I'm going to take it easy until I get this algae issue under control. I want to heavily feed things to make the corals fat so I'm going to have to be more diligent on post water changes, like 2 or 3 at a time to help flush things out.
• The bulb is nice, but I think it could use a little more blue. Like 4white:8blue instead of 6:6. Again, my phone makes things look whiter than they do in person (especially on the upper half of the jar). But in person I'd like a little more blue and pop.

 

I guess that's all for now. The war coral has almost grown completely over the plug and candy cane has a few more heads. Some palys and zoas have more heads as well. Over all I think things are heading in the right direction.

Talk to you soon!

[brandon429]

Your approach is just great its covering all the bases first go. that rock as it takes on more coralline will help to reject those species trying to set up shop on nice reflective non colonized surfaces. I wanted to add that for sure dosing is not required in picos, but, we can spike coralline in any system 10x faster with dosing. Im sure any number of additives work but if not taking any chances on one not working is worth it, standard 19 year old c balance additive is the one. I actually stopped using it, so this newer redo bowl of mine wont have such coralline removal -work-

 

if you don't use it it doesn't matter, the hand guiding you are doing will work and subside in time. but if you did 8 mos on c balance, the purps come

 

as in most of the stuff we do, c balance dosing in a pico reef doesn't have to be tested for, and even though all salt mixes mix up differently it still doesn't matter. you simply put in a quarter cap of dose a on Monday / wed /fri strictly before lights on and never after, and dose b before lights on tue thr sat approximately, it'll paint it purple faster.

 

it doesn't matter if you forgot a date and the week gave 3 dosings of one and only 2 of the other. we are rip water changing weekly, this is a reset. if your water was going untouched 3 mos it would matter

 

I know dosing is against the whole simplicity thing but nothing could be simpler than dumping in a quarter cap as long as its never after lights on (reef gremlins of ph LOL) and not much over a quarter cap. my own vase can take a full cap of either, so the recommend of a quarter cap is totally safe

 

I am currently dosing c balance in this way for another few mos not for coralline, but to help with sps mass I bought some distress frags so im blast feeding and changing water more often, and a little c balance bump. each week the tiny frag adds new corallites slowly but surely its working. as a side effect, the bowl now has some spots of coralline on the glass to contend with

[ReefJar]

Ah right on, thanks so much B!

 

I actually have some new bottles of C-Balance. I'll start putting them to use!

 

I have plating monti frag that is slowly getting some colour back. That's one of the reasons I got the Reef roids to help out, maybe my PE mysis and Calanus would have been enough. I didn't get such algae explosions with those compared to the roids.

 

Also, Mary recommended to me another bulb. It's the same 12w par 38 but with 8 blues, 4 whites. Currently I'm using the 6:6 model. Might be a month before it arrives in the mail. The one I'm using now looks good in person but I wouldn't mind a little more blue so that's what I'm doing. I'll of course report back on this in the future.

 

Today I couldn't help myself... bought some acans and purple death zoas from a tank shutdown today... I'll post a pic tomorrow when the zoas open up. The acans took to the jar right away and are all puffed up lookin' good!

[brandon429]

yes absolutely they are perfect for your setup post em pics when avail

 

I think of every coral I impulse bought for mine nothing ever was harmful except for the gonis. for some reason they did something chemically that closed up most of my corals so I had to move them out...but others do well with them so not sure.

[ReefJar]

Here's a couple quick pictures of the acans.

 

Looks like they have a bit of rainbow in their mouths. I like them. I'm going to change the scape in the jar, but for now I made some room for them here.

 

10+ heads on each frag:

 

 

 

 

Some close ups

 

[brandon429]

Those are knurly and pre bounce just about nice nice

[ReefJar]

Cleaning Day!

 

Today I'm going to clean and take care of some issues.

• Heavily Feed (mysis and calanus)
• Take almost everything out of the jar
• Take care of algae and aiptasia
• Put things back together. Change the scape a bit.

 

I started mixing 5 gallons of water yesterday morning so it's good to go!

 

Big Targets:

 

Algae on the upper half of the jar is a mess. It's important to take care of it now since I'm already winning the battle.

 

I'll have to frag off a white skeletal tip covered in algae on a pinks birds nest. I've tried to use a soft toothbrush to keep it clean but the algae comes back so fast and the birdsnest is slow growing. Fragging those tips off might spur growth to the other nubs and branches that are forming that don't have algae on them.

 

I found some Aiptasia, they will be destroyed with 35% H202.

 

Other Notes:

 

Since the acans are basically overgrowing their plugs, I want to attach them to a nice rock so they start to cover it as well.

 

I'm putting the Hydor heater in the jar. It'll be easier to hide since it has a smaller profile than the heater I have in there now (rena smart).

 

The air line. Here is something I haven't really talked much about. 1. having the air bubbles bubble up on rocks etc... seems to help promote the growth of algae on those surfaces especially since I don't have any other lifeforms preventing algae from taking hold there. So I'll leave it where it is to bubble up the glass to the surface. This seems to produce less algae and the kind that does form on the glass is brown and easy to wipe off.

 

I don't use an airstone, just a straight airline, not even hard airline. I noticed that the airline can become plugged over time, so it's important to clean out the end or snip it off with scissors. I noticed around Christmas that there was less air bubbling and my pump would stop. I thought it was the pump, but after by passing the check valve and trying to blow air through the line with my mouth, I realized what the problem was. Snipped it off about 2 inches and was at full speed again.

 

Here are some pics to give some pre cleaning visuals:

 

The new acans last night after the lights went out:

 

I had to turn on a light and the one in the back quickly retracted. The front one let me get a good shot!

Purple death zoas opened up today. but...

 

I'm ready to clean!

 

Don't forget:

[natalia_la_loca]

Looks fantastic.

 

If you're going to be taking stuff out of the tank to do this maintenance, I would suggest you use a lighter or a match rather than peroxide to kill the aiptasia. H202 never killed aiptasia for me, but fire definitely did. And it was oh so satisfying.

[ReefJar]

Did you use 35%? They sizzle to nothingness for me and are eliminated. Usually I apply it, let it works its magic, clean it up (usually lots of foam and brown bits), apply the H202 again just to make sure. 35% will burn your hands badly, just imagine what it does to soft plant matter.

 

Sometimes if it's a really delicate area, I'll just cover them with super glue.

 

Using fire in a tight space like this is going to burn the zoas. But I like fire too

 

I gave the one acan a mysis shrimp, it gobbled it up fast (it's the bloated one in the pic). I love when LPS feed.

 

Here are a couple top down photos before I started heavy feeding (I like to add a little at the beginning to get everything in to feeding mode):

 

The pavona that's in the top left of the previous picture. I used to have it standing up towards the light until one day I saw its sweepers going nuts everywhere. So I turned it like a plate and it's been tame ever since. It encrusts really fast! When I got it, it was on a plug and i broke it off, glued a tiny little piece to this rock and that's what it looks like now! It's cool because it looks shaggy but it's quite temperamental and one to dominate where ever it wants.

 

 

 

Oh I don't have a good pic of it but... there are about 15 -20 feather duster worms all under the top rock connecting them all together. I'm going to have to break their homes in a couple hours. But they'll be okay. I started with 1 about 2 months ago.

[ReefJar]

Another Idea

 

I was thinking about the heavy feeding and cleanup afterwards. I want to start feeding twice a week so I'm concerned about algae becoming an issue again. I'm especially nervous about using reef roids again. Although, I should have added extra water changes.

 

Sometimes it's hard to remove everything. Stuff gets stuck, stuff settles during the siphoning and doesn't get taken out. Usually I add more water sipon and then turkey baste until there's "nothing left". But I have a lot of little rocks and lots of small spaces for stuff to get hung up.

 

I could remove some of these and get bigger pieces but this is what I have and this is what I'm rolling with.

 

I think I could use a HOB filter just before I'm ready for a water change. I think with that running and constantly turkey basting the jar, I could eliminate a lot extra bits and prevent them from settling and rotting somewhere. HOB + some filters is probably like 20 bucks at Walmart. I could even reuse some of the filters because I'd be using it as mechanical filtration for 20 minutes before a complete water change. No worries about nitrates etc etc.

 

Of course this adds to the complication of things. But really it's just a few more minutes of work. Someday I assume the jar will get to the point where a little extra food somewhere won't matter so much.

[natalia_la_loca]

love those top down shots

 

Did you use 35%? They sizzle to nothingness for me and are eliminated. Usually I apply it, let it works its magic, clean it up (usually lots of foam and brown bits), apply the H202 again just to make sure.

 

Sometimes if it's a really delicate area, I'll just cover them with super glue.

 

Using fire in a tight space like this is going to burn the zoas. But I like fire too

 

I did use 35%. It took a while, but the aiptasia always came back in the same spot--smaller, but alive. Even a few cells are enough to start a new aiptasia growing. Super glue is sometimes effective, but even with superglue I've had aiptasia peek out from under the glue after a few weeks. They are incredibly persistent.

I think I could use a HOB filter just before I'm ready for a water change.

 

I would think that a HOB would mainly catch the suspended particles that your water change would grab anyway.

[ReefJar]

Cleaning (before and during)

 

Note: I lowered the temperature to 79f (1f lower than before).

 

One last look:

 

 

Food! (mysis are in the bottom, the small specs are calanus and a lot of good cloudy juice)

 

 

Feeding (I fed the acans until they stopped taking more):

 

 

Taking things apart:

 

I always take longer than I think I'm going to when doing this. Having everything in the same water that they came from in another container keeps them wet and happy until I'm ready to put them back in the jar.

 

 

In 3 months, life has taken to this once lifeless dry base rock

 

Hard to see but there was a lot of sediment trapped under the rock work (just because of the caves etc that were created)

 

Vacuumed! Amazing how much crap accumulates in the bottom.

 

 

Next pictures will be tomorrow or the next day when things aren't so angry after my H202 treatments and endless moving around. I literally spent 2 hours doing this, most of it was arranging the rocks again.

[brandon429]

That is full and complete reef surgery in detail.

 

Large reef tankers teetering on recycle at the slightest disturbance of waste or substrate take note

 

Pico reefs have no dilution factor yet house your same live rock and coral mixes

 

Why do they not recycle upon being parted to the core? Total detritus control. jar just laid out in modeling detail how to clean up any large sinked up tank on the verge of loss right back into compliance. It's proof you can part out a reef for access as needed

 

Nice coral mass so far!

[vlangel]

Cleaning (before and during)

 

Note: I lowered the temperature to 79f (1f lower than before).

 

One last look:

 

 

Food! (mysis are in the bottom, the small specs are calanus and a lot of good cloudy juice)

 

 

Feeding (I fed the acans until they stopped taking more):

 

 

Taking things apart:

 

I always take longer than I think I'm going to when doing this. Having everything in the same water that they came from in another container keeps them wet and happy until I'm ready to put them back in the jar.

 

 

In 3 months, life has taken to this once lifeless dry base rock

 

Hard to see but there was a lot of sediment trapped under the rock work (just because of the caves etc that were created)

 

Vacuumed! Amazing how much crap accumulates in the bottom.

 

 

Next pictures will be tomorrow or the next day when things aren't so angry after my H202 treatments and endless moving around. I literally spent 2 hours doing this, most of it was arranging the rocks again.

I will look forward to tomorrows pics!

[natalia_la_loca]

Me too

[ml86743]

Learning tonssss from this thread! Everything looks very nice. Excited for future updates!

[ReefJar]

Trying to get my phone to take some good pictures. It seems the brightness from the freshly H202'd surface (the top section where a lot of this "cob web" like algae was) is causing some issues.

 

So in the mean time, I took a very short video of some feather duster worms. First time I've actually looked at them up close!

 

[ReefJar]

All Clean

 

Here is a video the day after cleaning (today)! I added some acans and purple death zoas since the last update video 2 days ago.

 

Notes: "All Clean" is a bit misleading but it's a lot better than it was a day ago. There is some stringy algae that is now white from H202 and some coral slime here and there. I'll manually take some of it out and remove even more on the next water change (a few days from now since I'm going to be feeding 2x per week). I also noticed a couple things I missed but am on top of it as we speak.

 

The heater is visible because it has air in the top part of it. I don't have any rocks to weigh it down but I have some suction cups. I'll be using them next time I get a chance.

 

Pavona's polyps weren't out, so it wasn't all shaggy. Not sure how it's going to respond with the octospawn so close, but I'll keep an eye on it.

 

Red monti cap is on the mend. I'm not sure if it bleached or what but If you pause at 3 second mark you can see it has algae growing off it where it's a much lighter colour. It was quite pail but becoming much redder, especially were it's shaded. I'm hoping the extra feedings and dosing C Balance will heal it up.

[ReefJar]

Schedule Update

 

Here is my schedule that I've started this week.

 

Dosing

 

I started dosing with C-Balance. If I started a new jar/vase/bowl I would start dosing from the start to help fuel the growth of coralline and corals.

 

Here is my dosing schedule:

 

Monday/Wednesday/Friday - 1/2 Cap of "A"

Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday - 1/2 Cap of "B"

Sunday - I'm going to be lazy and not add anything.

 

*C-Balance added before lights on* - I add 1/2 cap to a turkey baster, add some jar water, mix it a bit, and slowly squirt it in the jar near the air line.

 

If I'm doing a water change, I'll already have the C-Balance premixed whether it's needed or not. Example: On a Friday water change I will have my water premixed with "A". It may not be needed, but that's what I'm doing.

 

I'll adjust the amount of C-Balance as I see fit.

 

Feeding

 

Tuesday and Friday will be feeding days. Tuesday will be super heavy feeding, Friday will be a little less.

• I will spot feed the acans/candy canes.
• SPS will get the "orange cloudy" mixture from my mysis/calanus cubes.

To help prevent a lot of uneaten food blowing around, I'll strain the cloudy mixture through a simple wire mesh. The calanus is small but too big for sps polyps to take in.

 

Water Changes

 

Friday - 100%

Tuesday - 200%

 

There may be follow up water changes the day after those days. Observe and adjust.

 

Since I have noticed a lot of detritus collects in the rock work, 100% water change doesn't seem to be enough to remove everything. If I only had 1 or 2 pieces of rock it would be much easier. But I have 12+.

 

As mentioned before I may end up with a small HOB filter so that I can continually blast the rocks with a turkey baster. This way I'm more confident on the amount of detritus removed and don't need to worry about siphoning up everything that's floating, suck in rocks or on the sand. However, since i'll be doing water changes more frequently, I may not have to do this. I'll adjust as I see fit over the next few weeks.

 

Lighting

 

Light is on 9h45m daily.

[ReefJar]

Observations

 

Today I wanted to update on a couple observations this past week.

 

Stomatella Snail

 

 

I sometimes see it during the day time, but not too often. It hitch hiked its way in some how, probably on the live rock that I got near the beginning. I believe there is a much smaller one as well. This one is pretty big and does a good job! I saw this guy start eating all of the H202'd algae that was hanging around to the right of this picture. Perfect!

 

Anyway, today I noticed it was crawling on the under side of a Monti Cap (in the picture). I thought, oh good it's cleaning algae off the bottom of it.

 

Then I noticed it started convulsing and spewing a white cloud in to the water. I thought "omg is this thing a parrot fish destroying stony coral?"

 

I found out that it was spawning! Pretty awesome to know some of the life in my jar isn't just surviving, it's thriving

 

Candy Cane

 

This past week I have been heavily feeding and dosing C-Balance. I'm not sure if these events are related to the candy cane, but I noticed the candy canes are taking on a much more neon green colour with more pop!

 

It started with 1 and more are slowly starting to change. It appears the ones with lower light levels are still not as vibrant. And these things keep splitting with more heads. Crazy!

 

 

 

Coralline Algae

 

I've been hoping that coralline would have started to take off by now (3 months), but perhaps the amount of corals I have that use up calcium plays a part in it, another reason why I'm dosing now.

 

I started to look more closely at the pieces I do have that are covered. Some have been speckled with H202 and some buried under other rock work. I noticed this interesting bit... It's much more pronounced in person.

 

I doubled checked to see if it was Cyano', but it's rock solid Nice to see some variation of colour. Hopefully it continues to spread throughout the jar.

 

 

Monti Cap

 

Well the monti caps I have were so/so when I got them and didn't really seem to improve. In fact they started to lose colour possibly due to too much light, so I shaded them slightly. However, since feeding heavily I've noticed the colour coming back.

 

Unfortunately I broke the red cap in 2 yesterday while adding a suction cup to the heater. No worries though, I glued the broken piece a bit futher down in the jar. The piece that broke off was a piece that wasn't doing so well anyway. It'll be interesting to see if it can bounce back with my new maintenance schedule.

 

[ReefJar]

Long White Skinny Worm

 

I noticed a 2" long skinny white worm on the glass today.

 

I know have a couple hair worms and digitat hydroids. Not sure what this one is but it reminds me of a tape worm. Perhaps some sort of nematode?

 

I'll definitely be reminded of this when I'm siphoning the water out tomorrow after feeding. *gag* lol

 

I took a video but the camera was blurring a lot so I'll just show some pictures.

 

I believe this is the "head" end:

 

 

Full shot about 2 inches long

 

 

It made its way down to the sand and disappeared. I noticed a lot of pods and other critters in the sand. Good to see!