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Natalia's Reefbowlocalypse: all good


natalia_la_loca

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On 8/28/2021 at 11:07 AM, natalia_la_loca said:

Reefbowl has bounced back a lot since I discontinued Vibrant dosing. Still haven’t gotten around to spring cleaning. Will probably be a fall/winter project. There’s still lots of bubble algae but I’m keeping it at least somewhat under control with manual removal.

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The duncans were the hardest hit and the slowest to recover, but they look a lot better now. And the blasto came back with a brighter green than before.CECFCC7D-E221-49A3-89CB-9F22CD0BCB90.thumb.jpeg.117ab53a682facd679a733bb33311648.jpeg

 

 

Very cool to see this win TOTM again.  Hopefully it's still going.  🙂

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natalia_la_loca
On 10/10/2021 at 7:14 PM, markalot said:

Very cool to see this win TOTM again.  Hopefully it's still going.  🙂

Yup it’s still doing great :) I’ll get some new pics up soon.

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  • 3 weeks later...
natalia_la_loca

So ummm…Vibrant yesss???

 

The bowl has been doing well, but there was still a ton of bubble algae and I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that I was able to eradicate bubble algae in the quart jar with Vibrant, with no ill effects to the corals. I was also massively overdosing the reef jar, using about 5x the recommended dosage for “dirty” tanks.

 

So I decided to try Vibrant in the reefbowl again. For the last 3 weeks, I’ve been adding 0.5 ml after each water change. (Total water volume is about one gallon, so this is about 5x the recommended dose).

 

If the corals start to go downhill i can always do a 100% WC and discontinue dosage. But so far the corals look great, and during the last water change I pulled out a bunch of transparent/dead bubble algae vesicles.

 

Today:

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  • natalia_la_loca changed the title to Natalia's Reefbowlocalypse (almost)
natalia_la_loca

Ahh.

 

Well I’m back. It’s been a time.
 

I’m way overdue for an update, especially since the previous entries make it look like Vibrant is all good. (spoiler: it’s complicated)

 

So after a few weeks/months dosing Vibrant, I stopped because the bowl was starting to get cyano and the corals were looking unhappy. Within a few weeks, the cyano cleared up, but bubble algae started to reappear.

 

I was pretty sick of bubble algae by this point. Manual removal was very difficult in such a tight space and peroxide wasn’t preventing regrowth/spread even after drainage/manual removal/spot treatment, and I didn’t want to introduce an emerald crab into such a tiny space. 

 

So I took the gamble of dosing Vibrant again, this time knowing full well I was dosing a mislabeled algicide, not some bullshit bacteria (yeah please don’t buy this product). The valonia went away again, but instead of cyano, what came next was dinoflagellates.

 

This is my first experience with dinos, so it didn’t fully dawn on me until the snails started dying. The other big indicator was the pink goniopora, which has put up with all sorts of crap over the years, but this time it closed up and started to STN, followed by all the other corals. (the micromussa and the bubblegum digitata lost color but retained polyp extension)

 

Because dino, the usual 100% water changes weren’t cutting it obviously. I didn’t bother to figure out what kind of dino I had because I don’t have a UV sterilizer to neutralize the kinds of dinos that enter the water column at night, so I did the following:

 

-3 day blackout

-dosed a couple brands of bottled bacteria (Dr Tim’s Eco-balance and Aquavitro Seed) daily 

-turned temp up to 82f

-added pods from Algaebarn

-dosed Neonitro and Neophos to bring nitrate and phosphate up to detectable levels

 

The blackout knocked the dinos way back, but I was still seeing limited signs of them as the day progressed. So I added the following:

 

-light cycle reduced to 7 hours with only blue light. Outside of that time, I wrapped the bowl in towels for a full blackout 

-dosing one drop of 35% hydrogen peroxide each night

-temp up to 83f

 

Side note: most threads report doing much shorter light cycles. I opted for longer because my corals were in extremely rough shape. Also: I’ve heard contradictory info on what spectrum is best. 

 

The last 2 water changes (done about biweekly), I strained all the old water through a 1-micron filter, dumped the polished water back in the bowl to dislodge more detritus, then siphoned it through the micron filter again. I did this 3 times, then added all new water, then added the bacteria mix again. Did it in the morning in case the dinos I had were the ones that enter the water column at night.

 

Since the second water change and the nightly peroxide dosing, I haven’t seen any sign of dinos. The corals have started to open, feed, color up and consume alk and calcium again. Even the pink goniopora, closed and receding for weeks, is coming back fast.

 

Total losses: Frogspawn (sad, but it’s pretty aggressive for a reefbowl…might get another, or not, idk). Rastas still haven’t opened yet and may or may not. The rest of the corals are coming back at varying rates. I’ve added a few new frags.

 

Other notes: lots of copepods now, and there’s been a population explosion of munnid isopods. They’re actually frolicking?! Not sure if that’s a bad sign but the corals don’t seem to mind. Sponges have also bounced back.

 

Anyway, I took a gamble with an algicide and lost big. But I only ALMOST killed my reefbowl, right? Year 7 and it’s still kicking! And uh has some more real estate for coral!

 

Also, I haven’t actually stopped dosing Vibrant this whole time. Wanted to see if I could knock back the dinos while maintaining an inhospitable environment for nuisance algae. I’ve continued to add Vibrant at the recommended dosage by water volume after each 100% water change.

 

Btw not sure if I’m qualified to give advice after spectacularly nuking my reefbowl, but this is the internet, so if you’re gonna take a risk with an algicide, please (1) consider it a last resort and (2) use Algaefix Marine, it’s cheaper and doesn’t use false advertising. I’m only using Vibrant because I still had some on hand. And if you do, maybe make sure you have detectable nitrate and phosphate and preemptively add some bacteria and pods. An ounce of prevention, etc.

 

and finally, pictures.

 

April 1, the day I started treatment in earnest. Blurry, crappy, bowl was sad, I was sad. ugh.

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less sad, still sad (windex effect=all blue)

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showing promise, still in rough shape
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atrophied duncan peeking out

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goniopora holding on for dear life 

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polyps starting to emerge

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bit more

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and more
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and more 

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and more 

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duncans looking better too

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bit bigger

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aaand the whole bowl today.

 

 

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Sprinter70

Still looks great! For the Dinos that get in the water column at night, in lieu of UV, had you tried a night time 100% water change to try and manage it? Curious if that could help.

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natalia_la_loca
2 hours ago, Sprinter70 said:

Still looks great! For the Dinos that get in the water column at night, in lieu of UV, had you tried a night time 100% water change to try and manage it? Curious if that could help.

thanks, I’m feeling a lot better about it than I did a month and a half ago!!  
 

So I actually started doing WC in the morning, after covering the bowl in towels all evening/night to make sure no light could get in, under the reasoning that if I had the kind of dino that enters the water column at night, then first thing in the AM is when they’d be at their weakest.
 

i really should have gotten a microscope to try to see what kind of dino I had, but something I did is working!

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brandon429

This is excellent

 

All reefs have upsets and challenges it's the coaxing back to strong life that counts, the cpr 

 

All three of our bowls are still alive

 

We should contact Matt P and offer a 5 or 6th year update article for sure

At no time in reefing has 3 different micro pico reefs been tracked out to year five then updated all equally, it'll sell for sure as an update article

 

Mine was dang near fully bleached but brought back barely in time: my heater was dead for 3 months in the winter and I never tested for temp/ got lucky. Fixed in time feeding+water changes brought it back 

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natalia_la_loca
6 hours ago, brandon429 said:

This is excellent

 

All reefs have upsets and challenges it's the coaxing back to strong life that counts, the cpr 

 

All three of our bowls are still alive

 

We should contact Matt P and offer a 5 or 6th year update article for sure

At no time in reefing has 3 different micro pico reefs been tracked out to year five then updated all equally, it'll sell for sure as an update article

 

Mine was dang near fully bleached but brought back barely in time: my heater was dead for 3 months in the winter and I never tested for temp/ got lucky. Fixed in time feeding+water changes brought it back 


Agree!! It’s really a testimony to how resilient vase/bowl/jar reefs are. I keep thinking about something you said years ago about total system renewal. It’s so easy to do that with a reefbowl.
 

It would be rad to do an update article!! Seems like there was a little uptick in people setting up these reefs around the time of that article but I’m not seeing as many of them lately, I could see people getting frustrated with the setbacks. But the setbacks are so much easier to fix with these tiny systems. I know people also get impatient with the limitations and decide to upgrade/upsize (some people just crave complication, which…valid, but that’s not me)

 

anyway I’m thrilled to keep this thing going and I love that all three of us still have them running. After all this time it still blows my mind that corals can survive and thrive in such a tiny space with such simple equipment (and be nursed back to health when bad stuff happens).

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natalia_la_loca

The silver lining to losing a shitload of coral: ROOM FOR MORE CORAL 😝 just scored some deals at a TCK Corals auction.

 

 

AOI zoas. These remind me a lot of a Caribbean zoa morph that Coral Morphologic used to sell. Hope they don’t melt like all the Caribbean zoas did. (RIP vice zoas…gone but not forgotten)

 


holy grail micromussa amakusensis!

 

not me putting an Amazeballs goni in a reefbowl  🤑
 

 

 

 

 

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natalia_la_loca

Yeah it’s weird, the videos play when I click on them but there’s no embedded image. I should probably just post pics. but I love watching the movement in the little video clips!

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  • 2 weeks later...
natalia_la_loca

So I just took an 8-day trip to Cozumel. I snorkeled for the first time and it was pretty amazing, even right off the dock of the resort where I was staying. In addition to seeing some beautiful animals up close like moray eels, stingrays, a scorpionfish, a barracuda, a trunkfish and sargeant major damsels of all sizes, I saw a bunch of animals that are common in the hobby, like long spined urchins, shaving brush macro, gorgonians, an emerald crab and (drum roll) bubble algae. Probably not super exciting to anyone who’s done much diving in the caribbean, but it was all new to me and super fun.

 

This was my first time away from my tanks and I was pretty nervous, especially given how recently the reefbowl had dinos. I was fortunate to have a pet sitter as I’m still nervous about backing off the anti-dino dosing regimen (bacteria each morning, a drop of peroxide at night).

 

To prepare, I fed the bowl and did a 100% water change the day before leaving. I dosed enough Neonitro and Neophos to bring nitrate to 10 ppm and phosphate to 0.1. I asked the sitter to continue the bacteria and peroxide dosing regimen but do nothing else.

 

When I got back yesterday, the bowl looked fantastic despite the alk going down to 5.4 (!!!) and nutrients zeroing out. Only the fiji hypercolor zoas were looking pissed. Turns out they came in with a couple of tiny vermetid snails. Fingers crossed they haven’t spread, given that the frag has been in there about a month. I fed the corals yesterday, then did a 100% water change this morning. With the bowl drained, I took out the vermetids with tweezers and superglue. I also removed one of the duncan colonies that was getting too big and switched it with a baby duncan from the Evo. Hypercolors are already looking better today.

 

So it looks like I need to stick to my 7-day water change routine. Anyway, pics.


the pink goni is almost completely recovered. Unbelievable.

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amazeballs goni living up to the hype. It really does look incredible in person and it’s so different from any other goni I’ve seen. I’m really curious whether some of the gonis available in the hobby are different species or subspecies. Like goniopora and bernardpora are pretty clearly different but a lot of gonis also have super different growth forms.

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natalia_la_loca

I can’t stop staring at that goniopora lol. It’s so beautiful! Because it’s so close to the glass, I can take pics with the clip on macro lens. The colors are just wild. 

 

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natalia_la_loca

Now I’m back to the luxurious problem of corals killing each other. The leptoseris was starting to steamroll this little micromussa (left front in the pic), so I pried the micromussa off the main rock, trimmed off the excess skeleton and gave it its own little rock island. Then I took out the bits of leptoseris and glued them to the big nephthea rock in the Evo, since not much else is likely to grow under the nephthea’s shadow.
 

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they’re looking a little rough now, but the micromussa will hopefully have more room to grow!

 

 

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natalia_la_loca
48 minutes ago, ml86743 said:

That holy grail micromussa is stunning

I know right?!! it’s so amazing! 

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natalia_la_loca

My reminiscing about vice zoas got me googling, and it turned out Unique Corals had some vice zoas available. So I decided to tempt fate one more time. 
 

The colors on these are nowhere near as fire as the vice zoas that Coral Morphologic used to sell. But they’re still prettier than the big frag of pink and golds that I traded in at the LFS to make room. Besides, I still have pink and golds growing on the glass and the airline. Fingers crossed these are a few years/generations removed from the ocean and less of a melt risk than the old vice zoas used to be.

 

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I also was on the lookout for some rastas to repopulate the old acro skeleton and UC had a good price on them, so I got a frag. The zoa garden is back!!

 

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Thumbs up for the money cowrie, they're by far my favorite invert to keep in a tank! They clean really well and seem to live forever, I have one going on 4 years now

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natalia_la_loca
1 hour ago, Jaren45 said:

Thumbs up for the money cowrie, they're by far my favorite invert to keep in a tank! They clean really well and seem to live forever, I have one going on 4 years now

big agree! In my Evo I still have the first one I bought like 4 years ago. And the 2 cowries in my reefbowl both survived the dinoflagellate outbreak. 

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natalia_la_loca

All good in the bowl. I’m annoyed by the big gap in front of the leptoseris that was caused by moving the micromussa out of harm’s way, and fortunately Legendary Corals had a sale, so I’ll have something new there soon 😎


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The pink goni isn’t 100% recovered (still has some bare spots that are visible when it retracts at night), but I can’t say enough how thrilling it is that it’s come back. I’ve had it in this bowl for six and a half years!!!

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natalia_la_loca

I like how reef tanks look with plants around them and I can’t be bothered to mess around with mangroves, so I’ve been training my spider plant to hang its babies around the reefbowl. (Btw there’s the opae’ula shrimp bowl off to the left, 7 years old and still kicking with no maintenance other than dusting and top-off every few months)

 

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For the incoming coral (spoiler, it’s a glitterbomb goni, fingers crossed it arrives safely and loves reefbowl life), I don’t want to place it in the scape because aggression and I can’t use a regular mini frag rack because of the strong curve of the bottom part of the bowl, so I got possibly the most heavily engineered (not to say overengineered) mini frag rack I’ve ever seen. This one from Oceanbox Designs pivots at an angle, making it perfect for the lower part of the reefbowl.

 

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  • natalia_la_loca changed the title to Natalia's Reefbowlocalypse: all good

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