OldManSea's Red Sea Max E-170 February Full Tank Shot, Random Images

[OldManSea]

Hi, Christopher, thank you for your comments.  It was a long road but since the tank is in a fish room and not the living room, I was able to just patiently (mostly) ride out the storm.  It is amazingly stable right now.  Yesterday I wiped down a couple of small patches of algae fog from the glass which took 12 days from last wipe down to show up.  I have been trying to take decent pictures of some of the denizens and have about enough for a proper update but since you asked about one fish, let me introduce Sandy the leaf scorpionfish.

 

 

Sandy has been in the tank since November 2017.  The name is strange but its expression and demeanor remind me of a beloved beagle that we had for 15 years before she passed away a few months ago.  Sandy is very placid and minds his/her own business.  (S)he only gets excited when I approach with a small thawed shrimp in her feeding forceps.  For the first 6 months she lived in this tank she would only take live ghost shrimp (presented with the forceps or the flame hawkfish would beat Sandy to the punch - and even with the forceps they sometimes cant be beaten off).  I tried frozen krill over and over with no success.  Then I read a post by someone who said he had the same issue with an angler and fixed it when he saw frozen "tiny shrimp" at the Asian market.  They look just like ghost shrimp - white with tiny eyes whereas krill are orange with enormous eyes.  I went to the market and found the identical item.  Sandy will eat them for a couple of months with gusto then refuse them.  When that happens a single live ghost shrimp convinces her that the tiny shrimp are OK, and then she eats them for another couple of months (as do the hawkfishes and clowns).  She eats one shrimp every 4 or 5 days.  I know that she is hungry when I see her on a rock swaying back and forth like detritus, or, when she sees me and swims to near the water surface begging.  If she is not hungry she just follows along when I move, bouncing from one rock or coral head to another.  If I offer food at this time, she ignores it.

 

It is interesting to watch leaf fish age their skin.  Over a period of two weeks, it gets browner and ragged and is then sloughed off.  In her new skin, Sandy is a pure white.  In this photo she is 5 days from last shed so there are darker cells beginnning to show.  Sandy is a very cool pet.  She has personality like the hawkfishes.  They are exactly the same size and for all intents Sandy and the hawkfishes completely ignore one another but they all closely follow any activity outside the tank and take turns bouncing from one rock to the next - the hawkfishes just move 100 times faster! 

[OldManSea]

Happy Labor Day! 

The tank continues to do well – no dino’s, cyano, bryopsis or hair algae. 

Since the tank is not changed in any meaningful way, I don’t have a FTS, but I did make images of some of the corals.

I have been changing 5 or 10 gallons of water each week (10 – 20% of system volume).  Dosing of calcium and alkalinity is ongoing.  Nitrate and phosphate are maintained more or less at 5 ppm and 0.05 ppm, respectively, by manual dosing every few days as testing dictates.  I have noticed that a few corals have been looking a bit “puny.”  This was especially true for the favia colony on the bottom at front right.  It used to be fuzzy with feeding tentacles when Reef Roids were added, and the base color was a dark, rusty red.  Of late the feeding tentacles have been few and far between and the color has turned a muddy purple.  A couple of the blasto’s have not been extending feeding tentacles as well as they have in the past.  I watched the recent BRS video about amino acid supplementation and for the past week have been adding Brightwell Coral Amino solution daily.  The morning after the first addition, the favia and blasto’s were plump and there were many feeding tentacles.  By the second morning, the favia’s color returned to the rusty red and the blasto’s were much more plump.  Perhaps the clams have been stripping the nutrients from the water since I don’t feed heavily. In addition to the Reef Roids the tank receives frozen mysis every other day and clown fish pellets on the days without mysis.  A couple of times each week a small sheet of nori is added. 

Here are a few close up shots.  First, the torch garden:

The green torch was added first (AquaSD,

it was called midnight something or other), then the purple  (also ASD, called “Purple Torch").

 

 

I have had a lot of trouble getting an accurate color rendition of the purple, it is actually a beautiful, rich purple.  Most recently, a couple of months ago, the gold torch (also ASD) was added. 

 

The gold was gotten during one of ASD’s 40% off sales so it was actually quite reasonable.  All of the torches are Australian. 

The other Euphyllia’s in the tank include a very nicely colored frogspawn that I have had for 2 years.  It was a single head  (ASDwhen I got it and is now 26. It hosts the pair of ocellars clowns, although the pink hammer shares that duty from time to time.  The pink hammer was received at the same

 

time, also as a single head.  It has 22 heads now.  It would have more but when I scrape the back glass I often manage to break off a lower head – the image is of a single head that I broke off the colony a month ago.  These incidental frags get me salt and other stuff from the LFS.  The green hammer on the left in the previous FTS didn’t have great color when I got it a few months ago (ASD) and has only improved coloration slightly.  I will probably take it to the LFS.  The small hammer in the center of the FTS is a Cornbred Banana Hammer:

 

that I got a few months ago.  On the website these were very expensive.  I got this one for less than half the web price in one of his Ebay auctions.  When I first placed it into the tank it was quite yellow but later in the day was green with yellow edges.  For the first few days, it was green with yellow edges in the morning, then close to noon would be bright yellow, and become a lesser yellow as the day progressed until late in the day it was back to green with yellow edges.  I realized that it turned yellow when the 4 T5 coral plus bulbs came on and the fading occurred when two of them turned off (I have 2 come on at 11 AM and go off at 1 PM and 2 come on at 11 AM and go off at 4 PM).  So, the coral is “banana” under the highly blue lights and less so when the T5’s are off.  The camera has a difficult time capturing the intensity of the color.  The tone in the image is spot on but the saturation is dazzling to the eye but not to the CMOS chip, but that is probably because I have negative compensation on since on a chip "Dazzling" = blown out.  The piece is still one head but has roughly doubled in size since I have had it.

 

I really like Leptoseris with their intense colors and patterns, and this Fake Jackolantern from Cherry Corals is a favorite.

 

It didn’t even cover half a small plug when I received it a couple of years ago but is now about 4 inches across in the long axis.  It would likely be much larger but it is on a rock that it covers but it will not extend to the glass, possibly because the rock gets moved a bit each week while I vacuum the tank floor. 

 

This tangerine leptoseris has grown very well in bright light (PAR 280) and encroached upon and attacked the Joe the Coral that was near it. I had been scraping

 

it away at the boundary but it got past and killed part of Joe’s base.  I fixed the problem with kalk paste (the greenish residue to the upper left of the piece.  I have been applying the paste with a syringe needle every couple of weeks which kills tissue only immediately below it.  About a year ago, I actually broke off half the tangerine and gave it to my sister so it has the potential to cover everything in the tank if given a chance!  I have more recently received a leptoseris which in the web photos (Cornbred) was a brilliant red.  For me so far it is a dull orange-red but lately I have noticed that it is encrusting downward on the rock face into a more shaded area.  That part of the piece is becoming quite red so the color problem may be too bright light.

 

I have begun to explore SPS with a green slimer (Cultivated Reef) and a Joe the Coral (Cultivated Reef). 

 

Feb 2019

 

Now

 

Feb 2019

 

Now

 

I show an image of each in February when they were received and now.  In the February images I still had a light covering of cyanobacteria and dinoflagellates in the tank, which are visible in the images.  In keeping with my clumsiness, I have broken the green slimer once.  It is beginning to extend again while it is encrusting the rock.  Joe the Coral was quite colorful when I received it and began encrusting.  Its losing battle with the tangerine leptoseris caused loss of the base tissue on that side of the piece.  Since I have been chemically returning the attack on the leptoseris (the area of kalk paste is readily visible here, Joe has begun to grow a good bit. 

 

Here is a watermelon psammacora (Cornbred) that has been growing like a weed, and to its right, a Blastomussa merlette with nearly 20 heads.  I got it as a freebie two years ago from Cherry Corals as a single tiny head.  Above it is a Cyphastrea obtained recently from ASD and to its left, an "acan" from the LFS gotten as two polyps and now 10.  This image also shows a couple of members of the plague of vermetid snails not in the tank along with an aiptasia.  These came with the clams.  The aiptasia are now almost gone with Franks's F-Aiptasia.  I crush the vermetids with hemostats but need to be more diligent with them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Wonderboy]

Amazing! Thank you for the euphilia overdose! I was not ready for that, but it was awesome! Lol  

Leptos look great - SPS growing super well - looking forward to the next update   :]

[OldManSea]

On ‎9‎/‎4‎/‎2019 at 4:18 AM, Wonderboy said:

Amazing! Thank you for the euphilia overdose! I was not ready for that, but it was awesome! Lol  

Leptos look great - SPS growing super well - looking forward to the next update   :]

Thanks!  I have become quite obsessed with euphilias.

[OldManSea]

I bought these two maxima's one year ago today.  It was a quasi-impulse buy.  I had been thinking of trying one for a while and my LFS got several that were 5+ inches at a very good price so I tried them out.  I really like them.  So far, they have been without any issues except that their shells are aiptasia and worm factories - you can see some worm tubes jutting out from the clam shell on the right.  I scrub them off every couple of months.   The one on the left has grown nearly 3/4 inch and the one on the right 3/8 inch.  They are both just under 6 inches now, which makes them roughly the size of an average maxima on a reef.  This is a quick phone snap this morning.  The reddish tint is from light spillover from a rack of freshwater tanks across from them.  

 

[AKAGuyver]

awesome tank. i have an e-170 as well and have had a hell of a time finding info on the red sea sump the picture you posted helped a lot, but was wondering if you could post another shot or explain the water flow in regards to the protein skimmer: does the skimmer dump skimmed water into another chamber? it looked like it dumped it into the large area where it would be re-skimming the same water over again. thanks a bunch and keep up the thread :)

[OldManSea]

3 hours ago, AKAGuyver said:

awesome tank. i have an e-170 as well and have had a hell of a time finding info on the red sea sump the picture you posted helped a lot, but was wondering if you could post another shot or explain the water flow in regards to the protein skimmer: does the skimmer dump skimmed water into another chamber? it looked like it dumped it into the large area where it would be re-skimming the same water over again. thanks a bunch and keep up the thread 🙂

I will post another shot tomorrow.  Lights are out for the night now.  The skimmer does dump back into the same sump chamber but the flow through that chamber (which has about 4 gallons in it) is about 300 gallons per hour so the reskimmed portion is negligible.  The curve 5 in there removes a lot of glop!

 

Thanks for looking.  I need to post an update of the tank as well as things are growing and I have moved a few things around because of that.

[AKAGuyver]

awesome thx, ive been designing a refugium build for my e170 and debating using an existing skimmer vs a new one, and space being at a premium the rectangular existing red sea skimmer with a recirculating co2 scrubber could be a great fit but theres so many options out there its great to talk to someone with the same tank whose been there.

[OldManSea]

I was messing about today doing measurement and so forth and made a few images.  I should have turned off the pumps but.....

 

Here is a FTS.  I have made a few changes to try to begin organizing the tank better.  I removed the Sprung Stunner chalice.  I have become convinced that one needs at least a 1000 gallon tank 

to contain one of them and it would probably fill that up in a year as well.  It got to the point that I had to break off the edge every month and even then it stung lots of other corals.  When I removed it I made 28 frags of around 2 inch diameter and took them to the LFS.  I pity the fool....  I also removed the Fake Jack-o-Lantern Leptoseris.  It was beautiful but it took up an entire rock, which I was able to simply lift out and transfer to another tank where it now looks beautiful.  So, I have a bid area of rock and tank floor on the right side looking at the tank to add something.  In my bumbling a few weeks ago, I made 3 unintentional frags (again!!) of my Joe the Coral that was growing so well.  The base of it is still on the top of the rock behind the ever-expanding tangerine leptoseris (that bad boy also needs to be placed in a different tank).  The 3 new frags are in another tank.  The red goniopora was an addition about a month ago.  I had a red goniopora in my small tank about 3 years ago.  I looked great for about 9 months then spent a month dying.  This one has longer polyps than the previous red and was brought into the LFS by a fellow who purchased it as a small frag 4 years ago.  The store owner fragged it into 4 pieces, one of which you see here.  I hope that since it did well in captivity for several years that I will not kill this one.  I spoke to the owner of the colony who told me that it had never been fed.  I feed this tank reef roids once a week and reef chili once a week along with various frozen foods and sometimes newly hatched brine shrimp if I have baby killifishes or other newly hatched fish around.  This goni really chows down on those things.

 

I can never do an update without featuring the two maxima clams which this month reached their 15th month in this tank.  Beautiful creatures!

 

The wall hammer has been in the tank for several months now.  It is exquisite in its coloration.  In the morning under all blue lights, it is a translucent, pastel green and later in the day (these shots were done around 1 pm) when there is significant white - about 20% intensity on the Hydra 26 - it is a beautiful translucent pastel yellow.   I have heard that wall hammers often have relatively short lives in aquaria but I could not exist.

 

The torch garden continues to grow.  The solid green one was obtained a couple of months ago from an ASD sale.  It was two heads and is now 4.  I really like the deep, solid green.  The newest addition is next to it.  I have had it for a couple of weeks.  It came in the first Indonesian shipment at the LFS.  The torches are all a bit blurred since the powerheads are on.  The new one has great green tentacles with bright pink tips.  

 

I will end with a couple of oldies but goodies.  I really like this Blasto merlette colony.  I got it nearly 3 years ago as a tiny pinhead single head as a freebie from AquaSD.  If I remember correctly, the last time I counted heads, it has 14.  It lives well with the Psammacora and the brain coral.  They grow right up to one another but keep separated by about 2 mm with no injury to any of them.  In the image, the Psammacoral looks like it is extending on top of the Blasto but there is actually a small protrusion of rock that the "foot" is attached to.  The Blasto goes under the protrusion.  One of the hawkfish is wondering why I don't feed her (of course I don't which one is him and which is her, but this one is slightly smaller.  I have had them now for more than 2 years..  

 

Finally, this Palythoa grandis colony.  I got a 2-polyp frag from Cultivated Reef in 2017.  It was higher on the rock and when it reached 12 polyps I fragged it and gave one away and kept the other.  When it reached 12 heads again, I fragged it and kept one, mounted to a small rock, and placed in the front corner of the tank.  Over time, the colony became attached to the rock behind it and now "goes around the corner."  When I feed, all the polyps close up so they are easily counted.  Currently it has 32.  I really like this creature.  

[JoePeter]

Can we get a 2 year update? Your tank looks beautiful.