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Dr. Felicia's Back to Basics IM14 - Retired 2/25/2020


Felicia

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5 hours ago, Felicia said:

Not tank-related, but a photo of my other hobby...baking!  Two of my coworkers have birthdays this weekend, so I made dark chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter cream frosting.  They're topped with Reese's Pieces crumbles.

 

39733004734_4bf53d2849_z.jpg

I had a recent birthday!  Yum, you have lucky co-workers. :-)

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5 hours ago, Felicia said:

Not tank-related, but a photo of my other hobby...baking!  Two of my coworkers have birthdays this weekend, so I made dark chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter cream frosting.  They're topped with Reese's Pieces crumbles.

 

39733004734_4bf53d2849_z.jpg

 

This looks way too good :-)

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On 2/23/2018 at 11:19 AM, Cannedfish said:

How deliciously sinful...

They were pretty tasty :D

19 hours ago, vlangel said:

I had a recent birthday!  Yum, you have lucky co-workers. :-)

Happy belated Birthday Dawn! Too bad cupcakes don't ship well or I'd share! :lol:

19 hours ago, Ranjib said:

This looks way too good :-)

Thank you! They were pretty tasty. I enjoy baking and especially like cupcakes since they're a cute one serving piece of cake and fun to decorate. I like trying new flavor combinations and sticking to simple, but fun decoration.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sorry for being so MIA.  I went out of town for about 9 days and then it was a busy week at work catching up on everything.  Unfortunately the dinos came back while I was gone and made a mess of the tank.  They ended up killing one of my gorgonians (the lacy purple one, which was clearly the most delicate) and my two newest coral additions, the pulsing xenia and the green cloves.  The thick finger leather is still alive, but is really irritated and mostly closed up.  I'm hoping it will recover.  Luckily, everything else was irritated, but otherwise fine.  All of my remaining fish and inverts were also alive and well, including Batman (the new black cardinal).  The only thing I noticed wrong otherwise is that my pom pom crab seems to have lost both of his anemones, which has me the most upset of anything.  He's still doing well, but I feel so bad that he doesn't have any anemones anymore.  I'm not sure what happened there.  Poor, adorable little guy.  :(

 

Anyways, I did a big water change and then a full 4 days of total blackout and now the tank is looking great again.  We'll see if/when the dinos come back again.  I'm hoping they will eventually go away.  Such a pain!

 

In other news, I grabbed a replacement clownfish from my LFS to keep my remaining clown company.  My little misbar is a true percula, so I got a Sustainable Aquatic Onyx percula.  The new clownfish is a decent amount larger than the little misbar, so my hope is that they wouldn't fight too much to figure out dominance.  So far they seem to be getting along without any fighting.  They spend a lot of time doing their own separate thing, but some of the time they behave like a pair, so I'm hoping they'll become more of a pair over time.

 

Also, I stopped by my friends' place who took a lot of my corals from the 40B and grabbed a couple of my original corals.  I picked up my green nepthea, which had been struggling but finally has been making a comeback recently.  I also picked up a frag of my original strain of pulsing xenia (this strain goes back to one of the first corals in my 10 gallon).  So far they seem to be doing ok in my tank.  I'm planning to do another water change in the next day or two and then I'll try to get some new photos.

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Christopher Marks

How frustrating with the dinos, that's a tough battle! :( 

 

At least you're back on track again, gotta move forward! That's so cool to be able to introduce frags from your old system all these years later, especially that xenia! 

 

Welcome back!

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2 hours ago, Christopher Marks said:

How frustrating with the dinos, that's a tough battle! :( 

 

At least you're back on track again, gotta move forward! That's so cool to be able to introduce frags from your old system all these years later, especially that xenia! 

 

Welcome back!

Yeah the Dino's are definitely a pain, but at least they're manageable. Going out of town meant I couldn't deal with them, but I don't have any trips planned for a bit so hopefully I can keep them under control until they fizzle out. I also still have DinoX that I haven't tried yet. I'd prefer not to go the chemical treatment route, so I'm keeping it as a last resort.

 

Yeah it's nice to have plenty of local reefers to share corals with and things. My tank sitter does aquarium maintenance for a living and used to own an LFS until he decided the overhead was too high. He now just does maintenance, but still has his wholesalers license to get fish, corals, and equipment for his customers. He has 1,000+ gallons worth of tanks in two huge sheds in his backyard now, so he had plenty of space to take and house a bunch of my corals when I took my system down. My cabbage leather, my Duncan, some of my gorgonians, some of my mushrooms, some of my zoanthids, etc are turning into huge colonies in his big tanks. I decided not to take a piece of the cabbage leather because it grows on a plating fashion and would take up a lot of real estate in this tank. I've debated getting a small frag of my Duncan colony, but I'm trying to avoid LPS in this tank because I don't want to dose or deal with coral warfare. It's nice to see my corals live on and be able to get some of them back when/if I want them. :)

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No major updates.  Unfortunately, I am still fighting dinos.  They just keep coming back.  For the most part things are doing fine, but I did lose one gorgonian and one frag of zoas.  I'm pretty frustrated with this tank, but I'm just continuing to fight the dinos and hoping things will improve over time.

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On 2/23/2018 at 1:59 PM, Felicia said:

Not tank-related, but a photo of my other hobby...baking!  Two of my coworkers have birthdays this weekend, so I made dark chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter cream frosting.  They're topped with Reese's Pieces crumbles.

 

39733004734_4bf53d2849_z.jpg

Can I get this recipe, please?

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Okinawa_Reefer

Have you tried micro bubble scrubbing? I’ve seen a couple tanks have success after implementing this process as the micro bubbles help surface the Dino’s and filter them out via filter sock or floss pad. 

9F422B0D-9172-47DC-821F-B5034BEE09E3.jpeg

 

I havent tried this process myself, and I’m not sure if the product mentioned in the picture is actually required or helps...but I would give the micro bubbles a try. Good luck and let us know how you fair!

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Polarcollision

I beat dinos in my little 8 gallon tank by adding fresh sand from the big tank and then adding some algae (the nuisance hair algae type). Let them fight over nutrients, right?

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Hey Felicia- I was just wondering if you ever got the IM media basket and if so if you have any feedback on it. My IM just overflowed when the Chemipure bag (the only thing I'm currently using) fell to the bottom of the chamber and slowed flow causing ATO to empty. Thank goodness we were home!

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15 hours ago, Pjanssen said:

Hey Felicia- I was just wondering if you ever got the IM media basket and if so if you have any feedback on it. My IM just overflowed when the Chemipure bag (the only thing I'm currently using) fell to the bottom of the chamber and slowed flow causing ATO to empty. Thank goodness we were home!

I did! I switched to the IM media basket about a month ago and I haven’t had any problems since I added it. I had several overflows myself before but the IM basket fits much looser, so even if the holes through it get plugged or blocked, the water can still flow around it.

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On 4/24/2018 at 4:22 AM, Sharbuckle said:

How goes the dino battle? 

Frustratingly...I really haven't made much progress.  Right now I'm just keeping them at bay enough to not kill a bunch of my corals.  I've done multiple 4-day tank blackouts and now I'm about two weeks into dosing DinoX.  People recommend not doing water changes with dinos, so I've stopped doing weekly water changes and that seems to have made it worse.  I decided to completely replace all of the stages of my RODI system to see if that could be an issue.  This weekend I'm planning to do several large water changes now that all the RODI filtration stages are brand new and see if that helps.

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1 hour ago, Felicia said:

Frustratingly...I really haven't made much progress.  Right now I'm just keeping them at bay enough to not kill a bunch of my corals.  I've done multiple 4-day tank blackouts and now I'm about two weeks into dosing DinoX.  People recommend not doing water changes with dinos, so I've stopped doing weekly water changes and that seems to have made it worse.  I decided to completely replace all of the stages of my RODI system to see if that could be an issue.  This weekend I'm planning to do several large water changes now that all the RODI filtration stages are brand new and see if that helps.

I had a short but hard fought battle with dinos. Reduced lighting schedule, reduced feeding, added gfo, turned up flow, skipped water changes, bit of manual removal (siphon into a mesh strainer and put water back in), and over time it worked.  

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Polarcollision

Urg. Dinos. It took several weeks to see progress but I believe that letting green hair algae run wild actually cleared up my Dino issues in the seahorse tank. Indirectly related, I also think dosing potassium nitrate rebalanced the fertilizer big 3 (that hair algae need) to clear up a long-running cyano overgrowth. I suspect Dino’s also break out with an imbalance of those 3.

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16 hours ago, Sharbuckle said:

I had a short but hard fought battle with dinos. Reduced lighting schedule, reduced feeding, added gfo, turned up flow, skipped water changes, bit of manual removal (siphon into a mesh strainer and put water back in), and over time it worked.  

Why skip water changes?

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