The number one way to boost coral growth in any pico reef

[brandon429]

If you want to know a secret to packing corals in a pico reef so thick you can't get the sps off the glass without breaking it, then do a blast feeding run

 

do twenty of them, or do six, just do something physically on your part vs the normal feeding modes reefers take on the boards (feed sparse, don't upset that po4 you've chased all year, don't exceed your export routines and supports)

 

*Because you are pico reefers

 

You can do something no other reef can, feed your corals better than anyone. Paul B is always posting about the abilities of feed, so test this in your pico reefs

 

 

*Because all pico reefs and pico reef corals, all of them, enjoy the 100% tank water change (didn't say tolerate, said enjoys) this is secretly allowing you to pack in feed such that a 100 gallon tank couldn't beat it. Your fragging will increase when you run this trick a few times over the course of 2-3 mos

 

Tanks with fish might find this hard, that's 1% of picos. most are coral only and inverts.

 

No shrimp or crab Ive ever kept minded this technique, they ate like kings too. drain down to 95% if needed to room them, the point is after you shoot 10x the normal cyclopeeze into every mouth in your contest pico, the tank will be littered such that if you left it that way it might crash in a day

 

but with a flushing water change habit/technique/secret of the millennium/standard pico reef CPR fare you can simply export it out

 

 

What if someone needs to drain and refill and spot siphon the feed out four times to get the tank clean?

 

that's 4x more motion, more reef action, more feeding, and more oxygenation than a stagnant pico reef asking for demise via feed withholding

 

 

Wont this overload the system>?

 

No, you are exporting feed before it degrades. your nitrate and p04 remains unaffected by the blast feeding, but fully affected by any sandbed that can cause a cloud upon disturbance.

 

blast cleaning handily removes all detritus. its not that a pico reef won't run in the typical hands off/light feeding/partial water change due to delicates-in-tow approach, they will. They're that flexible

 

Its that the steroid-fed and sustained one will hulkify your frags, triple the coral loading, make things strong against disease. we cure invaded tanks with blast cleaning. See the sand rinse thread on Reef2Reef, that is several large tanks fully blast cleaned to rid them of various invasions, its powerful technique. They were using it to rid waste and play catch up

 

you can use it ahead of time, simply to pack on coral mass.

 

what would you guess the cyanobacteria invasion rate is for the blast cleaned pico reef>? its zero. not one example living.

 

how about the dinoflagellates scourge in blast cleaned pico reefs? post us one.

 

the blast cleaning run is the baddest secret in pico and nano reefing.

 

its not the once or twice that runs it, its the habit. im a lifelong blast feeder and more than once Ive had to dremel and vinegar melt blue sps out of my reef it was total invasion and this is not one-off, it can be replicated in all these pico contest containers like a little zeovit bodybuilder contest in micro. someone latch onto it 4x weekly and sustain that ten weeks and lemme know if the corals minded. we do the amnt of water changes required to deal with the steroid feeding, so there is no number limit. Its a refreshing, energizing, ORP-sustaining move even if you didn't pair it with a feeding. but do

 

 

my pods?

 

sure to hurt my pods right>

 

after about six years worth of blast clean this was taken, it was water changing at 100% though this sandbed ran unrinsed at this point. pods scurry away and hide when it gets the siphon hose

 

*This shows how you can still hyper feed even if you don't want to disturb the bed during cleanup. Deflect your pour-in somehow

 

 

there is no bad aspect of blast cleaning as a core design for the successful and very long term pico reef. Its the human equivalent of brisk and sustained walking, or cardio + weights sustained, eating right, boosting immune defenses not with pills but by calories burned, its approaching the amnt of whole protein (undegraded) these animals are used to, and yes, it requires you to be busier until someone invents an automation system for it.

 

Have an average pico, or have an unaverage one/

 

test your own inversions and post. if its busier and weirder than the norm, we want it.

 

My own current inversion is sometimes I wont feed my tank for 8 weeks (not recommended on new for sure) and then after a couple mos hands off, I blast clean the whole tank then feed it like mad with water changes about 3x per week for 2 weeks, then back on the starve. coral growth is problematic still, have to cut some out.

 

so I think the final extension of the trick is, be very busy feeder, algae rasper, exporter up front until your whole pico reef is coralline and coral flesh.

 

then you can back off and reef the way you want to, and vary up this busy aspect. Secretly I do hardly any work on my reef now, zilch other than that catchup approach. Theres times I don't even change the water for three weeks, again not recommended for noncalcified reefs but nonetheless a fact. cruise control is on at a stead 70 mph shes cruising.

 

Hands off sustained is for old, purple reefs. We can reverse any negative condition in pico reefing by matching the work level to the age of the aquarium.

 

Do not think that being busy with protein in/protein out before degredation means you'll always be on the wagon, you can back off after forty months for sure. next time you read about a problem in a pico reef (rarely posted) just consider if the overall care technique is busy or stagnant, simplest remedy ever. chem free, elbow grease based outcomes.

 

dog whisperer said it, exercise comes first or none of what you want will be in balance

 

how well do humans respond to exercise sustained

 

our reefs are the same = amazing do try it. make your accessibility in the pico reef work for you in sixteen different ways and you'll be beating large tankers not only with salinity control, but approaching production levels too

[brandon429]

Consider this bare spot I've put right in the middle of this ten yr old brain colony

 

A convergence of events happened to form it, shading from red plating montis above not helping (it's an injury from removal from the tank recently) guess what's the cure sustained for about two months

 

Rip feeding, nothing else is needed to restore corals all other params normal, feed power is the best thing you can do for any reef, any pro will tell you it's the export that challenges them, sets their pacing, or they'd be feeding 3x as much like you can as pico reefers

 

Spot feed every polyp

 

Siphon clean out all the excess, leave fat polyps.

 

Do a nice pump water change next day with no feed if you want to run clean

 

Repeat these steps as often as you want to shred on coral growth.

 

 

Nitrogen pack the colony safely, with export, then can back off a bit and that coral will seal up by spring break. It's the in/out water changing

 

It's guiding the entire ecosystem into nitrogen positive, positive mass status. It's doing the water cleaning it takes to feed better than the average large reef even, per square inch of coverage of course and not by gallonage

 

[brandon429]

Regenerating corals is more about feed in/feed out than it is about dipping. I've put dying frogspawn in from a lfs before we just washed off bad parts, I've never dipped a coral in my life

 

I've never quarantined nor acclimated 

 

Rip cleaning and feeding occasionally is to muscle up your reef. Algae turf scrubbers are valid setups in that they scrub so much nitrogen from the system, they count as a valid export method to replace volume changed when dealing with larger setups

 

The benefits claimed in huge ATS threads aren't just algae removal, they're about being able to feed more food cubes and still not register free nitrate

 

 

They're accomplishing that not with huge water changes like we can so easily, it's with internal degradation of proteins within the system but enough rapid plant uptake to offset.

 

Pico reefers can merely use their accessibility to the whole water column as a reset for anything, anytime, or just for an oxidation boost/storm simulation. The positive that is worked by rip feeding is measurable for all, it's not snake oil claim. It is the method that will restore that brain I'll update. Gimme till Easter, phone reminder follow up set straight up prediction. It's mass will seal in the hole by mid April driven only by cyclopeeze and light and cpr stroke water changes. A fourth complete monti whorl frag will be ready by then too, a side effect of blast cleaning. I have to get rid of one now they're shading the brain too much. Low space left in here

 

12th year. I cannot count how many frags it's exported, I threw away much of the easy extras like Xenia and some brown montis, as eco horrible as that may be.

 

Im currently shopping for og warty bounce shrooms for obvious reasons.

[dmw913]

@brandon429, thank you so much for the outstanding suggestion for being more successful with our picos!!!  We appreciate not only this write-up but all of the help you’ve given across many platforms over the years!

 

Question:  You refer to ”blast feeding” and “blast cleaning” and I’m trying to make sure I understand clearly what you are saying.  Let me restate to see if I have it correct if that’s ok -

 

Blast feeding:  Spot feed every polyp with an obscene amount of food and allow them all to eat for around an hour or so until they are fat and happy.  What foods do you prefer?

 

follow with:

 

Blast cleaning:  After the coral have gorged, 100% water change to export the remaining pollutants.  Repeat if first water change is not sufficient to clear tank.  Do you also recommend blowing off the rock with a blaster or something to keep things as clean as possible - hence the “blast” term?  

 

Repeat this process as your time/energy allow for mega pico reef!

[brandon429]

yes and thank you so much for posting, feel free to document any aspect of increased feeding and results you may encounter. that craziness correctly summarized is what Ive amounted to over the years, the forcing clean of the sandbed occasionally, the massive feeding (cyclopeeze frozen is my old standby)

 

but all manner of increase is appreciated in these picos even if not so extreme. that's why inversions of feeding options are shown on the web with tricks like bowl feeding entire colonies of nonphotosynthetic tubastrea colonies

 

that way the tank isn't backed up, but that one coral gets the massive type approach. Tupperware bowl littered in spent mysids, the coral engorged, over puffed and burping on the couch going in and out of consciousness. that type of feeding corals just love lol. thank you for your kind words! its the success of coral growths I hope is fostered in sharing and cross documenting the ideas. here's my new third colony of red plating montipora ready for export, (middle red monti frag shading my stuff below) took 5 months to produce from only an ear broke off the other colony to the right

red montis from above, kessil changed to white for clear pic

 

all the corals are glued onto water bottle trash strips recycled as planks. the montis take them over 100%. my alley trash though cleaned well, is inside each red monti whorl as a caring eco gift to the recipient. sometimes announced, sometimes not, not sure if that's decent business conduct or not, the nondisclosure of alley trash at the core / corals do not care. it is a hedge against anyone claiming non eco friendliness, though Im still throwing out 98% of the bottle #increments lol

 

 

 

 

 

as the tank is drained all the way for these flushing sandbed changes, the rip cleaning part, or to get back all the food that was shot into the reef, that leaves rock work open for algae scraping in younger tanks.

 

There is no where to fit algae in that scape, by design, its 100% coral and coralline and no free space. But if one uses their emersion time as further access to scrape off algae with a steak knife, rinse that away in a flushing run then drain the tank again, you can put peroxide on the formerly invaded spot to totally kill it or at least better than any technique known, and that prevents peroxide from touching most of your other reef.

 

during any cleaning or anti algae runs while someone is guiding a newer tank into purpleness, feel free to use back to back water changes in succession to export peroxide runoff, rasped off algae bits etc.

 

Force your reef to be algae free, permit none, and eventually it will plate over and you'll never rasp again. If I stuck a rasp in that tank it would hit live coral, though theres about five lbs of live rock in the tank. its obscured.

 

*algae is outcompeted due to massive coral growth, by design, no free real estate for the competing. all benefits of the CPR strokes technique of pico bodybuilding.

[dmw913]

“Inversions of feeding options”?  

 

Can I trouble you for a link to an example for further reading, please?

 

What are your thoughts on ReefRoids and dry foods of that sort?

 

This is an exciting approach as I’ve never had a tank this small which opens up so many possibilities as opposed to what are often thought of as limitations!  I love the mind switch!  Would you like my documentation here or in my journal thread?

[brandon429]

feel free to link that whole journal thread, that overall scope of outcome is just what we want to see, start to midlife aged documentation is perfect.

 

Im going off to find PJ reef's tank of the month, a tiny 2.5

 

he earned sexual, not asexual, reproduction of tubastrea NPS stony coral which is just mind boggling. coming up. a documentation of how to pack protein into specific corals wo affecting the overall system. baby nps colonies were seating over most surfaces in his tank, those rascals sold for 60$ apiece with just five heads at my lfs. gold. take out those rascals and plant them on frag plugs in a 180 frag setup/gold. its taking some time to locate

 

in fact I know of three more this w take a sec coming right up. these are all alternate feeding and concentration documentations for ideas/thought provoking further.

how much do we like nano-reef.com for allowing open source linking so that all aspects of marine science can be modeled and conveyed without hesitation? lots

 

https://reefbuilders.com/2012/04/23/coral-bowl-dorkfish-aquatics/

 

 

a way to spot feed goniopora with minimal bleed off loss in a huge setup.

 

2. PJ's reef

 

3. http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2010/4/aquarium

a 100% water changing nano. you can tell about the hesitancy of the full water change/coral irritation concerns when these practices were coming about. The year of that article is about 4 yrs after the technique was posted on nr. com yay to the old site for archived reefing docs. we had been 100% changing a while before that was written. 2017 fast forward: it doesn't even matter if you use the same brand of salt on the new change, no salt mixes lethally to corals after complete mixing. **the change in params salt to salt is simply not a big deal. That pic above of my reefbowl is after a total change to brightwell salt, no acclimation, last week after using 5 years straight kent. instantly changed to another brand w no ramp up

 

 the salt brands this bowl uses actively, 100% water changing bringing on the new and cheapest alternatives:

 

reefcrystals

esv salt if that's even still around, it was 2006 for this bowl above.

ocreanic salt

kent, the longest running one so far but not avail at my lfs now

tropic marin was used here too, but its too $

 

 

to carefully frame what Im posting, I want to subject my reef to extremes of anything I claim for others tanks, they can go less cra mode. start incrementally until trust is built directly from their own system feedback.

 

Another really sick technique that many know is the little plastic cup concentrator

 

at Walgreens the other day they had these mini red solo cups

 

or, the common ones stacked on a bathroom counter dispenser for toothbrushing, the little wax paper cups

 

you can take any one of those and use it as a dome over a disc coral frag, a little brain coral lobe, or anything really in a moderate sized nano and shoot food into it via diabetics syringe. if its flat on the sb with a rock holding it down, or angled onto rocks somehow creatively, this capture just lets your target coral take in more before the current or bully crab steals it

 

 the normal complement of food you'd release into the tank anway...imagine if you concentrated it all on one single coral for a while then removed the cuplet

 

move around to possible corals each feeding time. We can use the feed we already provide in a more concentrated manner as an expansion of the approach.

just brainstormin

 

[brandon429]

here was the day I lifted out that 8 lb brain coral frag with fish hooks heh, before the middle was injured. I didn't expect it to spread that fast lol, the shading from the montis helped. ill reverse it all soon enough.

 

 

 

[brandon429]

Thought I would cross post this response to a pm with a friend on pico reef care:

 

One other handy you might make use of

 

Our invasions stop when our addition of things stops

 

It usually takes people years to complete a reef that's why you see invasions lasting so long and being so varied

 

A handy for pico reefing is a two part approach-

 

First part is add a few frags and do the hand guiding at the highest level to reject all early Invaders. Busy phase... Feeding, water changing, algae and diatom killing/removing etc

 

Phase 2 only comes after your first corals are clearly doing well perhaps several weeks or a few months

 

The second phase is to go ahead and stock up on your corals, you can see how dense we run them in those pictures I linked...and the rest of the time is simply growth into place and feed/water changes.

 

This is opposite of the normal approach of slow stocking over years or months, bringing in alternating invasion species. That way works, and we see it's challenges online bc that's how most people reef.

 

Of course a pico reef will allow all manner of variation... This optimized approach simply reflects that the presence of an invasion challenge is due to import vs parameter issues in a pico reef.

 

When you see algae, the web verse tells you to find a water problem

 

But pico reefers know differently; algae and cousins get here because we bring them in via non quarantine. We hold course on water care and habits that center on what corals want

 

When algae shows, and it will as you are stocking from different sources, we know to act independently.

 

Takeaway: water params are set to what corals want

 

Actions are set to what algae commands.

 

Water params vs action in a nutshell.

 

 

Part of the reason I haven't worked on algae invasions in my pico reef in about seven years is because i haven't added new corals from lfs in a long time. I didn't farm it on purpose in this bowl, it was never permitted.

 

I have added zo frags from friends homegrown system where qt has factored already.

 

My algae is controlled through import control #1, since that's it's vector into our lives.  #2 is direct spot kill, because algae cannot live where it was scraped out with a knife and then post rinsed in peroxide.

 

Of the Myriad approaches to running a Pico Reef this is just a set of constraints that has an incredibly consistent outcome, it's something to fall back on if times get challenging. Get busy with water changes, feeding and spot removal to recharge any pico reef

 

 

 

[brandon429]

 

 

just ran a blast feeding round, got really good detail of the feeding here.

 

Notice the benthic animals at the bottom foraging, arms from the stars waiving and some pods. Blast rinsing doesn't hurt anything it only removes extra feed and detritus.

 

Once your rocks are 100% coral, there's no where for algae to grow. We are not going to find bryopsis or valonia where a mouth is.

 

This is a one gallon vase. after this feeding sat bubbling for an hour, I ran five gallons of clean salt water harshly through the system

 

used a turkey baster at the end of the run to blast sand off all the corals, sand falls cleanly back to the bottom zero cloud. Every coral fat full as can be on red cyclopeeze

 

that's one sure way a brain coral gets enough feed to grow to that many pounds inside a jar