Muffin's 2.5 Pico

[Muffin]

12 hours ago, Christopher Marks said:

What a tease! 😄 

 

What's the story behind this little beauty? What do you have planned?

XD it's a maroon clowns dream home. Although the tank is the Evo 5, the clowns barely move from their anemones so I think it will work for a while lol. 9 gbtas and rbtas for now, and a mini maxi. I probably will make a thread sooner or later for it.

[Muffin]

March Update:

• Stock changes: Pistol shrimp was removed and placed in the HOB, and the sexy shrimp was put into the EVO 5 gallon
• General maintenance: Removed the HOB and did a deep clean on it.
• Upping water changes to every other week.

Light schedule(Kessil Spectral Controller):

Starts @ 10 AM 

Ends @ 10 PM

ramps up to 100% around noon and stays till around 2

I personally like the blue spectrum so I have it on blue all day long

 

Now for some pictures (used my DSLR, still trying to figure out how to avoid making corals look washed out):

 

 

 

 

 

Look at that spotless HOB refugium! All the rocks were placed in a cup with water before cleaning.

 

 

A macro of a baby, the adult shrooms are the next pic

 

 

 

While I love taking DSLR pics, I find that it doesn't truly represent what the corals look like in real life. However, the orange gel filter pics with my cell phone embellish what corals look like. I really want to figure out a way to figure out how to take accurate pictures without having to edit with Photoshop. 

 

I need a recommendation for a smaller pump, while the small rio pump does a good job it just looks a little ugly.

 

Once again, thanks for reading!

[SeaFurn]

Looking good! 

I think you’ve done a good job hiding the Rio. I barely noticed it until you called it out. 

[Muffin]

1 hour ago, SeaFurn said:

Looking good! 

I think you’ve done a good job hiding the Rio. I barely noticed it until you called it out. 

Thanks, I've been trying to hide it from the start lol but it hasn't looked natural until these past few days. I think this tank is finally at the point where I'll stop moving stuff around.

[JBM]

Settling on a scape is hard, but you've certainly made it seem larger then 2.5g so thats 71% of the battle 

[Muffin]

1 hour ago, JBM said:

Settling on a scape is hard, but you've certainly made it seem larger then 2.5g so thats 71% of the battle 

Thanks, that's sort of what I've been going for. This current state is definitely the best it's looked imo.

[Muffin]

April Update:

•  3 New mushrooms have been added: a lime green "bounce", a crazy colored hairy? mushroom (similar to a magic carpet mushroom), and a tiny baby gumdrop mushroom (or at least that is what my buddy called it who gave it to me lol)
• rockscape has been changed a little again 🤣
• I'm having a bloom of dinoflagelletes, however they aren't bothering anything so I'm going to try to let them run their course. They are a little ugly, but as long as the corals are healthy that is all that I care about.

Now for some photos (DSLR photos again):

 

 

 

Babies!!! Also I had moved a shroom so some foot and mesenteric filaments were left behind lol

 

Probably my favorite shroom in the tank:

 

And a macro of the dreaded dinos:

[Muffin]

May Update:

• The older JB detached 😞 but is still alive and well.
• The mushrooms are being very productive with babies which is totally awesome.
• The brown algae or dinoflagelletes are still present, however still aren't effecting the livestock to my knowledge.

May pictures:

The pico is looking pretty filled in

 

 

The dslr makes thes corals look much more washed out then they are in real life

 

This is going to become a really awesome mushroom (cause it already is lol)

 

Its hard to capture how bright this fuzzy mushroom is

 

This has to be some of the smallest shrooms I've seen

 

This very well might be the last monthly update of the mushroom pico (there might be one more). I recently set up a 60 gallon deep blue frag tank, and I've decided I need to break down a few systems in order to keep myself sane lol. I will keep the Evo V up seeing as there is little possibility I'm able to integrate the maroons with other pair of clowns. 

[Muffin]

Late-May Update:

 

Livestock changes:

• Moved quite a few of the mushrooms to my large system, my goal is to have backups for everything in this system.
• Traded a few corals with my friend for some new shrooms for the pico
• I also added a super tiny sapphire damsel that is very cryptic (So no pictures. I ordered it for my larger system, but the fish came in way small so I'm going to grow it out and add to the big system) 

While I said that I would be breaking down this tank, that is no longer the case due to the evo V crash. LOL I don't even know why I wanted to shut down this tank, its really nice only having 2 tanks to do water changes.

 

Pictures:

Here are some various pictures both cellphone with aquariclip so they are pretty saturated:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Tigahboy]

Very nice!  I'm a fan of this tank (on IG as well).  :)

[Muffin]

Just now, Tigahboy said:

Very nice!  I'm a fan of this tank (on IG as well).  🙂

Thanks!

[Muffin]

Well one of the rhodactis wasn't playing well with a discosoma so I had to intervene. I was keeping an eye for the past couple months and seeing if the issue would work itself out (which it didn't, only got worse). So the easiest thing to do was to chop off a piece of rock that the rhodactis was on, however, that led to the whole rock being broken. With that said I kinda re-scaped the pico, the only think is the depth doesn't show up very well on camera. I personally love the new look. 

 

Here are a couple pictures:

 

[Clown79]

Tank looks fantastic. Love all the corals.

[Muffin]

7 hours ago, Clown79 said:

Tank looks fantastic. Love all the corals.

Thank you! It's definitely favorite tank I've owned, super easy and super bright.

[Muffin]

Happy Friday!!!!

[Muffin]

Look how different the tank looks like when all of the shrooms are eating. Also you can see how tiny the sapphire damsel is.

 

[Tempestas]

Wow! I don't know how I missed this tank. Shroom heaven!

 

Everything looks so colourful and happy.

[Ratvan]

Sorry for the probably obvious question. But the HOB Fuge is that simply used to increase the water capacity and a place to grow more mushrooms?

[Muffin]

6 hours ago, Tempestas said:

Wow! I don't know how I missed this tank. Shroom heaven!

 

Everything looks so colourful and happy.

Yeah it's taken a bit to be adjusted for the shrooms to be happy. Also these pictures are snippets of the tank in the most ideal time where the shrooms are happy (not always the case lol).

[Muffin]

5 hours ago, Ratvan said:

Sorry for the probably obvious question. But the HOB Fuge is that simply used to increase the water capacity and a place to grow more mushrooms?

No worries! Lol that's exactly why I use it (also because it was laying around unused and it fits perfectly). I'm still dragging my feet getting an ATO for the tank, just hard to pull the trigger when I can spend the money on coral 🤣.

[Muffin]

June Update:

• When I was cleaning the glass, the scape changed again a little bit (very hard to work with such a small workspace 🤣).
• No livestock additions besides newer babies and such.
• The damsel is starting to swim about, however, is very scared of my presence.
• The damsel has decided to eat most of the copepods that regularly keep my front glass clean, therefore I have to clean the glass now.

All in all I'm glad I've decided to keep this tank up and running. The maintenance is way to easy to justify shutting it down. Yesterday I had done a 3 gallon water change in roughly 10 minutes. Now for some pictures.

 

I feel with pico tanks it's usually hard to put it into perspective how small they really are. Here is a picture with an old coke bottle I found diving.

 

 

 

The tank is in a really happy, which is super nice. I will likely get an ATO here soon (I feel like I've been saying that since the beginning lmao).