DarkMagic's ULM $290 5g Reef

[Tamberav]

Beautiful tank!! 

[CarolinaShoreReef]

Stunning stunning stunning!! ? 

[TitusNuvo20]

Those shrooms look fantastic! 

[DarkMagic]

On 3/31/2018 at 6:17 PM, CarolinaShoreReef said:

Stunning stunning stunning!! ? 

Oh hai!

[Justind823]

Great little tank! I'll be following this one

 

I really love bookshelf tanks

[DarkMagic]

2 hours ago, Justind823 said:

Great little tank! I'll be following this one

Thank you sir, will be following yours as well!

[Lula_Mae]

Love this little tank!  I have the 2.7 gallon Penn Plax Vertex that was part of this series and have looked at this 5g many times.  You've gotten some great deals!  Hope to see an update soon.

[DarkMagic]

Looks like it's been a year since my last update. The reef tank has been through a lot, and honestly I've been embarrassed to post as I struggled with some issues.

 

Around this time last year, I discovered I had some zoa eating nudis and began treating it with flatworm exit. Some of the nudis seemed to shrivel up, a few even floated away, but it didn't seem to work 100%, even at 10x the recommend dosages. I began taking the zoas out of the tank weekly and dipping them in fresh water, and scrubbing the rocks with a toothbrush to get rid of any potential eggs. Still not sure if this worked or not. 

 

A month into my battle with nudis, my "hollywood stunner" (that's in quotes because I don't know if that's actually what it was) started to deteriorate. I didn't think too much of it because it was only one coral, and it was kinda one of the uglier things in my tank. It wasn't colored well when I bought it, and it didn't improve. Then a week later, the problem seemed to spread to some other corals, and then almost everything in the tank was moving downhill. At night, shining the light into the tank, I noticed some huge amphipods munching on my corals. In particular, I watched them devour my frogspawn. I can't say for certain whether they were eating tissue affected by whatever caused the deteriorating in the hollywood stunner, or just hungry for coral. But they were attacking every single coral in the tank, including the only two things that were still healthy, the elegance and a rock flower anemone. 

 

So I decided to go nuclear. I hit the entire tank with a massive dose of flatworm exit, bayer insecticide, and hydrogen peroxide. My thinking was that I want to kill any pod, bacteria, virus, or algae that could be harming my corals. After the treatment, I did a 100% water change every day for a week. 

 

Here's a summary of the outcome:

• Elegance and RFA survived, but lost about half their mass and literally had all their tentacles eaten off.
• My green mushrooms had split prior to the treatment, but shrank to 10% of their original size.
• The red monti survived unscathed.
• The toadstool survived, but refused to extend its polyps for about 2 months, and it looked like the defensive posture included some sort of silk-like weave covering the head.
• The hollywood stunner survived miraculously, and you can see it on the bottom left of the FTS below looking more colorful than ever.
• Everything else died. 

Not a total loss, but not the start I was hoping for either. I added a clownfish to deal with any pods that may have survived, and mostly let the tank sit for 8 months. 

 

Around November, I decided it was time to start adding corals again, but the tank was covered in hair algae. I ordered some cerith snails and hermits. I got a few sweet deals on black friday, and also have been getting some cheap frags from local NYC reefers. I've also added a few equipment upgrades including:

• A skimmer (awesome upgrade, pulls out a nice thick sludge, but it makes a lot of noise).
• A second ABI 12 watt bulb (preferable I believe to the 23w, the improved coverage lights the tank much more evenly).
• A hamster bottle style ATO (cheap an effective).
• A HOB filter filled with cheato (the cheato isn't growing, but it doesn't seem to be dying either, and it put pods back in the tank).
• A new Sycce 1.0 pump in the tank, that feeds both a random flow nozzle and a line up to the protein skimmer (super quite and just the right strength, would prefer more randomness but not much I can do there).

 

Here's a pic of most of that:

 

 

Overall, I'd say the equipment upgrades add a bit of cost, a bit of complexity, a bit of risk of a flood (happened once when the skimmer overflowed). I don't want to jinx it, but everything seems to be doing fine at the moment. And finally, here's a FTS from today:

 

 

Thanks for reading!

[Justind823]

Wow chemical apocalypse in this tank and the elegance survived - crazy! 

 

The tank looks like it's recovering well and the new equipment seems to be working out.

 

Good update - the FTS with the ghost clown makes me laugh

 

[DarkMagic]

On 3/18/2019 at 3:40 PM, Justind823 said:

the FTS with the ghost clown makes me laugh

 

Yea my little ghosty clown! I'm still struggling with the photography. I can white balance the pictures ok, but then the colors of the corals look weird. To take the pic above I actually put my sunglasses in front of the camera lens. I think that's the closes to accurate picture I've ever taken color-wise, but the shutter speed was like 1/6. 

 

Love your mustache clown btw! Hey what do you think about adding a neon goby to my tank? I'd love for something to help with the pod population, but worried in a small space that it might not get along with the clown. 

[DarkMagic]

Just a quick picture update! Comparing these pics side-by-side, I'm noticing for the first time how much some things have grown. The only corals that haven't done well are the pink zoas under the Stunner. Reduced from 7 polyps down to 2. I'll try to move it this week, but it's glued down pretty good. Purple sponge is growing like crazy! Zoas all doing well, SPS all doing well. Nothing dying off. Not dealing with any pests or nuisance organisms. Some of the corals are in a slightly different location from the last update because I lost a coral behind some rocks and had to re-do the entire scape. A crap now I see there is one zoa colony that's completely missing, plug and all. WTF. 😕 

 

Ah well, that's the update. Thanks for looking!

[DarkMagic]

Quick update, good news. I noticed comparing three month pictures last night that I had lost one of my favorite zoas, plug and all. This morning when the lights were off and the elegance was still a bit less expanded, I found it behind some rocks and was able to get it out with chopsticks. The frag started with one polyp, and now has three, so I guess being upside down in the darkness wasn't too damaging. Keep your eyes peeled for it in my next photo update. 🙂