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Coral Vue Hydros

Jack's 10 year old 20g Tall


jservedio

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8 hours ago, DutchNanoReefer88 said:

Very nice tank, hopefully it get's to celebrate the 10 year anniversary! 🙂

Thank you! It'll definitely make it there. Maybe for its 10th birthday I'll get a nicer 20ish gallon tank and not have an ugly 20g tall with a hob overflow.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Only a cell phone shot, but my WWC Yellow Tips is doing pretty well after 9 months and getting nice color, even after being fragged pretty heavily. Here is what it looks like now and what it looked like when it was a little frag - surprisingly enough everything on that frag rack is still alive and extremely well (well, the monti is kind of beat up since my wrasse smashed into it and broke it in half):

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Had to dig into my external drive today to get some pictures for my wife and found a treasure trove of pictures from my tank over the last 10+ years. Before my reef was a reef, it was a FW planted tank. This is what my 20g looked like 10-11 years ago:

 

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While we were up in NJ, we had a prolonged power outage at our apartment in NC and everything in my FW tank died. Instead of re-planting it, I decided to dive into SW and set up a clownfish tank and took this picture after I bought a light, skimmer, and powerheads back in 2010:

 

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A couple years later, in 2013, after our first move, this is what the tank looked like just a few months before moving it cross country for the first time:

 

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I still have almost every single one of those LPS corals in that tank - albeit significantly bigger now!

 

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Here's what the tank looked like back in 2014 after moving to Madison:

 

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The tank did extremely well while I was there, and had crazy growth with the SPS - here is the upper right corner before I moved across the country once again and after I got my nem:

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Shortly after this, I sold off all my acros, packed up the tank, and moved to Raleigh! Another 8 months later I moved yet again to where my tank is now. It's been a long ride with this tanks and tons of ups and downs (much more downs with the moves!)

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Been a while since I posted a FTS, but I was doing some reorganization and moving a few things around while I still can. Any ideas on where I can put that stylo that is just haphazardly in the front? It's growing really fast and I don't want it stuck where it is now! I can't put it up top since it'll bleach and I don't exactly have a ton of room. I had to move it to the sandbed and it's finally getting some good color.

 

My wrasse broke my forest fire digi too and knocked it right onto the big fat echinata below it. Took some major damage, but it's still bigger than it was just a couple months ago. Hopefully it'll get it's color back before Christmas.

 

During the late summer and fall, I dropped my alkalinity down into the low 6's, temperature down to 76, an dropped my lighting about 10% to try and slow growth and alk usage to a crawl while I couldn't spend much time on the tank and it worked really well. Since my color got much better, I left the lighting and slowly brought alk and temperature back to normal last month and things started taking off again. My yellow tips tort, montis, and birdsnest all blew up immediately, but my other acros are starting to grow nicely again. Hopefully I won't have to slack off again and in another 6 - 8 months they will be huge.

 

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Bonus Points: The other hobby that sucks up all my time in the fall. They don't call it Rocktober for no reason:

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At least for the acute effects of a major salinity drop, temperature drop, and alk drop, I think I'm out of the woods and haven't lost anything. A little flesh came off one of my acros, but it's healed over that spot already.

 

My LPS are looking happy, if a bit washed out, but have grown quite a bit - especially my favia. Unfortunately, my gold acan is looking a little more brown, but at least it's growing!

 

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My salinity should finally be back to normal by tomorrow. Instead of just changing a bunch of water to bring it back up to 35ppt, I just let it evaporate off and I'm back up to a little over 34ppt right now.

 

My birdsnest is almost back to normal after close to a year after getting entirely bleached by my light - and much larger. I moved it down and decreased the intensity of the lights a couple times. The polyps are now fully extended and colored back up, except for the core of the colony on the top of the branches. Hopefully another 3 or 4 months it'll just look like a big fuzzy ball.

 

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It looked pretty bad a year ago!

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Apparently torts don't care about accidents...this is the first time the speckling has shown up in my yellow tips. For whatever reason torts really love this tank - the color and growth is significantly better than anything else in the tank:

 

Sorry for the blurry picture - but it's hard doing a top-down without a porthole! You can definitely see the speckling though

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  • 3 weeks later...

No wonder my micromussa is growing so much faster than my other LPS - it's because it continues to feast on asterina stars. While my DSLR was dead, I was able to get another picture of it eating another starfish.

 

That makes it Micromussa: 3, Asterina Stars: 0

 

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40 minutes ago, debbeach13 said:

Your tank looks fantastic. You must have nerves of steel I could never get into rock climbing. Plan ole hiking sure but hanging off cliffs nope, not happening.

Thank you! It certainly doesn't look like it's as old as it really is. It's at least starting to fill in nicely now that it's had more than 2 years in one place.

 

I don't know about nerves of steel, but I will say it's definitely my wife's least favorite hobby of mine! I just wish being comfortable hundreds of feet up on rock translated to not being scared while up on a ladder cleaning out the gutters.

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  • 1 month later...

I need to clean the glass to take another FTS, but everything is doing well and continuing to grow. The island on the right continues to amaze me with how the corals are all competing with each other as they grow in very limited space. I finally figured out how to get my cell phone to shoot in RAW, so I can actually get some not-entirely-terrible pictures!

 

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While it looks like my island has some room for things to grow from the side, the space situation is much more dire than it looks when seen top down! Almost time again to trim the purple monti and slide my big bowerbankii out of the shade. That sand is looking super nasty with all that green algae and cyano, but I guess that's what you get when you don't do a WC for a month and take your skimmer offline.

 

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The LPS on the left side of my tank is doing really well too and they are all growing together (and growing lots of algae). No fighting yet, but I am betting those lords aren't going to like getting squeezed between a favia and echinata.

 

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2 minutes ago, jservedio said:

The LPS on the left side of my tank is doing really well too and they are all growing together (and growing lots of algae). No fighting yet, but I am betting those lords aren't going to like getting squeezed between a favia and echinata.

 

 

is that echinata behaving itself around the lord's?  

 

the corals look great btw.

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3 minutes ago, mitten_reef said:

is that echinata behaving itself around the lord's?  

 

the corals look great btw.

Thank you! So far it's behaved itself, but that thing is a beast and has quite the body count over the last 7 years. It's really only a matter of time before they go to war - I'm just hoping it isn't too bad and only kills a handful of polyps on the lords. I lost a smaller lord frag a few weeks ago in the sand (like 6 polyps) when my wrasse pushed it too close to my other 8 year old echinata and it left nothing behind with a single strike. Thankfully it's the only coral I've lost in the last couple years.

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While it might be weird to like pests, I really like Colonial Hydroids and think they look super cool. I've had this colony going for 3 or 4 years now and they don't seem to bother the acros they are growing under/between. They've got a little algae on them now, but I like them - they glow a really cool cyan color under UV/RB during sunrise/sunset:

 

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Anyone have any suggestions for a coral or two that is low light, grows well on an almost-vertical wall, and grows pretty fast so it won't get quickly overtaken by the Stunner Chalice and Favia? While that space looks really small, it's actually about 5-6" between the Favia and Chalice, they are just pretty big. While I can get pretty good color and growth, I'm really bad at organizing my a decent display, so any help is appreciated! Sorry for the dirty glass.

 

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4 or 5 years ago I bought some dull solid purple Palys, and slowly individual polyps are changing color. Not sure why, but the colony is half purple/blue and the other half are purple/pink! Hopefully they all change color since it is way nicer.

 

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Over the years, as things got damaged or beaten down, instead of tossing them or forgetting about them in the back of my tank, I glued them all to one little rock. After a couple years, everything on that rock as bounced back and is finally starting to thrive.

 

This is my island of misfit corals

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Since the DSLR was out today, I decided it was new FTS day! Things are doing really well and it's been almost exactly a year since I've added a coral to the tank. I think I've got room for another chalice on the left side, another lord above the big echinata, and another acro in the empty stop up top, but I do like the idea of just not adding any more coral to the tank. What do you think?

 

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