Jack's Old 20g Picture Journal - 9 years old

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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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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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A couple acros steamrolling a mat of colonial hydroids

 

 

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This asterina star has made a grave mistake....the micromussa strikes again...

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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 10-12 years ago:

 

 

While we were up in NJ for Christmas, we had a prolonged power outage at our apartment in NC and the temperature of the tank got down into the 50s and everything in my FW tank died. Instead of re-planting it, I decided to dive into SW and set up a clownfish tank. After a while with the clowns and LR, I decided to dive headfirst into a reef and took this picture after I bought a light, skimmer, and powerheads back in 2011:

 

 

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:

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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:

 

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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Had the pumps off today and got some cool shots of the clowns in the RBTA.

 

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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.

 

 

 

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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Even with the disaster I had over the weekend:

 

I'm still getting great color from my acros. The smaller yellow tips tort is looking incredible down in the lower light:

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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.

 

 

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