Variant's Acros n' Nems

[Variant]

On 5/29/2019 at 11:45 AM, mitten_reef said:

If I got something like this under my stand, I won't even bother filling up the tank. It'd just spoilt this state of the art masterpiece.  🤣

 

Looking sharp!

Thank you for the compliment. But for better or worse the tank was filled with water last night! BRS and UPS surprised me with delivering the last part to my plumbing a day earlier so I stayed up all night making RODI and checking for leaks. So far, plumbing is solid! That said, I am totally wiped after staying up way past my usual lights out time. 😴

 

 

[Tigahboy]

👏  A true reefer.  

[Variant]

Well I gotta say, once water is in the tank, things start to ramp up pretty quickly. Before anything live goes into the tank, I decided to hook up a UV sterilizer to make sure the water is as clean as I can possible make it. It definitely helps with the water clarity through the glass, but only time will tell.

 

 

 

[Variant]

A couple other noteworthy updates… With a ton of traveling coming up in the next 12 months for both work and personal Phoenix, Mexico City, Amsterdam, London, Paris and Hawaii to name a few places, I decided to hook up a neck cleaner for my skimmer along with a skim mate collector.

 

 

 

 

 

[ef4life]

That’s a lot of travel, I’d be happy to go to all of them but Mexico City and London. The brits used to rule the world, now they can’t even carry a pointed stick 

[Variant]

On 6/4/2019 at 4:53 PM, ef4life said:

That’s a lot of travel, I’d be happy to go to all of them but Mexico City and London. The brits used to rule the world, now they can’t even carry a pointed stick 

It is... Unfortunately, most of it is for work....

Got my shipment of Tampa Bay Saltwater live rock and this was attempt number 3 of aquascaping. It was challenging to make sure the aquascape looked good from at least 2 or the 3 viewable sides of the tank. If anyone has thoughts, chime in! And for those who were hesitant in ordering from TBS for smaller tank, there's no need for hesitation. I specified the dimensions of my tank and the general sized of rocks I was looking for and all the pieces I got in were perfect.

 

 

 

 

[Variant]

While the conventional advise is to be patient when adding corals (especially SPS), I want to test whether 'good' live rock can really expedite this process.

 

It has been a little under 48 hours since the TBS live rock was placed into the tank and  a Green Slimer frag was just put in a couple hours ago. So far, the frag is acclimated well and polyps all out and swaying in the flow. Let's see if it survives! Am I brave, stupid or just impatient? 🤣

[Variant]

In my opinion, a reef tank is just not a reef tank without some clownfish. My S/O did a quick doodle of the new clownfish.

 

[billygoat]

On 6/6/2019 at 3:56 PM, Variant said:

While the conventional advise is to be patient when adding corals (especially SPS), I want to test whether 'good' live rock can really expedite this process.

 

It has been a little under 48 hours since the TBS live rock was placed into the tank and  a Green Slimer frag was just put in a couple hours ago. So far, the frag is acclimated well and polyps all out and swaying in the flow. Let's see if it survives! Am I brave, stupid or just impatient? 🤣

I also started with "the good stuff" live rock straight out of the Gulf of Mexico, and had several small stony corals come in on mine. Not only did they survive the cycle, they began to grow and show excellent extension before I was even done with ammonia and nitrites. So who knows, you might be just fine!

 

That doodle is amazing btw.

[Variant]

3 minutes ago, billygoat said:

I also started with "the good stuff" live rock straight out of the Gulf of Mexico, and had several small stony corals come in on mine. Not only did they survive the cycle, they began to grow and show excellent extension before I was even done with ammonia and nitrites. So who knows, you might be just fine!

 

That doodle is amazing btw.

I am going hiking in the backcountry for a handful of days next week so we'll see if they're still alive! haha

[Variant]

A couple pictures of some of the goodies I got today:

 

One of the two clownfish

 

 

Mr.clownfish photobombing the duncans

 

 

Green slimer + Mystery acro + maxima clam

 

 

 

 

[Variant]

Back from hiking the High Sierras to a tank ph of 8.3 and acros all happy and encrusting.

 

But on a sad note, one of the clownfish died. While the live rock allowed me to put acros immediately, it also housed some tiny parasitic isopods that basically ganged up on the smaller of the two clownfish. There was so many on him that it had a hard time swimming in the flow. I scooped him out and used tweezers to take the isopods off the body one by one. The clownfish was so weak at this point he eventually died.

 

To date, I pulled out ~15 tiny isopods, which have proved to be more difficult to catch than the larger ones. The positive is that with a barebottom, it's easy to find them!

[Variant]

My S.O. who is in the animation industry decided to pick up an interest in drawing aquatic life this week and whipped up some designs. It's always nice when your partner finds an interest in the hobby albeit in different ways.

 

[Tigahboy]

Wow.  Great job with those drawings.

[Variant]

2 hours ago, Tigahboy said:

Wow.  Great job with those drawings.

Thanks, I'll send her the compliments.

 

Anyone have any cool fish/inverts that she should consider drawing next?

[billygoat]

52 minutes ago, Variant said:

Thanks, I'll send her the compliments.

 

Anyone have any cool fish/inverts that she should consider drawing next?

I agree, amazing art! Sexy shrimp seem like an obvious candidate, since they are basically already caricatures of themselves. 😂

[748S911]

Great build, and very clean. 

[mitten_reef]

5 hours ago, Variant said:

Thanks, I'll send her the compliments.

 

Anyone have any cool fish/inverts that she should consider drawing next?

oooh, what about the always-grumpy yellow watchman goby?  maybe along with his pistol shrimp sidekick 

[Variant]

Running into some algae issues... I'm having these small patches of brown algae pop up. I know it's not due to low flow or cycling as I have mature live rock in the tank. Any idea what these are? I'm starting to do small doses of vodka + GFO. I've circles the algae in question in red here.  

 

Aside from the algae issue, the potentially high nutrients level + high ph levels I've been seeing has led to some pretty quick encrusting of my sps frags.

 

 

With a good deal of confidence in keeping SPS, I pulled the trigger on getting a nice wild acro colony. It originally had a bright red base with neon green polyps. It came in super cold water and pale. But after several days, I think it's well on its way to recovery. The green polyps are coming back but hard to capture with my point-n-shoot camera. Fuzzy for sure!

 

[Variant]

Things just got a bit serious....

 

Immediate impressions... tons of freebies (although I did spend $$$). A couple DOA (one I ordered and one freebie). Overall, great buy. Time will tell how the frags settle in...

[Variant]

Man it has been a really long time since I've updated this thread... While life has definitely been busy, I blame the fact that I didn't have a good camera to take pictures. That's all about to change now that I got a proper dslr + macro lens setup 

 

More updates to come but here's a quick teaser picture. Still trying to figure out this photography thing!

 

[Variant]

As promised, here's a more fulsome update. I'll start off with a tank shot and a walkthrough of what's been going on. I'll sprinkle a few photos I took with the new camera.

 

FTS 01.31.2020

 

Lighting today... I'm still using the ATI T5+LED powermodule and overall I'm happy. I changed out the bulb combo to 4 B+, 2C+, and 2 True Actinic. Only complaint is that I don't know what the pay level is in the tank. Colors of some of my acros have paled and after testing my water at home and via ICP, it's not a nutrients issue. Good news is I finally bought a Apogee MQ 520 so I can test the par. I figured I'll be replacing bulbs, tweaking LED settings, trying new bulb combos, so might as well invest in my own par meter.

 

Lighting in the future... I don't have any plans on making changes to lighting other than taking apart the powermodule to get the outer metal frame powder coated white to match with the rest of the setup. I know a lot of reefers really like the blacked out look, but to me, the black seems to take away from the setup since my walls are white. Would also love to white out that thick black cord in the back too.

 

Male Resplendent Anthias

 

That Ugly Pipe... you'll notice quite a few things changed here. I now have a 1" over the top return pipe. One of the mistakes I made with this tank was underestimating the amount of flow restriction a 1/2" return was going to be. While I had a Red Dragon 50W to combat the flow loss, this meant the velocity of my return flow was intense. Whenever I turned the return on/off, it would spew water like a firehose. Plus loc lines made the matter worse. So now I run an over the top return with a siphon break hole drilled right under the water level.

 

Clutter on the Rim... Because of the frequent traveling I do, the tank runs on its own for at least 25% of the time. With fish like an anthias, it was critical to make sure I had something that could feed multiple times a day. So I added the Eheim feeder. After coming back home from my 2-3 week trips, I would always be surprised at how much my acros grew, but saddened by the dried up fish that were on the floor. I've lost 2 female anthias and my male now runs solo. I decided it was time to add a mesh top.

 

Re-Designing the Top... I despise mesh tops. Not because the designs themselves are bad, but the glare from the mesh, plus the tiny little squares from the mesh really cause visual distraction from me. On top of that, I now have a fan, auto feeder and a return pipe cluttering the top of the tank. I plan to solve this by using white cast acrylic to create a 4.5" open-top canopy rim that will sit on the top of the tank. It'll hide all the clutter and what was previous a bunch of small visual distractions will be a nice white covering that will blend well with the wall.

 

Yellow Eye Kole Tang

 

The nhabitants... with two anthias dried up on the floor, I now have two clownfish, a male anthias and a yellow eyed kole tang. My cleanup crew consists of a single turbo snail and a few trochus snails, which apparently gave birth to several babies.  With the two female anthias out of the picture, I'm thinking about adding replacement fish. Currently, I have the diamond tail flasher wrasse and half banded flasher wrasse in mind.

 

The rock...  I ditched the Tampa Bay Saltwater live rock and switched it with Marco rock, specifically the shelf rock and a foundation piece. The anxiety that the parasitic isopods caused me for 3+ weeks on a daily basis, trying to save my fish and seeing bite marks all over the fishes' bodies did me in. I drained the display tank, threw out the TBS rock, put my new rock structure in and filled it back up. My sump and plumbing still have the original water so the biological process was seamless and I didn't really experience a cycle luckily. Plus, now my rockrock is lower in the tank, giving more room for acros to grow vertically. Plus I have tons of overhangs to create shadows that make the aquascape look more interesting.

 

Green with Purple Tip Microclados

 

Supporting the Sticks... Having spent a decent chunk of change on both generic wild and branded aquacultured acropora, I definitely have a lot riding on my corals not only living, but thriving. To aid in reducing my anxiety, I now added a KH Director from GHL. Setting it up was easy and straight forward. In such a technological world, I don't understand the stigma that GHL products are hard to set up. Given how helpful the KH Director is, I also pre-ordered the Ion Director to help me further track my elemental uptake. I'm particularly keen on monitoring nitrate since nutrient levels seem to bottom out when I am away from my tanks. This is probably due to higher pH > faster calcification. I use my KH Director to check for increased alk consumption to supplement it, but currently don't have an informed way to do this for my nutrients.

 

The Supplements... With just a roller mate and a skimmer, my nutrients are controlled pretty easily so I make sure to supplement the water with whatever my acros need. So far, I dose a series of Korallen Zucht products. I use Flatworm Stop, Coral Booster, Phols Xtra, Coral Vitalizer, Sponge Power, and Coral snow on occasion.

 

Blue and Purple Kimbeensis

 

Underestimating Electrical... I completely underestimated the space you really need to house all of your electrical equipment including your wires and the powerbars. With continual additions of equipment, I realized I had no space under my stand. I now have four powerheads, one return pump, skimmer, UV, Rollermat, Fan, two heaters, two doser 2.1s, KH Director, soon an Ion director, and the list goes on. So I ended up gutting the top side of the stand where my electrical equipment was originally housed and rehomed them. I'm still thinking through how I'll best organize and display them, but this dilemma definitely made me think about upgrading to a larger tank so I could have more space underneath for all of the equipment.

 

Green Tipped Torch

 

Reflecting on 2019...  I learned a lot and I hope to see more success this year. I'm listing a few things I learned to remind myself not to make the same mistake again.

• Always oversize returns and drains
• Make sure sump can handle high flow or else you'll hear waterfalls between baffles
• Make sure 30-50% of the space in the stand is dedicated to equipment
• Use external overflow box instead of having any parts inside (even a ghost overflow)
• A shallow tank might seem cool, but mastering high flow is going to be challenging
• Positioning all your pumps on the bottom of the tank means the detritus will sit on your rock work
• Always have a mesh top, always opt to have a nice tall trim +4" to hide the mesh top, fans, plumbing, and feeder
• Always remove the magnets off the frag racks when moving them, they'll scratch the tank otherwise
• Don't change major things just for one coral
• Relax, stay calm and just enjoy the tank

[DNR88]

We want a better FTS! 😁

[Variant]

Got in some custom cut cast acrylic this week to build my faux white open top canopy to hide all the clutter that ended up building on the top of the tank. It nicely hides the mesh screen top, auto feeder, return plumbing and fan. Need to build in the custom fan ports on the backside but that'll be for next week.

 

Quick Friday Tank Shot

 

Inside the Canopy

 

Snail Patrol

[Variant]

It's been a while since I've done an update on my journal and a lot has changed. I moved homes and the shallow tank didn't fit the space very well so I had to tear it down and relocate my livestock to a new setup. My new setup started with just an Elos 100 system and then a second smaller system to house my beloved blue gigantea anemone. For now, I've dedicated my Elos system as an acropora tank (with a blue squamosa) and my smaller system as a specimen tank to house the gigantea anemone until it gets too large.

Below are some quick full tank shots of both. I have quite a bit of updates but I'll save those for another day. Enjoy.