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Loungeview Pico – An Old School Cheerleader


Tempestas

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16 hours ago, seabass said:

I love fish bowl tanks.  I was planning on doing one if there wasn't a shape restriction.  I'm jelly of your macros.

And I am super jelly of your fish room.

 

On the update side of things, it would seem like a 6 hour photoperiod with this bulb is too much for these poor macros. Came home tonight to find a bowl full of bleached out algae. Most of the central portions have retained some colour, so I'm hopeful all is not lost. In the meantime I've knocked the photoperiod down to 2 hours.

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On 4/1/2019 at 12:24 PM, Tempestas said:

Lights: 12W ABI Tuna Blue

Hmm... I wouldn't think that a 12W bulb, up as high as you have it, would be too much for algae.

 

I'm kind of thinking it's something else (lack of nutrients, or even alkalinity). :unsure:  Not really sure what the deal is.

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What I find strange is that the macro sat cramped up in a vase for the better part of 4 days on a windowsill that gets about an hour of direct sunlight in the afternoon, and they all looked relatively fine when I transferred them out. Most were only slightly paler.

 

This evening everything is a lot paler. Like the purple branched one has gone white at the tips, which honesty looks like sunburn in a normal plant.\


And all the red algae has gone almost translucent.

7 minutes ago, seabass said:

I'm kind of thinking it's something else (lack of nutrients, or even alkalinity).

For nutrients, I don't think that would be lacking, mainly because of a whole pile of disintegrated macro (somehow I feel that it was actually a gorgonian) that should be providing something into the system. And for alkalinity, it was a fresh batch of seawater that I added yesterday. I would be really really concerned if my bowl managed to consume all the alkalinity in a day.

 

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1 hour ago, Tempestas said:

And I am super jelly of your fish room.

 

On the update side of things, it would seem like a 6 hour photoperiod with this bulb is too much for these poor macros. Came home tonight to find a bowl full of bleached out algae. Most of the central portions have retained some colour, so I'm hopeful all is not lost. In the meantime I've knocked the photoperiod down to 2 hours.

For my contest tank I'm not running any lights on my tank except to take a photograph. They get 1-1.5 hours of direct sunlight a day and they're growing like mad. 

 

I've decided white means too much light and black means too little 

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So things continue to not go so great in the bowl.

 

After Friday's bleaching, I turned the photoperiod down to 2 hours, and then when I arrived home on Saturday evening, the bleaching had progressed. So I decided to switch the lights off completely until I had a day off at home to fully assess what was happening. After Saturday, the bleaching seems to have stabilised, so I'm suspecting that the light really is the cause of it. Unfortunately all the long leaved macro is pretty much translucent at this stage, and the fine leafed red stuff is mostly pale. The purple one shows distinct areas of bleaching, and the white portions seem to be turning green now, with what I suspect to be secondary algae growth.

 

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On the plus side, there's a small shard of this bright emerald green macro that seems to have survived, which you can see in the third picture just behind the fine leafed red macro, and in the bottom left corner of the fourth.

 

My big dilemma at this stage is deciding how to proceed forward. My heart's desire is to grow coral in this bowl, hence the purchase of the PAR38 bulb, but if it's going to nuke the macro into the next century, I'm considering taking most of it out and chucking it back into the ocean. Either that or go survival-of-the-fittest route and use the light to see what will survive in the bowl.

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While maybe not the ideal spectrum for macros, I'd be surprised that your bulb is able to eradicate algae like that.  If that were so, it'd be the hottest selling bulb on the market.

 

Sorry, I don't really have an alternative theory as to why they  are dying.  Maybe someone else can provide more insight.  In the meantime, I'd probably run the bulb at least 6 hours a day.

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Macros browning out/dying back may be a lack of nutrition coupled with intense lighting. A lot of people lose their chaeto when starting a refugium because the nutrients bottom out and there isn't enough to sustain the growth.

 

I hope they recover, you have some beautiful specimens

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1 hour ago, AugyBear said:

coupled with intense lighting

Not sure I'd categorize it as intense; it's only a 12W bulb (probably providing a PAR reading around 200 at the current mount height):

 

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The bulb measures 40cm (16") from the lenses to the water surface, so I suspect that it's even lower than that.

 

Things seem to have stabilised for now without the light on, so I'm going to wait until tomorrow or Thursday, when I should be able to perform a water change. Somehow I used up all my siphon tubing and forgot to buy more.

 

I'll also see if the shops have any fertilizer type products. Offhand, I know that one of them stocks Aquaforest freshwater products. Seems like I may have to run this tank dirty to keep stuff alive.

 

Or should I just add a big dash of reefroids and see what happens? 🤔

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So yesterday was a pretty momentous day for me. I bought my first coral! Yay!

 

Of course, I had just gone to the shop to find tubing and fertiliser, but the poor thing was sitting and glowing in the middle of the 'frag' tank. Of course, this is the shop where I promised myself that I would only ever buy dry goods because all the coral tanks are INFESTED with green hair algae, but it was a solitary mushroom that was just floating on its ownsome so I figured it was worth the risk.

 

R50 later ($3,50), I was happily driving back home waiting for multiple contractors to come in for quotations.


After all that was over, I set about getting the coral into the tank. Generously, the owner let me have a bunch of rocks I found lying on the floor, so I decided I wanted to attempt to mount the mushroom.

 

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The dip was in Polyplabs Reef Primer, and for added measure I peroxided the bottom surface of the poor thing afterwards to make sure algae hadn't tried to hitchhike along.

 

After it had started to slime up quite generously, I manipulated it onto a rock and tied it down with cotton string, and then placed it in another little baggie to temperature acclimate. After all of that it was moved into the bowl, where I fiddled around with forceps to get it into a good position.

 

And the it slipped and fell over the front edge and disappeared into Narnia. Joy...

 

 

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How did you collect your macros? Were they washed up on the beach or did you pluck them off rocks in the intertidal? If you are collecting off rocks, try to remember where they were growing, was it in a dark crevice, under a shady rock, or in the surf zone with lots of wave action? For example, sometimes fluffy reds prefer shade, and some other species need strong current or they will melt away. 

 

If they were washed up on the beach, they may have already been on their way out, even if it didn't appear that way at first.

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They were basically all floating around in the tidal pools, and I couldn't find any of the same specimens attached to rock. There was only one type of macro actually growing attached to the rocks, and as I wasn't able to find a loose specimen, I left it alone.

 

When I have enough money to go down for a dive, I'm sure I'll eventually see where all the macro actually comes from.

 

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So in addition to all of that, today was water change day.

 

Sadly all the long red macro had wasted away, and with the turkey basting, they all broke up, and the loose macro and sponges went flying around. In the end, I landed up removing both pieces of live rock to be able to thoroughly remove the detritus. Additionally, I was able to retrieve my mushroom that had pulled a disappearing act on me last night.

 

Whilst everything was exposed to air, I used the opportunity to glue the loose macro down to some anchoring rocks, and some of the other macro down to the rockwork.

 

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Peach fluffy macro is now called Lily, and purple branching macro is called Robyn

 

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The red fluffy macro, now severely pruned, shall henceforth be called Marshall

 

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Upon closer examination of the mushroom, who has been named Barney, it seems like it got really cheesed off last night and decided that its cotton prison wasn't working for it. So it decided to split. There seems to be at least one portion that's viable, but we'll have to wait and see what happens to the rest of it.

 

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Interesting enough, there seems to have been some sort of growth where the emerald green macro (new name Scoobie) touches the rock...

 

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The effect under the lights isn't amazing, but the mushroom does light up.

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So I've been watching the tank over the past few hours and the mushroom started developing a split which kept going until a fragment started drifting off on a line of slime. When I went to collect it before it fell into the abyss, the found that all the fragments had basically disintegrated. I fished what I could and jammed them into another dry rock, and took out the now slime covered rock and chucked it.

 

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This is all what remains. Not feeling hopeful for these pieces.

 

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Seems like the only thing that I can keep alive in this bowl is my one solitary tubeworm, and even that has decided to jump ship from its tube this evening (which you can see on the right in the picture)

:sad:

 

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On 4/18/2019 at 10:27 PM, Tamberav said:

Sorry for your troubles. I would probably verify the temp first. 

Thanks. The temperature is holding solidly between 25.4 and 25.9 degrees. The easytherm is really worth the money

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So over the course of that night the largest of the mushroom fragments disappeared somewhere and the other fragments turned into slime. Oh well. Bye bye mushroom.

 

And then I get home last night to find this squatter wandering around the tank:

 

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Managed to fish it out and now it's been evicted into a yogurt tub that's floating on the surface.

 

I just wanted to ask and make sure that I've identified it correctly as a bristle worm? Also, that they're not considered desirable?

 

Just want to be sure before I chuck it out.

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Yes, it's a bristle worm.  I myself like them in my tanks (small ones anyway).  I'll usually fish out larger ones (maybe like 4" or more) if they are out and about.  I've actually purchased them before.

 

Some people hate them and prefer to have none.  Your call.

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Bristleworms are good guys. I also will fish out the really big ones, they don't really hurt anything but it makes room for more baby ones. They eat leftover food and are part of the CUC. I have never seen one eat something healthy.

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So on Friday I was actually home to see the aquarium with the lights on and after watching my featherdusters and bristleworm in its prison, I noticed this:

 

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Turns out that the smallest fragment of a mushroom had survived. How I don't know, but it is one tiny fragment, no larger than 1mm in diameter.

 

So I went about trying to create a new home for tiny mushroom so that it wouldn't get lost next time I did something to the bowl. And this is what I came up with:

 

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I'm going to leave it in there for a good number of months and let see what happens. Hopefully at some stage it'll decide to attach to the rock.

 

And to celebrate the return of my mushroom, I decided to let the bristle worm back into the pico. It's promptly disappeared and I haven't seen it since...

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Expedition photo time!

 

Also on Friday, I decided to go down to the beach, as the weather was particularly nice.

 

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This time round, I went exploring first and then collecting. I also scoped out a different section of the rockpools. (This time south of the first drainpipe if anyone cares)

 

I managed to go further out to sea than before, and found some nice deep pools with large colonies of macro growing there. What I found is that all the soft red macro all appeared to appreciate some level of shade, with the larger leaved varieties favouring less current. That would explain all the red macro fatalities last time round. Strangely enough, there was only one type of green algae, and again that grew more in the shade with less flow.

 

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So I did however find lots and lots of that 'variegated' macro I spoke about earlier, so I decided to harvest some. And upon closer inspection, it was actually made of tiny twigs, with tips of white skeleton - pretty cool to me.

 

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What sucked is that in nearly every tidal pool, there was copious amounts of that red macro just floating there. But I behaved, and didn't pic any of it up as there's no real shady spots in my tank.

 

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I also managed to spot an octopus. Pity he wouldn't fit into my yogurt tub. (sorry that he's not in focus)

 

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Everywhere there were these anemones around. Again, I sadly couldn't convince them to join in my adventures.

 

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