Tinitanks 5gal pico, The Alcove (thread currently under construction)

[A.m.P]

That's a mystic monti, no plating, rapid-growing encruster.

[Tired]

Huh, good to know. I will make sure not to let it stay touching my rockwork. Might put it on a little rock on the sandbed, though I suppose it may not get enough light there. Maybe smack in the middle, right under the light. I really do like those little blue polyps. 

 

Not very good for the average pico, I assume? Rapid growth, difficult to get off once it gets on a rock, probably uses up a lot of calcium and whatnot. 

 

[A.m.P]

59 minutes ago, Tired said:

Huh, good to know. I will make sure not to let it stay touching my rockwork. Might put it on a little rock on the sandbed, though I suppose it may not get enough light there. Maybe smack in the middle, right under the light. I really do like those little blue polyps. 

 

Not very good for the average pico, I assume? Rapid growth, difficult to get off once it gets on a rock, probably uses up a lot of calcium and whatnot. 

 

Calcium consumption isn't tremendous because it has a paper-thin and brittle skeleton ime, doesn't really even feel like a monti, you could stick it on some rubble and have it self-frag for you.
The colors are great, but yes it grows very quickly in most setups.

[Tired]

Hm, I guess I might give it a try. Thanks, that's good to know. Maybe I can encrust it on part of the back wall. Can it be semi-easily broken off of thin plastic with a razor blade and some patience, if needed? 

 

Does it have any remote stinging power, or will it only sting something that touches it? Or does it sting at all? 

 

I guess I'll see how this plug does. If it keeps its color without me changing anything in the tank (since my other stuff likes it), I might keep it. If it starts losing color from all the nutrients, I'll give it to someone else. 

[A.m.P]

9 hours ago, Tired said:

Hm, I guess I might give it a try. Thanks, that's good to know. Maybe I can encrust it on part of the back wall. Can it be semi-easily broken off of thin plastic with a razor blade and some patience, if needed? 

 

Does it have any remote stinging power, or will it only sting something that touches it? Or does it sting at all? 

 

I guess I'll see how this plug does. If it keeps its color without me changing anything in the tank (since my other stuff likes it), I might keep it. If it starts losing color from all the nutrients, I'll give it to someone else. 

Never had any issues with color, but my systems are all 0.1 P04 and 10+ N03, as long as I remember to dose, Monti's don't really sting anything their strategy is their growth rate lol (similar to porites). Shouldn't be too hard to get off the back wall with a razor and was never too fussy about lighting for me.

[Tired]

I suppose I"ll give it a shot, then. If I keep it trimmed down to a relatively small size, I bet I can keep it under control. 

 

(Famous last words.)

[Tired]

Quick snap of my red bubble algae, showing off the new growth. Which, as I've read happens sometimes, is not covered in hair algae like the old stuff. Hopefully I can eventually just remove the stuff that grew elsewhere, and only have the pieces that grew after adding the seaweed to the tank, which will hopefully be immune to hair algae. It needs to grow more first, or it'll just be silly. Also ft. coraline that also seems to enjoy the Chaetogro.

[Tired]

Well, this tank is almost a year old. Neat. 

 

The ChaetoGro might be irritating a few things. My rics are kinda scrunched, and my LPS aren't fully expanded. I'm doing small water changes and will stop dosing it for awhile, and will dose only a very small amount when I start it again. 

 

Finally found my nitrate and phosphate test kits. Nitrates ~30, phosphate ~0.1. Not bad. I think I'll try to keep the nitrates a smidge lower, but I'm not going to chase numbers, and especially not for nutrients. As long as neither is too low. 

 

I got some macroalgae from live-plants.com. More hypnea (the first stuff melted), and a red algae sampler pack. It included red thorn algae (which unfortunately is too long to keep in here), two types of something that looks a bit like flame algae, some red bubble algae, and gracilaria. I put a bit of each red except the thorn into the tank, and will see how it does. 

Quick snap. I expect all that red to get swarmed in hair algae pretty quick, but that's okay. You can also see where I've done an experimental thing with the encrusting monti. I made a very thin sheet of putty, let that harden outside the tank, then put the monti on it. It's on the back wall, and I'll be moving it up higher and gluing it in place once I'm sure the monti likes it there. That way, when the monti spreads, it stays on the putty. Once it gets near the putty edges, I can take it out, trim it back, add more putty, and return it. Like a giant, easily-cut frag plug. Should keep the beast contained. 

 

I've added another fish. Meet Special Ops (counterpart to trimma goby Task Force), who will hopefully eat more amphipods. Yes, that does make 2 fish in a 5gal tank. I think it'll work, though, neither of these is exactly huge. I feed the corals decently heavily right now, and the fish not at all, and the nutrients are clearly fine. If that changes, I can adjust coral feeding. Think the soft corals and macros will be able to handle the fish nutrients just fine. And since one of these lives under a rock, and other lives on top of rocks, I won't have any territorial squabbles. 

No clue why he wants to be there. This isn't right after addition- I got him in from TSM Aquatics, pre-quarantined, on the 30th last month. He hid for 3 days straight, and is now out and... apparently hanging out there. I don't know if he's found the pistol shrimp yet. Think he was hiding in its burrow, but I haven't seen any symbiotic behaviors yet. 

 

I also got... I think this is a shrimp? Pretty sure it's the entire shrimp, but it sure looks like it's missing some parts.

No name for this one yet. Venus/Pederson's anemone shrimp. Picked this little glass beastie up just today, along with some extra hermit crab shells. The LFS is doing curbside pickup. I sat in the parking lot to check my order, and it's a good thing I did, because they accidentally gave me an entire hermit crab. Apparently their shell bins were running low and they pulled some shells out of a sales tank, since I specifically asked for the types of shells that scarlet reef hermits like. I should have taken a pic, but forgot in the process of calling the shop to ask them to come swap it out. Big ol' dark red hermit crab. I don't blame them for not noticing it, I only saw because he was coming out of the shell at the time. Hid really well when he got scared and went back in. If I had a bigger tank, I would have kept him! But I don't have room for a big mystery hermit wandering around in here. 

[Tired]

Turns out, when the death of a fairly large snail (think it was just old? No real way to tell) coincides with a couple weeks of chronic fatigue flare and some recently added macros, you get a pretty big algae surge. Everything needs a good cleaning, but mostly things seem healthy. The monti hasn't kept all its color (probably from the lighting), but is starting to grow. Pretty funny considering how high I'm sure the nitrates currently are and this idea some people have about nutrients being bad. 

 

I haven't heard from the pistol shrimp for awhile, and all its tunnels have slowly collapsed. I don't think it was a water issue, the Pederson's shrimp and all the corals seem fine. Not happy about that. 

 

I also haven't seen the goby. I saw him a few times for about a week after addition, added some large copepods to the tank because I was having a hard time getting him to eat mysis and he looked thin, and he's stopped coming out. He looked a little thin on arrival, and I guess just didn't have the body condition to make it, poor guy. The few times I saw him, he was swinging between having a decently full belly and a fairly concave one, which seems odd. 

I don't think he got bullied into not eating enough. The trimma goby pretty much seemed to ignore him. I saw them close to each other a few times. 

 

No pictures because the glass is dirty as hell and I can't really photograph anything past it without a lot of blurring. Imagine roughly the same tank shots as above, but greener and way, way blurrier, and that's pretty much the idea. Might need something more thorough than my toothbrush to handle this, but it's going to have to wait a few more days. I have to wind down a bit from the whole "are we going to reelect an utterly incompetent president" stress before I'll be able to focus on the tank. 

(My nerve issues mean my system reacts overly strongly to adrenaline, and tends to produce adrenaline when it's not especially needed for the stress at hand. Great combination. I've been taking a medication kinda similar to Benadryl since the 3rd, to cut off the adrenaline response, but it makes it hard to get much done. Been keeping up with topoffs and light feeding, and that's it. Will do a water change in the next few days, and I'm not fussed about rushing, nothing looks like it has any complaints. Good to know I can neglect things and nothing really minds! Even the high-end micro lord and the SPS are just chilling.)

[A.m.P]

Sorry to hear about the goby and the shrimp possibly not making it, and about the sfx from your medications.

[Tired]

I'm still trying to figure out what happened. The pistol shrimp actually stopped sounding off a couple days after I got the goby, and the goby started showing up at one of its burrow entrances. I thought it had stopped snapping because it had company, but it never started up. I almost wonder if the goby killed it. Maybe they startled each other and the goby lashed out? I don't know if such a small fish could kill a pistol shrimp, and the shrimp vanishing was probably a coincidence, but I still wonder. 

 

I'll get another pistol shrimp at some point, and probably another antenna goby. I don't have any indications that something in the tank is permanently out of whack for them, after all, and everything else seems happy enough. I even found the little orange-center zoa frag that I got from KP awhile ago and promptly lost behind a rock! The pistol shrimp had shoved it up somewhere more accessible at some point. 

A new pistol is something to get fairly soon, I think. I don't have the best circulation behind the rockwork, and the shrimp is great for putting detritus back out into the water column to get swept away. The goby, I may wait awhile. 

 

The medication was actually working pretty much as intended. The mild sedation effect is a consequence of the adrenaline-reducing thing. Much more preferable than being perpetually worked up on adrenaline (you know how you feel right after being startled badly? That, constantly), just not great for productivity. 

[A.m.P]

I had viral-induced adrenal failure, so cushing's followed by addison's, I can relate.

 

No clue as to what may have happened to the shrimp or goby, but I wouldn't rule out the goby being able to kill the shrimp and vice versa.

[Tired]

Ooh, that sucks. Hope you can wrangle yours with medication. I just have a system that handles stress kinda poorly. 

 

I don't think the shrimp killed the goby, because it went quiet before the goby vanished, but I am wondering if the goby somehow killed it. I've never heard of that happening, but I guess it's possible. Or maybe the shrimp just had a heart attack, who knows. I think the goby might have just been in poor shape already somehow? I got it to eat, but only hesitantly, and only tiny pieces of mysis. There were lots of pods for it to eat, and it had a non-concave stomach enough times that I think it ate them, but obviously something didn't go right. It's not just hiding, it's stopped being in one of the few spots I reliably saw it at before. Kind of discouraging- the last antenna goby I tried jumped out a very small gap in the lid (which I fixed), and now this one's vanished. 

 

At least I have some corals growing, my remaining goby is happy, and everything else seems to be doing pretty well. My rics are mad because I accidentally put too much chaetogro in awhile back and some of them are kinda stuck on being mad about that, but they're improving. The holy grail micromussa hasn't kept its full color, but that's okay, it still looks cool and it's healthy. Aside from the bit of bare skeleton from an unfortunate incident- it has a pointed bit of skeleton from when it was fragged, and a hermit crab in a heavy shell crawled over it at the right angle to damage the flesh over the corner. The polyps are all intact, there's just a bit of skeleton between two of them, where formerly there was some connecting flesh. The polyps are all fat and happy, no signs of infection, so I guess it's just going to be pointy now in that one spot. I'd smooth the skeleton off in that spot, if I didn't think I would crack the skeleton and hurt the coral. 

The blasto took some damage from the hermit, too, or from something else that physically took a piece out. It's down to one polyp now, the rest sort of gradually receded away starting with the damaged one, so I think it had an infection. I gave it a couple iodine dips and that seems to have fixed things, it isn't losing any more flesh. 

 

I trained the cleaner shrimp to come to my tongs for food, then promptly lost the tongs. It's a surprisingly enthusiastic little animal now! Only took it a couple times being tong-fed for it to get excited when I open the lid, instead of scared. It even comes up and skims along the surface if I don't feed it quickly enough. I love cleaner shrimp.

 

I've decided that I want to get a rainbow encrusting monti at some point. They're pretty, and the mystic sunset growing makes me confident it won't die. I could put it on the back wall also, maybe above my pink zoas. That light blue base they have would look nice against the pink. 

 

I'm going to tweak the lights some, after I wrangle the algae. I want to see if I can turn up the blues a bit more to bring out and keep some of the nice colors, while still having it look decently white to the eye. I just like the whiter coloration more than sheer blue. 

[Tired]

Monti and Holy Grail are growing happily, which is very funny considering I haven't cleaned all the algae out. The tank looks like a mess, but the corals really don't care. Everything else is growing, too, it's just funny to me that the SPS and the higher-end LPS are happy in a very, very non-clean-looking tank. 

 

I have a minor explosion of white brittle stars. The "black" brittle stars (they're more like maroon striped) don't seem to be multiplying, but are definitely still in there. I actually removed most of the bristleworms to reduce competition for these guys, because I'm hoping to get enough of a population going that I can sell starter cultures to other people. Somebody's gotta sell these guys. 

 

Need to figure out how to upload videos to here. The cleaner shrimp sort of vigorously waggles its antennae at me when I come near the tank, really cute. 

 

I got my hermits into new shells, too. Scarlet reef hermits are picky about empty shells, they want a specific shape of very heavy, solid, beat-up shell. You can see it if you look them up online, basically every picture of them is in the same type of shell. The only frequent exceptions are little ones in cerith-style shells, which I'm guessing just don't have a heavier shell. I had to get specific shells from my LFS, these lil guys didn't want the kind I can get online. 

 

I've been thinking about semi-final additions to the tank. I want to replace the Black Hole Sun and God of War zoas I lost to salinity issues earlier this year, I really want a rainbow encrusting monti, and I'm looking at options for something... fleshy, basically. Maybe a candycane, if I could find a place to put it. It's a shame all the branched soft corals seem to grow really fast, I like those. 

I know "fleshy" isn't a very good description, but does anyone have any suggestions? Basically all my corals are things that are pretty much flat to the rock, so I'd like something that grows outward. It needs to be hardy and tolerant of nutrients/algae/etc for when I don't have the energy for water changes, though apparently it only needs to be as hardy as an encrusting monti. It needs to be something I can expect to not engage in chemical warfare, and it needs to have very short sweepers, if any. It either needs to grow slowly, or be easy to frag and have enough demand that I could at least give extras away. 

[A.m.P]

Blastomussa; slower growing, compact, medium flow tolerance, no sweepers, fleshy as can be.
Acans; medium-low flow tolerance, fleshy, kind of domes, but might not be as tolerant of iffy params.

Trumpets; medium-low flow tolerance, medium-low light tolerance, big branching and usually slowish growth, can have short sweepers and they're nasty.

Bowerbanki; slowish grower, no real sweepers (some filiment though), variable but lowish flow, medium-low light, bit more tolerant than acans.

Meat/doughnut/cynarina; EXTRA fleshy, low light, lowish to borderline-medium flow, expensive, bit worse than blasto's in tolerance, no sweepers but SWELL.

[Tired]

I have a blasto and a couple of micromussa (acans), and they are nice, but don't have much upward growth. Bowerbanki are pretty, but look like they might need a relatively large colony to be nice, and I don't have much space for them. Trumpets are definitely a possibility- isn't that another name for candycane corals? Or are they just really similar? Meat corals are cool, but those things get huge. They'd look a bit ridiculous in a tank this size, and would take up the whole floor. 

 

I really like this ORA candycane. If I can figure out where I'd put one, I might get one. Something big and smooth-shaped like this seems like a good contrast to the other shapes I have. 

 

[A.m.P]

Trumpets and candycanes are both caulastrea, there are a handful of color morphs out there.
Vertical and fleshy pretty much restricts you to trumpets and duncans.
( I like the red and white striped ones too), honorable mentions to alveopora and goniopora (but the latter can warfare in the water and neither is really "fleshy").

[Tired]

How do you tell the difference between the two? I looked at some pictures, and it looks like maybe trumpets tend to sort of flare outward more? 

 

Duncans are another idea, I suppose. I'm looking for something that has a different visual texture than corals that grow close to the rock, basically. I mostly have zoas/palys and mushrooms, which are all relatively flat or mounding, so I'm looking for non-flat corals. Branching soft corals are almost all invasive and have chemical warfare potential, branching hard corals tend to not like high nutrients and the hardier ones can also be too fast-growing for a pico. My palythoa grandis might make a nice bit of punctuation once it multiplies a little, and if I can get this codium to take off, that could also help. 

 

The 'poras are definitely neat corals. I want some in a future tank, but I don't know if this tank has enough room for a colony to really look nice. Those are some of the corals that are really not tolerant of bumping against rocks, right? 

 

Do you happen to know much about the different encrusting montis sold as "rainbow" montiporas? I'm trying to read up about them, and I keep finding multiple different names for multiple corals that... may or may not be the same thing. I really like the ones with the light blue/purple base and the polyps that are different colors, ranging from orange to green, depending on age. 

[A.m.P]

That's all rainbow monti, and I meant all trumpets (and caulastrea and candycanes) are the same animals (different of course from "strain/name" to name).

 

Worth mentioning some of the button corals stay small and grow slowly as well.

 

I don't know about gonis and alveopora touching rocks, I don't think it's an issue, but I've not really looked either.

[Tired]

Ah, I see. It's too bad it would be so close to impossible to get every coral sold with its full Latin name attached, to help avoid some of the confusion with multiple common names and different morphs. Would also be nice if people would stop giving separate names to two zoas that are so, so similar you can barely tell them apart even side-by-side, or renaming zoas that already have a name. It's good to have names for specific morphs of things, to help be clear about what they're describing, but too many names for the same thing just gets more confusing. 

 

I didn't know there were small button corals. I may have to look into those, but it looks like they aren't yet able to be propagated in aquariums, which leans me away from getting one. Not least because buying wild-caught coral makes me nervous about pests, never mind potential sustainability issues. 

 

How will candycane corals grow in a semi-confined space? If I put a frag near a rock, will it branch in a way that avoids the rock, or will it fasten onto the rock? 

They're easy to frag, right? Just chop a branch off well back from the flesh part? 

Are candycanes one of those corals where you shouldn't get a tiny little one-polyp frag? I know bigger frags are better for just about everything, but some things seem to be less tolerant of being fragged into tiny bits. 

[A.m.P]

To an extent the namegame is consumerism, to a large extent it and the boutique prices/fad/must-have corals are good ol' american degeneracy/sociopathy hustle. People expect to pay more, vendors and importers then expect to get paid more, and the lack of communication/goodwill/oversight drives prices up, people out of the hobby, and then drops one species or another into obscurity after the fact -rinse and repeat-, meanwhile in Euroland you can get chunky frags of $100+ coral from online vendors for 20 euro.
/endrant

They'll grow somewhat towards the light but, as with most of these animals, they'll grow as they please lol.
More heads = faster growth, no reason not to start out with one otherwise (apart from potential "backup" if things go south). 
They're easy to frag but have a thick skeleton.

Some buttons are propagated, however you'll be receiving a triangle and not a circle, it may not be as durable and it will grow slower as well.

[Tired]

Yeah, that's a whole situation. It's a multi-faceted one, but I wish people would stop buying the tiny, crazy expensive frags of fad corals. I get that supply and demand is a thing, especially for luxury items, but this has gone way too far. It would be one thing if it was "not many people have this cool coral, so we'll charge a bit more for it", buuut we've gotten over into "we can sell this at absurd prices and people will actually buy it". I've actually been able to watch zoa prices shift after a fad changes, and I've only been looking at them for a year! At least with those, it makes some amount of sense for the prettier, slower-growing ones to be a bit more expensive. 

 

Speaking of demand, any clue why blue-green sympodium isn't more popular? It's pretty, it seems fairly hardy, and it grows at a reasonable rate. Do people mistake it for invasive blue cloves? Do people underfeed or under-nutrient it and have it die? I love mine. I only recently got it to really do well, it seems to pretty much require being fed, but I'm excited for it to cover a nice area. 

 

Do you know if candycanes will attach onto a rock that one of their branches grows toward? Since the colonies can easily get big, I'd need to be able to remove the whole thing from the tank to trim down. I have some bone cutters. 

[A.m.P]

I do not know.

[Saltysheep]

Nice thread and tank ! I enjoyed reading through it.

[Tired]

Porcelain crab got scared out of its anemone thanks to the decorator crab walking over the whole place, and wound up temporarily in these palys until it felt safe back in the anemone. They're Captain Jerks. Not super bright, but I like the shapes of them. They are a bit fast-growing, though. 

 

lu

Blue sympodium is doing well, since I started feeding it. It wasn't terribly happy before that. I love this stuff- grows at a reasonable pace, looks pretty, doesn't seem picky. 

 

Task Force is doing well. I haven't intentionally fed him in months. He snags a bit of mysis now and then, but mostly he's eating amphipods. 

There's also a neat white tubeworm in the background. It's attached to that frag of zoas that are either Halle Berry or Alien Antivenom, I really can't tell. I'm not convinced they aren't the same thing. Its tube is nearly two inches long at this point, and I'm careful not to block it off and prevent it from extending.