Snow's 2.6G Little Monsters Picoreef - Retired!

[debbeach13]

I might be thinking of non reef products but I am a believer in after Christmas sales. Every thing you wanted but didn’t get for Christmas is on sale now at Sears. Is playing in my head every time I look at stuff on line. 

[Snow_Phoenix]

WCed the pico! 🤗

 

 

Sapphire and I had a battle of wills of sorts over flattening the sandbed. Everytime I tried to flatten it, she'd create a mound of it and bury my bullseye rhodactis. 

 

After a while, I gave up trying to mess around with the sandbed, and let Sapphire win. The tank is *her home, after all. 🤷‍♀️

[farkwar]

23 hours ago, Snow_Phoenix said:

 

I'm looking into a reasonably priced ATO for the future 10G. Some of them seem unusually expensive, and I don't recall the prices for ATOs being this high last year. 🤔

 

The Hydor ATOs used to be inexpensive were always reliable for me

[Snow_Phoenix]

Update #1: 

 

I have a new tiny rasta polyp coming in: 

 

 

 

Absolutely love my Zoa Tower:

 

 

 

 

 

[Snow_Phoenix]

Update #2:

 

Different corals seem to be recovering at different rates - I still have pieces that are in poor shape/lost color:

 

 

 

 

But some pieces have made a good recovery:

 

 

 

 

[Snow_Phoenix]

Update #3:

 

Green leptastrea has healed up pretty quickly though: 

 

 

 

And I found this neon green polyp among my duller zoas! 😮 :

 

 

Other zoas & palys are still growing out more new heads:

 

 

 

 

 

I hope my success with them continues in the next tank - would love to have a larger zoa garden. 🥰

[Snow_Phoenix]

Update #4:

 

Harvey & Memphis seem to get along fine now: 🤐

 

 

 

 

They still keep a respectful distance from each other, but at least they can tolerate each other pretty well. 🤗

[Snow_Phoenix]

Sapphire's retaliation:

 

 

Have a pretty blue fish. It'd be fun, they said. 

[farkwar]

What is this animal

 

Flesh looks like a lepto

 

But that scrolling?  Very cool

[A.m.P]

I think that's their purple red pavona (call me colorblind but they look similar lol), I recall seeing something a while back claiming pavona and lepto were essentially the same animal.

Edit, found it https://reefs.com/2017/06/14/pavona-leptoseris-damn-coral/

[Snow_Phoenix]

30 minutes ago, farkwar said:

What is this animal

 

Flesh looks like a lepto

 

But that scrolling?  Very cool

It's a red pavona. 🙂 

[Snow_Phoenix]

Memphis had a successful molt last night: 🦀

 

 

^That new exoskeleton looks squeaky clean. 😄

 

Tricolor blasto looking squished up right after I turned the lights on:

 

 

Sapphire introducing the acans:

 

 

A closer look at Sapphire - you can actually see her scales in this pic: 🥰

 

 

She is truly an amazing fish. Mischievious, but very entertaining to watch. 🤗

[Snow_Phoenix]

Memphis finally abandoned his exoskeleton:

 

 

 

The Coral Wars between the monti fraglet & leptastrea still continues! 🤐

 

 

The other two fraglets have yet to merge:

 

 

Yuma:

 

 

Orange & purple leptastrea:

 

[Snow_Phoenix]

Also, prep. for the upcoming tank has already begun:

 

 

 

I've hosed down & cleaned approx. ~5kg of live sand today, and left it out to dry. Either some time tomorrow or the day after, I'll be taking down the pico. (And pick up the new tank from the LFS).

 

I'll slowly do a TTM over the next few days. Although I'll be using extra cured & established LR for filtration, I'll take my time to scape the tank and transfer the animals in batches. Non-coral inverts & fish will most likely be added only after all the corals have been transferred into the 10G. 

 

Will take a lot of pics of the pico before I take it down though - don't worry! 👍

[Snow_Phoenix]

Hmm. I think I'll sneak the tank into my bedroom & hide it under my desk until I have enough time to pull off a TTM. Still a lot of prep. work needs to be done. 

 

Also finished fixing this beautiful puzzle today - am planning on framing it and hanging it over the tank area in the future:

 

 

There was a wonderful ocean-themed box on sale online but it was 2000 pcs & incredibly expensive. The largest puzzles I've completed are 1000 pcs - I don't think I'm patient enough to fix anything beyond those numbers. 😅

[Snow_Phoenix]

The pico has been retired. More details & a new build thread for the nano to come up later. 

 

Here's a quick sneak peek at the new tank: 🤗

 

 

 

[debbeach13]

Pretty 

[Snow_Phoenix]

Hey everyone,

 

So I ran into a few issues before & during the TTM for the pico today.

 

To start off, sneaking in an 18" long tank wasn't easy...because my whole family, including my uncle, aunt, little cousins & grandmother was there when I brought the tank in. In a way, it was a good thing, because I could see how pissed my mum was, but she couldn't yell at me in front of the kids - or basically, the *visitors, so I could bring the tank safely into my bedroom. 😛

 

I had to work fast to tear down the pico, because I honestly didn't know how long my uncle, aunt and little cousins were going to stay, so I didn't snap any pics of the 2.6G before I stripped it. 😞

 

But! I managed to get everything into a bin, and that's when I noticed my crab was missing a claw, and my brittlestar was missing half of one of its arms. I have a feeling...those two tangled with each other some time late last night/this morning. Memphis had both his claws after his molt yesterday, and Kraken had all five of his arms as well. I think Kraken *might have accidently tried to grab Memphis. <--- Just my theory. 

 

I'm not sure if it was for food, or if it was a territorial skirmish, but I checked up on both animals, and they were very active and responsive. 

 

So the way I performed the TTM was a little bit different this time. After moving all the critters into a holding bin, I drained the pico, then kept a very, very small cup of live sand (rinsed thoroughly with tank water) and put that cup in the bin as well. I threw out the rest of the sand.

 

After I washed the pico, I noticed my oldest of the three 'little' cousins that I had expressed an interest in keeping fish. I originally wanted to keep the pico as a mini frag tank, but I had nowhere to store it - and I had excess tanks stored in cupboards downstairs. So I gave it to her, and she was extremely happy. (Right after they left our house, my uncle took the kids to the LFS and they picked up some guppies)

 

🙂

 

Back to the new tank, I set it up on my cabinet and I noticed it was extremely large for a 10G. But even after measuring it with a tape, it is indeed 10+G - so maybe I've just been too used to having a tiny tank, that everything seems big (?) 

 

Eh, anyhow, the tank was roomy, so I put in 4kg of LS and filled it up partially with freshly mixed SW. Then I began scaping - with rocks taken from my refugium of the 60G & rocks taken from my 10G nanocube downstairs. 

 

Now comes an issue. My 10G nanocube has three fish - 2 clowns and a blenny. When I picked up the rock and transferred it from tank-to-bucket-to-tank, I didn't realize one of the fish a.k.a. the blenny had stowaway in the rock until I put the rock into my new tank. Worse, he was tucked into a hole pretty tight, so I only realized I had an *extra fish when I had finished scaping the new nanotank and began adding corals.

 

Which quite frankly, at that point, I decided it was too exhausting to try and catch him (he's super smart & darts into a hole when he sees my hands dip into the water), so I left him be.

 

My mother was not happy. At this point, she made many offhand remarks regarding having an extra bin of critters in my bedroom because it looked messy & cluttered. 😕

 

So I moved *everything into the new tank within three hours. Because I had so many loose pcs, I misplaced two shrooms - the red devil & leopard discosomas - and I think I accidently either binned those two or threw them back into the sump of my 60G. 😕

 

Moving forward, I added the animals in batches - inverts first, fish next (Sapphire the damsel went in last). Then I tried to turn on my major HOB filter (which was working fine, and hour before hanging it over the tank) - and it spluttered and died out on me. 😞

 

That filter is indeed old, but still, I was really hoping it'd work because it was the largest HOB filter I have. I do have a spare HOB (much, much smaller one), but I was too tired to rummage through the cabinet to re-stock it with new media, so I just left the large HOB filter sitting over my new tank and have not touched it.

 

Thankfully, I do have a new Jebao SW-4 wavemaker that I ordered few weeks ago, so I just added that to the new tank for flow. I still haven't set up my lights over the tank either - I need to stick some black tape over the red LED and tinker around with the holder, but I was too exhausted so I decided I could adjust it tomorrow. 

 

So...the new tank is up and running now. I added a vial of Bioptim biodigest, although I believe it's unnecessary. 

 

And! I brought back ten new zoa morphs (which my LFS manager kindly glued onto a piece of rock for me) to be added to my increasing zoa collection.

 

The morphs are:

 

Purple Monster

Blue Agave

Rainbow Infusion

Yoda

Blondies

Yellow/Green Nuclear Death

Fruit Loops

Red Hornet

Purple Hornet

Unknown Starbust Purple/Green/Blue

 

And I've also reserved a mini red carpet nem for the tank, which will be picked up next month during my birthday. 

 

Looking back, I've spent a lot on corals/reefing this month already. But I'm happy. And sometimes, you just have to shut out the rest of the world and do what makes you happy.

 

I'll write up a proper build thread for the new tank tomorrow, including the full list of corals and other critters. 

 

In the meantime - here's how the tank looks like:

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CHpqCHpLuXW/

 

^That white rock on the left is where all the new zoas are. It was a previously LR-turned-dry-rock, but it's not very big, so I *don't really expect it to cause much of a cycle, if any. 

 

Benny in the new tank:

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CHpw-vZLDON/

 

Once the new journal is up, I'll link it back here so that you can take a look at it. 🙂 

 

 

[debbeach13]

Wow you really worked hard yesterday. The new tank looks super. Looking forward to seeing the new zoanthids.

[Snow_Phoenix]

11 minutes ago, debbeach13 said:

Wow you really worked hard yesterday. The new tank looks super. Looking forward to seeing the new zoanthids.

Thanks, Deb - I'll probably sleep for the next 10 hours or so. My back is killing me. 😞

 

I'm looking forward to seeing the new zoas grow out too - really hope they will continue to grow and thrive like they did in the pico. Zoas can be testy sometimes. 

[Snow_Phoenix]

Did I mention I found my green favites? It turned out to be wedged tightly next to the inlet pipe of my HOB, and I only realized it was there after I washed the HOB with soap and vinegar. 😕

 

So yeah, I accidently washed the coral with soap and vinegar too - but I quickly rinsed it off and now it's back in the new tank. Lost a bit of flesh around one edge, but otherwise appears intact.

 

As to how it got into the HOB itself - I usually have a habit of stacking corals in the HOB (with the lid off) during maintenance for the pico. So I think I dropped it into the HOB during one of the maintenance periods and forgot about it. 😕 

[Snow_Phoenix]

Hey guys, I've created a new journal thread for my new 10G build - the upgrade of this picoreef. Here it is:

 

 

Feel free to have a look, because I'll mostly be active on that thread from now on. Thanks everyone! 🌺

 

-Snow

[Snow_Phoenix]

Add-On: I've also updated the link in my Signature, so that you may locate the journal thread more easily. I have 2x 10G tanks - the pico's upgrade is called: 'Snow's 10G Critters of Chaos'. 

 

The other 10G link will divert you to my macroalgae-FOWLR nanocube, which is pretty much on hiatus atm. Hope this doesn't sound too confusing. 🤔

[Ratvan]

bye little tank, its been great. Unfollowed