Jack's EXT-50 Lagoon

[A.m.P]

19 hours ago, Pjanssen said:

My Basslet only come out to eat 😢

That's a real bummer, my little black cap will come out, perch on a rock and stare at me on the couch, watches youtube on a laptop too, loves the flashing lights and will go right up to the glass for a closer look.
Constantly re-arranging the scape, building new caves with shells, moving rocks, making little territory markers and dragging corals around; harassing snails + hermits.

[jservedio]

After more than 2 years, I finally did it...I got some more acros! Yesterday I got an awesome box from Pokerdobe and am completely blown away by how incredible everything is. I am going to wait to show the rest until I finish up the rescape, but these two seem to love the tank so far and are exceptionally generous frags:

 

 

 

 

 

[mitten_reef]

28 minutes ago, jservedio said:

After more than 2 years, I finally did it...I got some more acros! Yesterday I got an awesome box from Pokerdobe and am completely blown away by how incredible everything is. I am going to wait to show the rest until I finish up the rescape, but these two seem to love the tank so far and are exceptionally generous frags:

 

 

 

 

 

welcome to the @pokerdobe's customers club, lol. 

 

those two look GREAT! SCOP will become one of your favorites in no time, if it isn't already.  what's the first one? 

[jservedio]

2 hours ago, mitten_reef said:

welcome to the @pokerdobe's customers club, lol. 

 

those two look GREAT! SCOP will become one of your favorites in no time, if it isn't already.  what's the first one? 

Seriously! They are great. I'll definitely be getting more.

 

That first one is the Cherry Bomb tenuis.

[jservedio]

Well, I'm still alive! Been a super long time since I've been on here, but I had some health problems and then a surgery where I couldn't lift the weight of a bucket of water for a good long while. The tank languished for months (just after I had already been slacking off and just started getting things cleaned up) without many water changes and really no maintenance. My nutrients got all out of whack and I sort of just left them for a few months. Bunch of alge, cyano, little bit of dinos (thankfully they never really took off and sort of just died away) and it was too hot to ship a CuC so I just left things be. Some how, some way nothing except a single acro frag died on me. Not to say things went unscathed - had some die back on a few things here and there (I lost a good 6" of the center of my purple cap) but everything was big enough to weather the storm and is re-growing. The biggest thing that saved me is that my alkalinity never moved - I only checked it 3 or 4 times, but every single time it was within 0.25 of 7.5 dkh.

 

I've been pretty much back to my regular old self for about 3 weeks now and spent that time ordering a big CuC, getting my nutrients back in balance, getting a few water changes in, feeding frozen super heavily and manually removing what I can.

 

While this isn't what a half of year of growth should look like since I was hovering just over 0 nitrates for a good long while, it isn't all bad. A few spots look really great (basically anywhere there wasn't enough room for algae to grow), a few look how you'd expect after months of neglect, and some are going to need some work! Still a lot of algae to clean up and a long road to some things recovering, but thankfully I've still got all my corals.

 

Not enough room for algae to grow here, so it looks pretty great actually! The RFA moved in about 6 months ago and killed some UC, but I like it better this way:

 

 

 

 

My Boomberry has been doing extremely well. I think it's because the Yellow Tips got a little banged up and wasn't fighting for a good 6 months. It's starting to grow again now though and is bigger than it was 8 months ago, but it had a little dieback on some of the tips.

 

 

 

 

My Bowerbankii is still doing it's thing and slowly adding more polyps. Got a few more on the backside and the really light green color has been coming in more - hopefully it'll darken over the next couple years (so, so much cyano on the sand...)

 

 

 

 

Blastos doing their thing - you can see some GHA got in between some of the polyps and I've been pulling as much as I can. Hopefully that'll heal up in the next few months too:

 

 

 

 

My Stunner in the back is doing pretty well and has officially fully come back from the dead and is wrecking stuff around it:

 

 

 

 

My bubblegum digi is slowly and surely coming back - it didn't die and is fighting back against all the crap growing around it. Colored up nicely over the last couple weeks.

 

[mitten_reef]

Glad to see you back in action.  Was just wondering how things are with this tank.  Looks like the tank is recovering pretty well, all things considered. 

[A.m.P]

Glad you're recovered and doing great, the shots look fantastic -- still, sorry to hear about the acro loss

[jservedio]

16 hours ago, mitten_reef said:

Glad to see you back in action.  Was just wondering how things are with this tank.  Looks like the tank is recovering pretty well, all things considered. 

Thanks! It's always two steps forward and at least one back... I was just starting to catch up on your build and I'm really sorry to hear about the big table. That thing was phenomenal. Though  I'm sure those clams and super nice torches will easily fill in that giant hole!

 

The two biggest bits of damage the tank took (and is still very clearly recovering from) is the Yellow Tips lost about 15% of the colony (though grew way more than that during the losses) and the Idaho Grape Cap lost a good 50%. It's stupidly large and shading everything, but I can't clip it back because it's the center of the colony that went. I have to wait for it to regrow before I can even trim it. So much algae though that I've been working through over the last few weeks and there is still quite a bit. But, at least the tank looks better now than my 20g looked back in 2018 and it was only like 2 years to go from beaten down to pretty great.

 

It even hurts to take pictures of them...

 

 

 

I'm honestly not even sure what caused the damage and I still randomly see one of the caps or the yellow tips lose a tiny bit of flesh (like 1/4-1/2" circles) and then promptly start regrowing over the hole every few weeks. But it's only on the Yellow Tips and the two caps - every other acro and monti is perfectly healthy and even duplicates of the caps don't have that issue. Wondering if maybe it's just the hair alge trapping cyano and dinos that's harming the coral? Who knows. At least it can't be pests! It's definitely better than it was and moving in the right direction.

 

 

16 hours ago, A.m.P said:

Glad you're recovered and doing great, the shots look fantastic -- still, sorry to hear about the acro loss

What I showed looked fantastic 😆

The rest is still a mess! But, it'll get there eventually. I haven't caught up on your tanks yet, but I really hope they are doing better than mine. At least all I lost was a Walt Disney frag and because of how awesome Pokerdobe is, it wasn't expensive. I was bound to lose something not being able to work on the tank and the fact it was just a single tiny frag is pretty good in my book.

[jservedio]

Well, even if the algae is very, very slowly going away at least I'm starting to get some real growth now. The Yellow tips has tons of new growth from just the last few weeks and I'll probably just pull the rock in a few more weeks and dremel off anything with algae on it. It's growing so fast hopefully the cuts will get healed over before any algae can take off. It's been almost a year since I've had actual yellow on the tips and the rings are starting to come back:

 

 

 

 

My big purple apmonti c is what took the most damage out of all the corals in the tank and grew really, really thick hair algae over all the dead spots. The big dead area in the middle is now starting to shrink pretty quickly - tons of new growth from both ends now:

 

 

 

[mitten_reef]

4 hours ago, jservedio said:

What’s the yellow and red in the background?  Looks 🔥 

[jservedio]

14 hours ago, mitten_reef said:

What’s the yellow and red in the background?  Looks 🔥 

Believe it or not, it's the tiny sliver of my bubblegum digi that survived a couple years ago when everything went to war up on that rock. It's just entirely new growth so it's got blue/green/yellow skin and really red polyps. I'm sure in a few months, only the tips and base will have that green and yellow skin and the whole rest of it will be back to boring blue. 

[mitten_reef]

6 hours ago, jservedio said:

Believe it or not, it's the tiny sliver of my bubblegum digi that survived a couple years ago when everything went to war up on that rock. It's just entirely new growth so it's got blue/green/yellow skin and really red polyps. I'm sure in a few months, only the tips and base will have that green and yellow skin and the whole rest of it will be back to boring blue. 

awesome, can't wait to see it grows.  I have what I thought was bubblegum digi, but i may just have a very bright version of forest fire as I don't recall ever seeing the blue base. 

[jservedio]

1 hour ago, mitten_reef said:

awesome, can't wait to see it grows.  I have what I thought was bubblegum digi, but i may just have a very bright version of forest fire as I don't recall ever seeing the blue base. 

The guy I got it from told me it was the cornbred one, but who knows. Mine always seems to branch horizontally so I don't get much of the typical digi shape I was hoping for.

 

If I don't get it killed again I'll have to send over a frag in the early summer! I've shipped it using priority express and it did surprisingly well.

[jservedio]

Even though I'm still in an all-out battle with the algae I've got in the tank, a decent number of my corals took a beating while I was unable to work on the tank and growth felt like it had been incredibly slow (and it has for many corals) - a lot of time still passed and I hadn't realized just how much had changed.

 

I don't have a wide enough angle lens to get this shot, so I had to do it on my phone with my shaky hands (and full windex blue at sunset to make it worse) - but it shows just how much changed over the last year.

 

My monti garden is now 17" across, the yellow tips is 9" front to back (and almost as wide), the confusa is 8" across, and the boomberry about 6" - way bigger than the last time I bothered to really pay attention and whip out the measuring tape. Still a lot of work to go, but at least those months of being able to care for the tank weren't totally wasted!

 

[jservedio]

Still hanging in there and working on getting rid of the algae - seems that every time I get snails, I end up with like 75% of them dying within the first week or two and the rest live on forever. Slowly building up the snail force and sloooooowly beating back the algae. It's always something. Pulled a couple rocks and scrubbed them out of the tank and got another 8 snails today, so hopefully it'll break.

 

Anyway, the corals are happier now that I've got the nitrates running through the doser instead of manually and inconsistently - I guess if I can keep it up I'll get to the same point I was at in the 20 and algae and pests just won't matter since there is no rock left for it to grow on!

 

Got another 3 polyps going on the bowerbanki and somehow even more colors starting to develop around the mouths on the oldest polyps. Crazy how the teal and now yellow only started coming in after having it for...10 years...

 

 

 

 

With nitrates, all the SPS are getting good color again. The yellow tips is looking good as ever and it's skin is getting super thick, even on the new growth. With less phosphates than in the 20, it's way less brittle so I can actually touch it without shattering it. Even though it looks out of focus and weirdly saturated, if you zoom in you can see that it's just the crazy texture of the skin.

 

 

 

 

The boomberry continues to blow up, even with a little GHA growing around the edges:

[NoOneLikesADryTang]

That bowerbanki is something else! 
 

[jservedio]

15 hours ago, NoOneLikesADryTang said:

That bowerbanki is something else! 
 

Thanks! It's wild just how much it's colors have changed over the last 10 years. Here is what it looked like in 2014 after a bit more than a year of healing from the three-quarters of a polyp I got from Scott at UC as a freebie. That polyp is still the center of the colony now, but that single polyp has got to be 2x the size it is here:

 

 

And this was another year later eating a hermit (and spitting out the shell 3 days later). It's only about 2.5x the size it is here with another 8 years of growth, but I mounted it's base about 1.5" of tile, so there was an absolutely massive void that it needed to fill with skeleton since I wanted it to mound:

 

 

 

[Justind823]

Tank took a beating but you've got some great coloration going there! Glad to see things on the mend and getting dialed back in.

[mcarroll]

On 10/2/2023 at 3:05 PM, jservedio said:

Been a super long time since I've been on here

Just saw this....even tho I'm late in saying so, I'm glad you are back!!

[Pjanssen]

Seems that a lot of us have taken a bit of a hiatus 

[jservedio]

On 1/13/2024 at 3:24 PM, mcarroll said:

Just saw this....even tho I'm late in saying so, I'm glad you are back!!

Thanks! Been a while and kind of not doing anything with the tank for the last few months. Put a few new acros on the rack over the last year, but still dealing with hair algae and haven't planted them yet. Everything is still growing like crazy and I just keep dumping in nutrients with the doser so it looks like I'm doing exactly like I did in the 20 again: just wait until there are no surfaces for algae to grow on.

 

I've got to rescape a bit, but it's been easier to just kick that can down the road. It's getting cold though so I'll need something to do!

3 hours ago, Pjanssen said:

Seems that a lot of us have taken a bit of a hiatus 

It seems like it - murph shutting his tank down reminded me to get on here. Plus it always gives me a little inspiration to work on the tank.

 

Sorry to hear about your tank btw. Haven't had a chance to look through everyone's threads yet.

[jservedio]

Well, I finally started the re-scaping project I'd been putting off since basically I started the tank! I'm not going to give anything away on what I'm doing, but I finally popped my WWC Yellow Tips off the rock it has been on since 2018 (well...chiselled it off...)...

 

It was always hard to show just how big it was - this is what it looks like in my hand:

 

 

I am going to dremel it down to about the size of my hand and cut most of my SPS back (especially the caps!). Maybe I'll update this again in the next couple months with a freshly scaped tank.

 

[mitten_reef]

Look forward to the scape update. I gave up on revamping mine, 🤣. 

[jservedio]

22 hours ago, mitten_reef said:

Look forward to the scape update. I gave up on revamping mine, 🤣. 

I feel like it's even harder now though with that extra volume! Mo gallons mo problems.

 

I would have left mine, but I've got so many dead spots even with the 2 gyres going and more than half the tank is totally shaded from the caps and that yellow tips. Being lazy is starting to become more work than just doing it right.

 

I've got a few new acros too, but nothing is over growing my frag rack quite like yours was!

[jservedio]

I finally got around to building my water station out in the garage and it was well worth it. My wife couldn't be happier about it since I've been using our guest bathtub to make water for the last....14 years...

 

I built it up high enough so that the bottom of the trashcan sits level with the top of my sump so I can gravity feed my ATO through a solenoid. Still have some more work to do before I can turn that on since I want to drill my sump for an emergency overflow into the garage so I don't ruin our expensive floors if the solenoid and float valve fail together. Right now the RODI doesn't shut off automatically, but it does have an overflow inside the can so it can't be overfilled. Not sure if I am just going to just toss a cheap auto-shutoff on there or if I want to build out a dual sensor system that will automatically turn it on when it gets down to about 50% then shut back off when filled.

 

I also built it so that the overflow, wastewater and the dump valve flow directly into the garden! I've also go the feed line plumbed into the drain with a bypass on the RODI machine so that I can water the garden using it without having to devoured by mosquitos standing there with a hose like an idiot for 10 minutes at dusk!

 

Total out the door cost was about $150 and it took about 6 hours start to finish (plus a little planning).

 

 

 

The line into the wall pops back out into my garden. Once we get it planted, I'll have to post up some more pictures with the watering system.