Jack's EXT-50 Lagoon

[jservedio]

39 minutes ago, mitten_reef said:

 

from choice of acros, pretty much what he said, lol.  you already narrowed down to some of the must-have's.  and CB is the Cherry Bomb tenuis, its pinkish/reddish polyps should make for good contrast against WD (but i've been told they could be finicky with showing their best coloration)

 

for #5 spot, it isn't all that low from lighting perspective, so i'd say explore a "true" table - this will give you one extra dimension in growth form.  for idea, search for Battle Coral aquaticman, PC Superman, these two have very tight small vertical branches that spread horizontally - there are some more out there, but the names escape me atm.  if you can't search and find colony photos, don't go with anything with just 'table' in the name, lol, fair warning.  for example, I don't personally classify the red planet as a table.  to me, only acropora anthocercis (old school terra del fuego) and hyancinthus (two above examples) are the two tabling growth forms worth waiting for.  like @pokerdobe said, most corals will grow into a table-ish form given enough space and time to grow and proper husbandry - and he knows that cuz he got a bunch of palm-sized slabs (some even bigger) in his tank, lol.    

 

If you really want to stick with the original idea of deepwater-type, try searching for a granulosa species.  again, ymmv on who call their acros 'granulosa'.  but if you see enough of them, you'll get the idea what could be the real deal.  it gives you that smooth look that you lost a while back. 

 

also, while we're on the aquascape topic, one constructive criticism if I may.  prune that tort in the center of the tank, and hopefully it'll regrow with proper side corallites and branches now that you have plenty of flow and light for them.  I'd say trim a couple branches down to about 1/2" off the crust and see how they regrow, if you like the new growth, move on the to the next leggy branches, you have an awesome base for a massive feature colony.    

 

Oh hell yes on the CB Tenuis - that'll contrast amazingly with the WD, only issue is going to finding one. I don't know anyone here who has one off the top of my head, but I'll hopefully be able to find one. Certainly not paying $250 for a 1/2"!

 

I 100% agree with on on "low light" being...relative...in such a shallow tank. I love the PC supermans, but I don't really think it'll contrast too well with all the other pink/purple in that corner. I also already have an ORA Red Planet on the other side of the tank, so even though the hyancinthus is way nicer and an actual table, it'll look repetitive in such a small tank. That spot is going to be filled last anyway, so I'll be able to get a good idea how it's going to after everything else is in. You are definitely right a table will look best there since it'll grow pretty much straight out and there is nothing else that grows horizontally out on that level vertically.

 

I am also planning on filling in the more hidden spots of the tank like I did in the 20 since I'll be keeping it for a really, really long time again - so maybe I can pick better spots for the deepwater. I really like them and want one - just not sure if I want to fill up a primo spot for a table.

 

Please be critical! I spend so much time staring at the tank and just saying "meh, I'll let it be" and then a year or two goes by and I realize it'd be way better if I had just made a decision back then. I am definitely cutting up that Yellow Tips, and plan on funding a couple of the new corals with the frags from it. It is way too big and the branches are too long, but it's got a super solid base and it's already throwing off nicer branches in the back that look way better. It's actually an Austera, so it should have a much more tabled structure thankfully. Here is where I'm going to hack it up - should ne able to get at least $25 each (unfortunately the back one has to go since it's growing into the Pinky):

 

[jservedio]

Still waffling on which acros to get, but hopefully will make up my mind in the next....some time. Anyway, the reef is doing really well and have slowly been upping the lights.

 

My Acropora Florida (basically, a slightly fancier green slimer), has finally gotten the upper hand on the big confusa next to it after more than three years. It's still not much bigger than a frag, but it's finally got enough new base grown out on the monti to begin to throw up a couple new branches. Previously, every time it grew base and started throwing new branches, the monti would very quickly grow directly over it and it'd start the process over. While it definitely looks super cool having all your SPS packed in super tight, it really, really slows things down:

 

 

 

 

On the other side of the top SPS shelf, my Boomberry has continued to base out over the monti cap growing off the edge of the shelf and is starting to throw up a branch off the monti cap. I'm really glad I didn't frag the monti again, since it extended the shelf in a pretty cool way. I'll probably let the acro add another inch of base to the monti before I start cutting it back again. Should be super cool when it's done. With the lights being turned up, hopefully I'll get some better color out of it.

 

 

 

 

My hulk amakusensis is also starting to get the upper hand on the big monti caps that surround it and it started growing over the top of one of the caps finally. Hopefully I won't have to aggressively kill back the caps and it'll be able to manage on it's own. I really, really need to get that acro out of there though - it's just too shaded underneath it.

 

 

 

 

And  finally, my lord rock is coming along nicely. It's only been a few weeks now, and the nicest of the frags I got was 4 heads and is now up to 10 including the little tiny baby heads popping up. Being able to feed 3 times a week without having the hair algae get entirely out of control because of the skimmer is really nice - not that I don't have a lot of hair algae...

 

[mitten_reef]

On 6/29/2021 at 4:46 PM, jservedio said:

Oh hell yes on the CB Tenuis - that'll contrast amazingly with the WD, only issue is going to finding one. I don't know anyone here who has one off the top of my head, but I'll hopefully be able to find one. Certainly not paying $250 for a 1/2"!

 

I 100% agree with on on "low light" being...relative...in such a shallow tank. I love the PC supermans, but I don't really think it'll contrast too well with all the other pink/purple in that corner. I also already have an ORA Red Planet on the other side of the tank, so even though the hyancinthus is way nicer and an actual table, it'll look repetitive in such a small tank. That spot is going to be filled last anyway, so I'll be able to get a good idea how it's going to after everything else is in. You are definitely right a table will look best there since it'll grow pretty much straight out and there is nothing else that grows horizontally out on that level vertically.

 

I am also planning on filling in the more hidden spots of the tank like I did in the 20 since I'll be keeping it for a really, really long time again - so maybe I can pick better spots for the deepwater. I really like them and want one - just not sure if I want to fill up a primo spot for a table.

 

Please be critical! I spend so much time staring at the tank and just saying "meh, I'll let it be" and then a year or two goes by and I realize it'd be way better if I had just made a decision back then. I am definitely cutting up that Yellow Tips, and plan on funding a couple of the new corals with the frags from it. It is way too big and the branches are too long, but it's got a super solid base and it's already throwing off nicer branches in the back that look way better. It's actually an Austera, so it should have a much more tabled structure thankfully. Here is where I'm going to hack it up - should ne able to get at least $25 each (unfortunately the back one has to go since it's growing into the Pinky):

 

yeah, the new growth looks much better.  I'd go a lot further up on the old branches after you cut the frags.  you can try putting the stumps on plugs, and see if they grow into more frags, lol.  

[jservedio]

4 hours ago, mitten_reef said:

yeah, the new growth looks much better.  I'd go a lot further up on the old branches after you cut the frags.  you can try putting the stumps on plugs, and see if they grow into more frags, lol.  

Thank you, and it looks so much better now - it actually has the proper green -> purple -> blue -> yellow gradient out to the growth tips on the new growth with tons of radial branching. I know everyone is on the super high phosphate train right now (and I definitely share some of that blame because of the way I kept my 20g), but it really jacked up this colony and some of the others with the way the branches grew. Same light, same flow, but like 1/3 the phosphates and the growth is so much nicer and not falling apart from being so brittle.

 

The stubs will definitely grow into really nice, big frags. I bet I can sell them as nice fat mini-colonies in just a few months with tons of growth off them - if I mount them flat, once those fat stubby branches start to grow, they go nuts.

[jservedio]

Just a few progress pictures for some of the LPS under bluer conditions than I normally shoot under - these were all under about 18,000k instead of the 12,000k I normally shoot at. Still feeding super heavily to keep my nutrients up while the hair algae runs it's course on my one fresh piece of dry rock. It's pretty cool how my old rock doesn't have a single speck of green algae on it, yet the dry rock is just an explosion of hair algae. Thanks to the turbos the clumps are thinning out and hopefully it'll be done in another couple of months just like every other piece of dry rock I've added in the last 6 or 7 years!

 

My Amakusensis has now gotten over the top of the monti caps and is successfully killing it back without having the monti able to push back. Wasn't quite sure it it'd totally hold it's own last month, but so far so good.

 

 

 

 

Also added another boatload of polyps to my new lord frags in the last month. I can't believe how fast they are growing. They put on more in a month that some of my older ones did in half a year right after I got them because I got them from another awesome reefer with a great tank instead of a LFS:

 

 

 

 

My 3-blasto island is doing great and the green/cyan blastos are glowing these days. I picked up another 10 pounds small pieces of dry rock and I'm planning on breaking up a couple pounds of it and extending this island above the purple blasto and to the right of the red blasto hooking downward to get another 2-3 frags of blastos. I can't believe how far they've come - the green and red started as single polyps and the purple started out on a 1" plug.

 

 

 

 

And my platy has been going crazy as well - added a good 2" to the back side of the colony over the past few months now that it's growing over rock instead of having to fill in an inch of void with skeleton. Doesn't look like that much, but it's a good 4" wide, 4" tall, and now about 3.5" front to back with the new growth and a complete ball. Not bad for starting out as a 3/4" wafer thin chip...in 2013.

 

[jservedio]

Over the last month or so, I've only been home for a few days with tons of travelling and a longer vacation, so I basically left my tank to it's own devices with a 20g ATO reservoir and a packed auto feeder while the new dry rock was burning through it's hair algae. Everything made it through and the hair algae is nearly gone on the new rock replaced with some nice coralline. Unfortunately because of the hair algae explosion, my nutrients plummeted and I lost a lot of color on my more nutrient loving acros, but nothing else was really bothered and the LPS and nem have been going nuts from the auto feeder that was directly above them (even though they lost color, too). It was definitely strange because other than the single rock, my gyre and the back wall got totally covered in nasty long hair algae (I guess since they were fresh surfaces with nothing to compete) - everything else was entirely green algae free.

 

I took a FTS after the cleaning up as a "starting point" now that I've got the hair algae taken care of, nutrients rebounded, and added some AB+ to the ATO to kick start my organic levels, and a filter sock to catch any leftover GHA as it dies. It still looks pretty good and the nem got big, but the really deep color on the acros has faded and they are pale. Hopefully since I will be home for the foreseeable future and have things stabilized, they will color right back up quickly and can grab a few more acros.

 

 

 

 

While I was on vacation, I did bring my camera and was playing around with very long after-sunset exposures with a narrow aperture and got this picture of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (f/22, 8s, ISO-100):

 

[Pjanssen]

15 hours ago, jservedio said:

and added some AB+ to the ATO

How much do you add and how much fresh water do you go through in a week?

[jservedio]

1 hour ago, Pjanssen said:

How much do you add and how much fresh water do you go through in a week?

I just started it about a week ago and started very slowly - I go through about 5g every 6-7 days and I'm adding 20ml per bucket, so around 3ml/day (25% under their recommended dose for mixed tanks). I still haven't added any new fish yet and it's just my two old clowns in the 50g so even though I heavily feed frozen 4-5x a week when I'm home, it still really isn't enough to keep my nutrients up with all the dry rock in the tank and all the other critters on my ancient live rock. I am hoping once I get more fish, I can do away with it.

 

My garage has been crammed full of crap because we are adding a sunroom and new deck, so all the outdoor furniture has been in there for months while we waited, but they got started this week so hopefully it'll be cleared out in a couple weeks and I can get my QT tank up and running to start adding fish!

[jservedio]

Picked up a couple of RFAs today to add to the tank and was giving my maxi-mini a very time consuming photo shoot, for what I will hopefully be able to tell you about mid-September!

 

New Orange/Teal RFA:

 

 

 

 

New Red/Green RFA:

 

 

 

 

My favorite picture so far out of a few dozen from the Maxi-Mini Shoot in really-high resolution, so zoom in! (Edit: boo, was resized when it uploaded!)

 

[jservedio]

I've got the new orange RFA is all tucked in exactly where I want and looking great! Still need to work on the red one a bit, but it's a little more stubborn.

 

 

 

 

It's been about a month since I started dosing nutrients and aminos, and while my acro colors have been coming back really quickly, the LPS went nuts. I think the biggest transformation in color was with my orange crush echinata. These two pictures are 3 months apart.

 

6/7/21:

 

 

Not as good of a picture and it was pissed off from cleaning the glass, but the color is totally different today. In the 9 years I've had this coral, it's never had this much green.

 

[mipster]

woooah that is an extreme change! incredible!

[Pjanssen]

Wait, you like the green better?

[jservedio]

46 minutes ago, Pjanssen said:

Wait, you like the green better?

Lol absolutely not. But, I am really happy I am getting green that I haven't seen in years. I'm hoping I can slowly adjust things to get color somewhere in the middle.

 

That said, there is way more orange now and I prefer that way more than green or purple.

[jservedio]

I took a higher quality top down of it this morning and the green isn't that bad since it's still got quite a bit of purple. I'm hoping the orange keeps ramping up over the next few months. The cyan is so much better now as well. It's definitely on a roll growth wise and throwing tons of new polyps.

 

Now:

 

January:

 

 

Totally unrelated to reefing, but @Christopher Marks, the sticker you sent me that I slapped on my water bottle definitely helped - have to represent NR in other pursuits!

 

 

[mitten_reef]

not sure which one i'm more 😲 by, the coral growth and coloration, or the height of that climb.....but definitely both!!!

 

echinata looks great!  

 

 

[aclman88]

2 hours ago, jservedio said:

I took a higher quality top down of it this morning and the green isn't that bad since it's still got quite a bit of purple. I'm hoping the orange keeps ramping up over the next few months. The cyan is so much better now as well. It's definitely on a roll growth wise and throwing tons of new polyps.

 

Now:

 

January:

 

 

Totally unrelated to reefing, but @Christopher Marks, the sticker you sent me that I slapped on my water bottle definitely helped - have to represent NR in other pursuits!

 

 

Dope. Where do you go climbing? It’s always interested me but I also have a healthy fear  of heights

[jservedio]

3 hours ago, mitten_reef said:

not sure which one i'm more 😲 by, the coral growth and coloration, or the height of that climb.....but definitely both!!!

 

echinata looks great!  

 

 

Thanks, I've been liking the AB+ as a substitute for fish poo until I can get some more fish.

 

It's not actually as high as it looks - you have to drive and then hike way uphill to get to the base of the climb. I was maybe 150 feet off the ground, it just looks crazy high up because the cliff is at the top of a small mountain that's about 1500 feet above the surrounding area. For an "easy" climb, it is improbably steep - the whole wall is overhanging, but there are huge incut holds everywhere you could want one which is extremely rare for such an imposing wall. Good way to make a weekend warrior like me look way stronger than I am 😆

 

2 hours ago, aclman88 said:

Dope. Where do you go climbing? It’s always interested me but I also have a healthy fear  of heights

I've been all over the country climbing, but lately since my son was born and with the pandemic I haven't gone outside of NC more than a couple times. Luckily we've got some of the best climbing east of the Mississippi. This route is a 2-pitch climb at a cliff called Moore's Wall at Hanging Rock State Park about 2 hours from my house. I too have a fear of heights, I just trust my gear and my ability to use it properly! I white knuckle the ladder while cleaning my gutters, but have gotten very comfortable on rock.

 

It isn't hard to get into at all - you can pop by a climbing gym and rent shoes and a harness. Most gyms have something called an auto-belay system (super cool machines) that you simply clip into and they automatically slowly lower you to the ground when you fall or let go. If you have a friend you want to go with, learning to Top Rope belay is trivial and something you can pick up in maybe 15 minutes. Most gyms have classes for it. The basic gear to go to a gym is maybe $250 without sales (harness, shoes, grigri belay device) if you want to purchase your own stuff. Hell, if you are really afraid of heights, you can skip roped climbing and just boulder - basically climbing 10-12 foot routes over top of a big thick gym mat.

 

Once you learn to top rope, you can start going outside either with a guide or someone who knows what they are doing at short cliffs with walking access to the top of the cliff set up an anchor. Local chapters of American Alpine Club do meetups like every month and are free. Many gyms also do "gym to crag" classes and organize trips. That will give you a taste of real rock climbing with no risk of getting seriously injured or dying since you aren't actually falling (the anchor is above you, and you are just sitting back on the rope). This is what probably 90% of people who climb outdoors do and is more than enough for most.

 

If you get a taste for that and want more than top roping, the learning curve gets much steeper and the risks start becoming real...and terminal. The next step would be lead climbing. There are two types of lead climbing: sport and traditional (trad). Lead climbing is where you are climbing above protection (steel bolts for sport, you place your own protection for trad) and if you fall, you are falling twice the distance to your last piece of protection plus rope stretch. With sport climbing, there are steel bolts drilled into the rock that you clip your rope to as you climb and is designed to be safe (relatively) so that you can fall almost anywhere and not hit the ground or a ledge. Bolts are typically spaced 6-10 feet apart and are placed as smartly as possible to minimize danger and be as easy as possible to clip - most falls are typically no more than 10 feet, though you can occasionally see bigger falls in the 20 foot range. Broken ankles and wrists are the most common injuries and deaths are extremely rare. Traditional climbing (what I was doing here) is the same concept as sport, except without the bolts. You bring your own removable protection (called nuts and cams) that you place where the route allows. While a steel bolt can hold 10,000 lbs comfortably in any direction, the gear you place isn't nearly that strong and it's ability to hold a big fall rests entirely on how well you placed it and ensuring the rock is good. If you don't place gear properly and fall on it - it can just rip right out of the rock and you'd better hope you did a good job on the gear before it. This is why the learning curve is so steep and mistakes simply aren't an option.

 

While traditional climbing is undoubtedly riskier, it gives you the freedom to just walk to the base of any cliff and start to climb. You don't have to follow someone else's route, can protect the climb as well as you would like or can forgo protection on easy climbing for speed, and it leaves no trace.

 

Once you have that down, you can start going beyond a rope length (~200 feet) off the ground up some big stuff - called multi-pitch climbing. Basically you climb up, build an anchor, bring your partner up and repeat until you get to the top. That's where the real fun is at and is my absolute favorite.

[A.m.P]

Climbing gyms and walls/towers are also just a ton of fun.

[jservedio]

On 9/14/2021 at 10:48 PM, A.m.P said:

Climbing gyms and walls/towers are also just a ton of fun.

Definitely! I spend at least couple days of the week climbing indoors, especially in the summer when I don't feel like melting in the NC heat and humidity.

[jservedio]

All of the GHA is now gone off my rocks entirely, but is still clinging to my powerhead, frag rack, and back glass and making keeping my nutrients up a little difficult. They are definitely better than they were when the GHA was growing, but lots of pale SPS. At least they are still growing, albeit a bit more slowly.

 

My Boomberry has almost completely taken over the tiny chunk of red cap I had left behind up top and is now finally throwing up branches right off the monti Here are a couple of okay quality pictures showing the new branches coming up.

 

 

 

 

A little more zoomed out you can see much of the boomberry colony has smoothed out it's corallites and is turning into base. Not a big deal since new branches are popping up out of it, but it's a little strange seeing corallites on branches just start disappearing. This has been ongoing for almost a year. All of the new growth looks just like it should, but the old growth from the 20 is almost all turning into base.

 

 

 

 

The newest rock in the tank in the front right corner has rid itself of GHA and is starting to mature nicely. Those Utter Chaos palys are growing like crazy. I got 2 polyps of them very late last year and are now more than 20, even after selling a few frags. Should look really nice and flow directly from the old rock behind it with my caps, hulk micro, and hawaiian ding dangs. I still really need to cut the yellow tips off that rock and just get rid of it. I don't have too many acros, so I certainly don't want doubles!

 

[jservedio]

Cleaned off my left glass that's facing the wall and caught a peak of my stunner chalice and I can't believe how far it's recovered. When I set up this tank, I buried my stunner chalice under some rockwork and let it "die" since there was no way to get it off the rock. When I re-scaped in May, I uncovered the "dead" skeleton after being totally buried for 6 months and in just a month it started growing polyps out of the skeleton. Another 3 months along, and it's grown an incredible amount for where it was and in another 3 months will probably look better than it ever did.

 

It's a terrible photo since it's incredibly hard to get a picture of this. It's actually behind my rockwork, just off the sand, and I can't fit my camera between the glass and the wall, but you can still see what's going on:

 

 

 

 

And here is where it was just 3 months ago - one month after being uncovered.

 

[DevilDuck]

On 9/23/2021 at 3:18 PM, jservedio said:

Cleaned off my left glass that's facing the wall and caught a peak of my stunner chalice and I can't believe how far it's recovered. When I set up this tank, I buried my stunner chalice under some rockwork and let it "die" since there was no way to get it off the rock. When I re-scaped in May, I uncovered the "dead" skeleton after being totally buried for 6 months and in just a month it started growing polyps out of the skeleton. Another 3 months along, and it's grown an incredible amount for where it was and in another 3 months will probably look better than it ever did.

 

It's a terrible photo since it's incredibly hard to get a picture of this. It's actually behind my rockwork, just off the sand, and I can't fit my camera between the glass and the wall, but you can still see what's going on:

 

 

 

 

And here is where it was just 3 months ago - one month after being uncovered.

 

Amazing how resilient coral can be. Makes me think I should have kept the skeletons of all the coral I thought died in the tank.

 

[jservedio]

10 hours ago, DevilDuck said:

Amazing how resilient coral can be. Makes me think I should have kept the skeletons of all the coral I thought died in the tank.

 

You definitely should for a least a month or so - you really never know. Some of the nicest corals I have came back from the edge of death with no visible flesh or polyps. This is now the 5th coral I've had come back now, so it isn't a fluke.

 

You should check out what happens with plate corals coming back from the death. They go from one big plate to dozens of tiny little plates when they come back. It's pretty incredible.

[Pjanssen]

In a nut shell, so I don't have to go back pages(I will if I must), how did you get rid of the hair algae? And can't you remove the powerhead and frag rack to scrub them clean, and scrape the back wall with a razor to get it clean?

[jservedio]

4 hours ago, Pjanssen said:

In a nut shell, so I don't have to go back pages(I will if I must), how did you get rid of the hair algae? And can't you remove the powerhead and frag rack to scrub them clean, and scrape the back wall with a razor to get it clean?

For the new rocks I did nothing and just waited for coralline to take over. I've never added dry rock and not gotten hair algae on it for a few months - but it only happens on clean surfaces and white rock so it doesn't bother the corals or old LR at all other than sucking up the nutrients.

 

For the powerhead and rack I just pulled it and cleaned it every month or so whenever it got bad enough to drop the nutrients enough for the acros to pale a bit or was bothering anything on the rack. For the back glass I scrape it where there is no coralline and just let it do it's thing and it eventually goes away when other stuff out competes it. I run a filter sock while I scrape and leave it for a few days after. Just takes a while for calcerous algae to cover the back wall and powerhead.

 

There is still a little on the glass and powerhead, but it's not enough to do anything about at this point.