TheCoralBeauty's Transferred IM 50 EXT Lagoon

[thecoralbeauty]

1 hour ago, ReefCap said:

I doubt it but also I sure hope not because I just started my new 14G with it but my PO4 stays around .01.

crossing my fingers for you- if you have a thread for it, i'll be interested to follow along

[thecoralbeauty]

stuck a 1/3 cup of Phosguard in the sump. phosphates are down to .5 overnight. Wondering if this is too quick a drop? No corals seem upset. yet. 

 

[thecoralbeauty]

[pokerdobe]

4 hours ago, thecoralbeauty said:

stuck a 1/3 cup of Phosguard in the sump. phosphates are down to .5 overnight. Wondering if this is too quick a drop? No corals seem upset. yet. 

 

Slow and steady wins the race. I'd slow down just a tad. 

[thecoralbeauty]

6 hours ago, pokerdobe said:

Slow and steady wins the race. I'd slow down just a tad. 

yea, even though optimal ranges are a thing, consistency rules everything in this game. 

 

I measured at 4 am and it was at .5. spend new years day with my folks and tested when I got home at 4pm- still .5. 

running new media- but only a 1/6 cup and will measure where we are at in another 12 hours. 

 

lights go off around 4 so i didnt see everything throughout the day, but things still look pretty good. 

[thecoralbeauty]

phos has dropped to .25 which is much more like it. for how i run this tank, its fine, but could still stand for things to go a little lower so i'll keep the media in and keep testing, but its at least under control. nitrates holding at 25.

 

noticed last night that one of my hammers seemed to be considering bailing out. maybe not full bail out but being moody with a few hammers starting to peel off one edge of one head. It was an odd sight to see the flesh start to peel off (even a small patch- i'm a helicopter mom) and also have little baby branches forming at the same time. after some testing I found that my magnesium was super low- 1100 low, which was also dragging down calcium a bit to the low 300's. dosed mag and adjusted my calcium/alk accordingly. Once the lights came on this morning the hammer is fully fluffed and there would be no way to even tell it was acting that way. hopefully it likes the adjusted mag and those baby branches get back to growing. i'm sure they had begun in the old cube and i'm just now appreciating them. 

 

man, i miss having a five-years-of-stability tank. i had completely taken for granted the auto-pilot i had going for me with that. 😅  even once this starts to hit it's groove, it definitely has a different personality!

 

[thecoralbeauty]

i'm suspicious of everything now. 

out of curiosity (never a good idea haha) i decided to compare my red sea test kits to Ca, Mg, and Alk to my Salifert tests (that are still well within their use-by dates) and the results are SUPER different. Mg was 1200 with my salifert kit, and 1400 with my red sea kit. Ca was 270 with my salifert kit and 400 with my red sea kit. Alk was actually the most consistent, with salifert reading 7.7 and red sea reading 7

 

In any case, nutrients i could only measure with salifert and that produces nitrates at 10-25ish and phos between .25 and .5. I'll be ordering red sea kits for nutrients in a few minutes. 

 

i added 5 peppermint shrimp in the last few days. i spotted 3 of them this morning and what appears to be a molt stuck to the back of one of the powerheads. hoping they start making a dent in the aptasia stragglers. i'm convinced that when i try to kill them with aptasia x, they multiply out of stress and i end up with more than i started with. 

 

I think the red sea kits might be easier overall to follow, does anyone have any opinions of their own? There is a possibility that i'll be spending my summer in california in which case my parents will be dropping by my house to keep the tank running. I'd like to try to simplify testing/maintenance as much as possible for them. i'm still hoping I get to stay here, but it never hurts to prepare for the worst. 

 

brown diatoms, whatever, are subsiding. corals are all happy as are fish. I added a third pump, another nero 5, to the middle bottom back. I think by running all three pumps on low settings ive created gentle but thorough flow, and the corals seem to be really enjoying it.

 

moved some stuff around too in the last few days. i just dosed some phyto and reef energy AB+ but once water clears up in a few minutes i'll probably keep trying to grab photo/video. 

i still feel like i'm a long way from really watching corals stretch out and get back to growing, but i do feel closer to stability than where i was last week. 

 

 

[thecoralbeauty]

 

Video:

 

[ReefCap]

Personally I have noticed that the red sea mag test kit does read different from all other test kits. But Cal and Alk should read the same compared to Salifert. Watch those peppermints closely cause some like to go rogue and start munching on corals.

[thecoralbeauty]

My cardinals have spawned again! 

[DAP]

Congrats!

How long have you had your tube anemone?

[thecoralbeauty]

1 hour ago, DAP said:

Congrats!

How long have you had your tube anemone?

Over 5 years for the purple. 4 for the pink

[Snow_Phoenix]

Your tank is so beautiful! Love the assortment of corals - especially LPS, in there! 😊

[ReefCap]

Is the male holding the eggs still or have they hatched? I’d love to a picture of the male with all the eggs in its mouth!

[thecoralbeauty]

18 hours ago, ReefCap said:

Is the male holding the eggs still or have they hatched? I’d love to a picture of the male with all the eggs in its mouth!

hes got the eggs in his mouth. they'll probably hatch within a month (seems to be the general timeline for these two lovebirds) and i suspect he swallows them, or i he does spit them out, the other fish swallow them. 

I had considered finding a longspine urchin for the tank so the little ones might have a chance to hide, but i didnt get around to it in the old tank, and dont have much algae yet in the new one.

 

I'll try to grab a photo of him holding the eggs. the pair is being pretty skittish though so far, probably BECAUSE they spawned. 

 

In the past, I had accidentally stressed him out trying to fish the coral beauty out of the tank. he spit out the whole clutch in his panic, and didnt ever pick them back up. i tried my best to keep them protected and with good flow but unfortunately the eggs developed eyes, a heartbeat, and then all perished. the two of them kept on spawning. 

 

i'll try to find a way to post  the video i have of the eggs. here is a screenshot. 

[thecoralbeauty]

This is a little off topic, but we do have a few plant-people on the forum, so it's worth asking maybe:

 

I have two orchids right now that are sitting on my window sill not getting a ton of light (i have frosted windows in this room since it is my office and privacy from the breezeway of my condo building's walkway is nice) and I was playing with the idea of mounting them on the walls behind the tank (the tank is set forward from my wall about 6 inches to accommodate the overflow box and plumbing) and maybe adding a small supplemental light for them on the wall as well. I was hoping a) they might look better there and b) they'd enjoy the humidity.

is this a crazy idea? Are there affordable orchid lights that may be ideal for this?

 

 

[pokerdobe]

Following cause my wife has orchids and we suck at caring for plants. 

[I'm Batman]

Best bulb for plants in my wife's opinion.

[aclman88]

Love this tank. Wish I could help about the orchids, I end up killing most plants I take under my care. Congrats on the spawning! Did you get them as a pair or just luck out after buying two? I have a lone bangaii cardinal and was thinking two is better than one. 

[thecoralbeauty]

7 hours ago, I'm Batman said:

Best bulb for plants in my wife's opinion.

Oh that's great! Okay. I need to decide on a fixture. I'm also wondering if having the light from those bulbs spill over into my tank is going to cause a problem due to the difference in spectrum between them and my radion. hmmm...

 

57 minutes ago, aclman88 said:

Love this tank. Wish I could help about the orchids, I end up killing most plants I take under my care. Congrats on the spawning! Did you get them as a pair or just luck out after buying two? I have a lone bangaii cardinal and was thinking two is better than one. 

Thank you so much. I originally got a trio. these two bonded and killed off the third. my dad loves them and for christmas, just after the tank move, he got me two more. unfortunately the two new ones were much smaller than these and these two killed them off in under an hour despite my efforts to rescue/distract. They aren't particularly aggressive otherwise though. 

This week I think the male already swallowed the clutch they just had, his mouth is empty again.

This is what he looked like last week, @ReefCap:

 

[Gore15]

On 12/24/2020 at 4:14 PM, thecoralbeauty said:

So, yesterday afternoon, I noticed a few things:

 

 1- I have some cloudiness to my water. Upon further investigation, I believe the microbubbles from my skimmer are to blame. The water level in my sump is significantly higher in this system than it was in the cube in order to keep the Herbie drain quiet. This is a big deal since I have taken up teaching English lessons online for some extra income while I am back in school, and I do that in this room. Constant gurgling would be awful for everyone. But, because of this, the existing baffles in the sump aren't working like they were intended to, and microbubbles are making their way into my display. It's not a huge deal, but if you're looking for it, you can see it in the video. Ive ordered some filter floss that I plan to wedge between the return chamber and my skimmer chamber and hopefully it does the trick! I also probably need to clean out my skimmer soon. That may also help... 😅

 2- There is a very slight brown film developing on the rocks/sand that is most directly under the light. Its very slight, and occasionally has a micro bubble trapped in it. Not stringy, so I'm not immediately concerned about dinos, but since I did beat those in the old tank, and this was a direct transfer, it may be possible. It could also just be the brown weird photosynthetic film many of us have noticed in our tanks in the last few months. However, I did bump my flow just a touch, test my params, and raise the temp a little. Over the summer, my tank runs around 81-85. I haven't ever had any issues with this, but I've read that higher temps can stress fish. Fish are all fine but I'm not even a full week out yet from the move. Immune systems are still really important right now until I feel like I can trust the stability of this thing. It had been running at 79 the last few days, now it is at 81. I've read that some strains of dinos will go away with higher temperatures, so this is precautionary for a few days. If theres not much change, I'll let it slowly drop back down to 78-79. 

 

My strategy in the past to address cyano and dinos has always been to increase biodiversity. I've been lucky enough to catch things early before they get out of hand, and these methods have worked well for those circumstances. So, I've seeded the tank with live copepods the day of the transfer, but I did order more that should be coming next week. Since I have 4 different wrasses, I don't think I can overdose on copepods. I've been keeping up with daily dosing of different bacterial strains (microbacter, bio-spira, PNS bacteria, etc) and keeping my skimmer running and have a small bag of chemipure elite (carbon and some GFO) in the sump. I've also been dosing phytoplankton. 

 

I have no film on my glass to speak of and no new algae growth, but nutrients are reading high, as usual for my tank: nitrates about 30, phos over 1. alk is sitting at about 7. those numbers are very typical for me, and knowing that I have nutrients, i feel ok continuing to dose bacteria for the next few days without bottoming them out and causing problems. They're a bit on the high side (generally), so they could still drop a touch and i'd feel fine. I wish I had thought to test nitrate and phos before the transfer, but my philosophy the last few years has evolved into a "if things are happy and growing, who cares about the numbers?" approach, so I guess I never bothered to record my exact "happy numbers" for nutrients, other than just knowing they're generally high.... lesson learned. I do know that my tank's "set point" for alk tends to hover around 7. so at least that's maintaining itself into this setup as well! 

 

nitrite and ammonia are 0. 

 

Enjoy the video! (and excuse the ghetto lid. the lid i ordered should ship jan 14th so this is how i'm coping in the meantime)

 

 

A newbew asking, aren't those Euphyllia too close to to other corals? 

[thecoralbeauty]

4 minutes ago, Gore15 said:

A newbew asking, aren't those Euphyllia too close to to other corals? 

my hammers play nice together 🙂  so do two of my torches. the dragon soul is up and away from reach from those two. if something starts stinging, i'll move them. I've had pretty good luck though.

my bubble corals are in time out in the corner, where they will likely remain, they're really my biggest stingers. 

[thecoralbeauty]

The tank has been wet a little over a month now, officially!

 

Updates: 

Tailspot blenny, tang, and lawnmower blenny are enjoying nipping at the little algae growth on my rocks. They also manage to scarf down a little nori every day. 

 

The Bangaii pair definitely aborted this clutch of eggs. I suppose things haven't really fully settled so I'm not really surprised.

 

The ClearView lid I ordered for the tank came in a few days ago. Unfortunately the internal dimensions that IM had sent me were 1/8th of an inch of, causing the lid to not fit.  ClearView takes about a month to make lids, so I placed the lid order as soon as I had decided on the tank, and emailed IM directly to ask for measurements and internal dimensions so I could place my lid order.

 

I ended up on the phone with Kerri from Clearview to sort it out, they're sending some adjusted pieces (I had the tsunami lid made, like my cube's lid) and she took fantastic care of me. She let me know that ClearView designed the drop off tanks for IM and encouraged me to reach out to them to let them know the dims they gave me were wrong. IM replied saying it's not their concern since they expect their tanks to vary in dimension by that much of a tolerance. I relayed this back to Clearview and Kerri followed up making extra sure to send a few options of parts to make sure it fit. If IM can't be accountable, ClearView sure is, even though it wasn't their fault in the first place. 

 

As it is, I'm able to use the new lid even if its not entirely secure. It definitely helps even out the light- the screen I had magneted to the top as a makeshift lid was fine mesh like from a screen door and definitely filtered out a lot of light. I think the wrasses have noticed more than anything else: in the last day that I've had the new lid, they're hiding in the back in the shadows and rarely swimming out in the open again yet. All three even opted to skip breakfast yesterday, and though they were a little more hungry today, they're back to hiding. I'm wondering if maybe my cats had been whispering death threats or something to them overnight? 

 

Params are holding steady:

Mg- 1400

Ca- 450

Alk- 7

Nitrates- 25-30ish

Phos- .5 😞 .... no idea why it is, that no matter what I do, from WC's every other day, to not feeding for a few days, to changing phosguard every day, to adding MORE phosguard, nothing budges it. This is the reading whether I test red sea or salifert. Fortunately, nothing is upset by this. so far... I will keep up the fight. Just because it's not killing things doesn't mean it's helping. 

 

Since the tank is still very young I've been dosing phytoplankton and bacteria on off days. The brown diatoms have not returned. I did snag two small clams in the last week, and so I'll keep a close eye on levels and nutrients for the next few weeks (not that I haven't been already anyway since the transfer). I really love how this rock scape has them up higher towards the light, front, and center. My clams were by far my favorite part of my old tank and the last year without them really was sad. These two aren't anything special so if they don't make it, it won't be as devastating as losing my Mimosa's to some unknown cause. I do hope they do well, though! 

 

Other update: one of my RFA's took a stroll right into one of my Nero's- even with the fish guard on it! I couldn't figure out why the pump wouldn't come back online so i pulled it out to inspect and at first panicked that it was one of my prized wrasses that had been hiding. it was the RFA, of all things. I have him in a little food defroster to keep him from blowing around but so far I can't tell if he will pull through or not. 

 

My little band of peppermint shrimp has begun mowing down the aptasia, with no coral casualties so far. 

 

Overall, all seems well!

 

Oh- and in plant updates: I decided to go with a wall-mounted grow frame. I'll let you know how it turns out once I've got it up behind the tank. 

 

 

 

 

 

[thecoralbeauty]

immediate update: nevermind! Phos have dropped to .1

I stuck about a table spoon of HC GFO in a really fine mesh bag(that i finally found) in my overflow box (this is the reason Ive been using phosguard instead- its bigger and its less likely to mess with your alk)  this morning at about 3:00 AM when i started working and phos measured at .5 then. I just measured again and we've dropped to .1.... wow okay so i'll be pulling that out now! 😅

[ReefCap]

That’s a quick drop! Everything doing ok?