Walker's 35g - Home of the Great Zeo Experiment

[Walker]

And more pics!

 

The usual suspects:

 

The view from the Vortech:

 

The sad birdsnest. The bottom parts are coloring up green, the tips are bleaching white and losing tissue:

 

My best FTS so far I think. It really represents how the aquarium looks in real life:

[Walker]

I'm glad I QT'd my royal gramma, as it developed ich within a week. I am now treating it in hypo (just reached 1.009), and hopefully it will survive and be out of QT in late March.

[Walker]

Finally managed to get my Mg to where I want it to be (1300), although I am very suspicious that IO mixes low for it. I got it to 1300 last week and it dropped to 1250 after a water change. I think I will make it a habit to boost my 5g waterchages with 30mL of TechM, and switch to a more reef-friendly salt when I'm through the bucket. I'm thinking either reef crystals or Seachem reef salt.

 

The royal gramma pulled through the salinity drop in QT and is now swimming around and has started eating again. I thought I would lose him for sure midweek as the ich was all over him and he was barely swimming. I guess after the parasites started dropping off (and hopefully dying in the 1.008sg water) he was feeling much better.

 

Better yet, to my surprise, it seems that my five trochus snails have succeeded in breeding in the aquarium. I have rescued two tiny trochus snails, one from my skimmer, and another from the wastewater bucket. I haven't seen the smaller one since, but the larger one (maybe all of 4mm in diameter?) I've seen wandering around on the rock. I'm happy about that .

[Walker]

Another month, another update. I unfortunately lost the royal gramma in QT to a combination of ich damage (early on) and ammonia (later on). I will have to start over and nuke the QT with bleach, and re-cycle the tank. I was ready to move the gramma to the DT next week too . I guess it's better that it happened in the QT instead of the DT, but I still hate losing fish.

 

The DT has been doing well - too well, apparently. My weekly GFO and carbon changes have apparently gotten to the point where it's stripping too much nutrient from the water. My SPS have started to turn pale, but they are still growing well. I have elected to halve my GFO/carbon changes to 2x a month and feed more. I was hoping to get a new fish in to "dirty" the water a bit, but that will have to wait until next month when my QT is back up. I may try some aminos, but I'm leery as it seems like my aquarium is pretty prone to having cyano outbreaks.

 

Otherwise, corals are doing great, especially the LPSes. The duncan is growing 3 more heads, and I think one of the hammers is starting to split as well.

 

I did lose 1 trochus snail just yesterday to what I presume is old age (it just up and died) but on the plus side, I now have five small trochus wandering around the aquarium. The largest is now almost a centimeter in diameter, and the others are catching up.

[Walker]

Photos, of course!

 

Cleaner shrimp pestering the frogspawn. I accidentally poured out too many 1mm NLS pellets and there was a pileup of 5 hermits, a nassarius, and the shrimp.

 

The clowns blithely wandering around their favourite torch above the commotion.

 

A little blurry, but you can see the largest of the baby trochus in the middle almost directly behind the green slimer.

 

A closer look at the clowns' favourite hammer. Looks like the top head is starting to split.

 

FTS:

 

[Walker]

March hasn't really been a down month for the reef, but it marks the first time I encountered STN on my SPS corals. I've lost 3/4 of a frag of my pink milli and majority of the underside of a green slimer. It turns out I've been overusing GFO and creating a ULNS situation in my tank. Quite mystifying to me as I thought that only happened with carbon dosing, but since I started feeding oyster-feast, the STN has slowed down considerably. It has stopped on the milli and hopefully has stopped on the slimer. I did frag the green slimer just in case.

 

Sad pic of STN'd slimer and frag:

 

On the plus side, the extra coral food has really stimulated the growth of my other corals (notably the bird of paradise). My montis that have faded out are starting to regain colour.

 

On better news, I now have a new favourite coral:

Stubby green torch from an LFS an hour or so away. I love how it swishes in the current. Now I have the trifecta of Euphyllias: torch, frog, and hammer.

 

Torch from another angle:

 

Clam being all... clam-my:

 

Bird of Paradise being all fuzzy with almost extreme PE after oyster-feast feeding:

 

FTS:

[Walker]

So I've been observing the STN on the green slimer and I've come to the conclusion that it won't stop without manual intervention. I decided to cut off the remaining branch with STN and smother the leading edge of it with reef epoxy. Hopefully that will take care of infected tissue, and the coral can start to recover. I don't like the look of the reef epoxy though - here's to hoping the slimer encrusts onto it nicely.

[Walker]

Looks like the STN event is in the history books (knock on wood). I have noted that the firetruck milli is orange-ing up, and the bird of paradise, which faded to a sort of a pale cream, is now developing its characteristic green tinge. I added a quarter of my usual GFO (i used 1/8th last week) and hopefully that will be the maintenance dose.

 

I also switched to DDH2Ocean for my salt. Kinda nice not to have to dose my water change bucket for once.

[Walker]

After recovering from STN, I decided that it's time for some new corals! A local guy has some fantastic frags (can actually call them colonies, for sure) and I made the hour-long trek to his place.

 

My favorite, a pink milli:

 

Love this deep blue Cali tort. This "frag" is honestly 4 inches high.

 

A bali tricolor - yellow with purple growth tips, green polyps:

 

Purple stylophora:

 

Yellow tort. It's a pruned branch from his massive colony, so it doesn't have branches. It IS the branch. Hope it starts branching out in my tank.

 

He also gave me some dove snails to supplement my slowly-growing cleanup crew. They really home in on algae - within a day of them in the tank they're crowding around the skimmer intake, which is thick with brown stuff.

[Walker]

Got an osmolator for the tank. I had to bend some acrylic to create a plastic "hook" for it to work with my tank's rim. Been working well so far - we'll see if it was worth it.

[Walker]

My quick-and-oh-so-very-dirty DIY for the Osmolator:

 

Scoring acrylic:

 

A little ooops while scoring/snapping off acrylic...

 

Oh well... keep going!

 

Installed on the DT:

[Walker]

Tank is now full of coral, I think. Added three more frags - an Incredible Hulk, tricolor bonsai, and forest fire digitata. Also moved my stubby torch to an area with lower flow.

[Walker]

The newest additions - been looking for these forever. I'm going to call it quits on adding more coral now to let everything grow in.

 

The tricolor bonsai:

 

The forest fire digitata:

Incredible Hulk:

[Walker]

New fish addition, at last! A yellow watchman joined my fishy friends last week, after an abbreviated QT. He is alert and active (maybe too skittish right now), and I managed to catch him peeking:

 

I added a small Randall's pistol shrimp to pair with him today, but they haven't run into each other yet. The shrimp is deep in a piece of LR right now... one can only hope they will pair up.

 

In addition, I added a white porcelain crab.This guy seems to be a lot braver than the blue porcelain, which is kinda skittish:

 

The rest of the aquarium seems to be doing well after that STN bout. I'm debating whether or not to run GFO again (maybe 1x a month for a week), as I don't want phosphates to accumulate. On the other hand, everything's recovering fine so I don't think there's an excess right now.

 

The rest of the crew:

Tailspot chillin':

 

The clowns have now taken to swimming in the middle (instead of under a cave) - perfect:

 

My best FTS so far:

Love how my duncan's really taken off:

 

[Walker]

It's very interesting to me, looking at the FTS series that I have, that things were growing well (if a bit browned) up until December, when I decided that I have an awful lot of phosphates and started running GFO. Then all growth slowed to a crawl (or STN'd) until the March 2013 FTS, when I cut GFO to 1/8th, and have had excellent growth since I removed it altogether (April to May).

 

The basic GFO from BRS is pretty potent! I'll probably intermittently run GFO (maybe a week out of a month?) just to make sure phosphates don't rise too much, but you can really see how much nutrients I stripped when everything started taking off after I took out the GFO.

[Walker]

Elos kit came up with .092 PO4, so I'm going to run a teaspoon of GFO for a week and see how it affects the readings.

 

With all the coral additions thriving and encrusting, my Ca uptake has increased. I am currently dosing 5mL B-ionic to compensate for ~15ppm Ca drop per week. For the past month, my Ca has been trending down from 470 to 440. Time to increase the dose to 7.5mL a week and adjust my projections to 25ppm Ca/week.

[Walker]

Tank update! The tank has been doing really well, except for a touch of STN on my bali tricolor. I think I dropped the phosphate too fast last go-around with GFO - I am hoping that it will make a good recovery. The rest of the SPS are doing fantastic. Even the little stub of a Red Planet is starting to grow faster, and I am hoping it will start sending up branches as opposed to encrusting. LPSes are doing well, with my two hammers starting to split more heads. I really want to encourage the duncan to grow more, so I have been spot feeding it. I am concerned that my one softie (a toadstool) is growing bigger and MOVING slowly towards my favorite tricolor frag. I'll have to figure out how to prevent it from eventually engulfing it.

 

The fish are mostly ok. The yellow watchman and the blenny had a little altercation that ended up with a rather large bite mark on the blenny's face. It's almost gone now, and the blenny now watches himself when wandering near the watchman's hidey-hole. It is a little frustrating that the Randall's pistol and the YWG have not paired up even though their burrows are within 10" of each other, but I'm hoping it will happen in time.

 

I am a little concerned about spots of red bubble algae sprouting around my rocks. I am hoping that maintaining close to ULNS will slow that down enough that I can manually pick them out. I might consider carbon dosing to maintain ULNS but I'm kinda worried I might disrupt my aquarium's balance, which has been working well so far.

 

Anyway, on to the pictures!

 

My best picture of the clowns fighting for dominance:

 

Excellent growth on the forest fire digitata - almost a centimeter of growth on the tips:

Bird of paradise growing like gangbusters. Note that it doesn't like either the high flow or the light - it is bending back away from the flow and the light.

 

Green slimer frag has recovered nicely from STN:

 

Pink milli has encrusted past the epoxy right onto the rock. Very fast growth!

 

My favorite tricolor. Note the encroaching sarcophyton tendrils:

 

Cali tort starting to a have decent growth tips.

 

Incredible Hulk acro has added some decent growth as well:

 

I'll post a newer FTS tomorrow.

[Walker]

Aaand FTS!

[Walker]

Just a bit of an update... I have tried to trim/frag a couple of my SPS (my first fragging! yaaay!). I've mounted them around the tank, and hopefully they'll be happy and start to encrust.

 

 

 

I also rotated my toadstool rock so that it won't eventually encroach on my tricolor bonsai.

[Giga]

Cool tank and good job fragging

[Walker]

After using my AC70 for a year, it broke down and I had to take it apart. While I made it work again (a couple of amphipods nested inside the propeller housing o.O), I accidentally killed my filter sponge with hot fresh water (doh!). I am unwilling to put it back in as I am sure it is "live" and that amount of bacteria that has been lysed by fresh water can do no good. So... I am running my system without a mechanical sponge filter for the first time. I'll sit and see how it affects my system. If worse comes to worst, I can always use quilt batting to add a mechanical filter. If the experiment is successful, I might upgrade to an AC110 and use it as a fuge instead. It'd be an interesting exercise, I think.

[Walker]

I've decided to replace the nutrient export that I perceive the sponge provides with carbon dosing. I'll start with 1mL of vinegar (very low, I know) and ramp up to 10mL as a maintenance dose, as I already have a low-nutrient system. Seems like a lot of people end up with about .5mL of vinegar per gallon (Randy Holmes-Farley ended up with .6), so erring on the side of caution would be good I think, especially if nitrates/phosphates were already undetectable to begin with.

I'll also start more of a weekly FTS series to document my experiment.

[Walker]

Just a small update this month. Frags are doing very well except for my bali tricolor which continues to STN, very slowly. I can't figure it out - high nutrients, low nutrients, ULNS... nothing works. I even superglued around the base trying to kill the STN but no dice. If it still progresses I'll have to frag it and see if the frags survive.

 

I've decided to back off of carbon dosing as it seems the system is already very low nutrient-wise anyway. I went up to 3mL vinegar, which is almost nothing, but I started seeing some colour loss with my green slimer. I'm going to go use 1mL maintenance for a couple more weeks and see if the colours rebound.

 

My forest fire montipora digitata seems to have a few montipora black bugs. That explains why the polyps started retracting a few weeks ago. I have taken to manually removing them. Hopefully I can catch enough of them to make a difference. I have very little in the way of montis so there isn't much damage.

 

I took FTS every week but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of changes so I'm just posting the latest one .

 

[Walker]

Just something unusual... my white porcelain crab molted, and it immediately took shelter in the waving tendrils of the toadstool. It stayed there for a day and is now out and about again.

 

[Walker]

Happy birthday to these guys - they took residence in their new home one year and one week ago! They've grown quite a bit, but I figure they still have quite a bit of growing to go. Please ignore the tailspot blenny photobombing .

 

 

And appropriately enough, I added a brand-new toy to the "simple" tank I started out with:

 

 

I've set up the probes and lights so far. Can't wait to play around with it more!