--75g Barebottom/Starboard Reef Project--
- Thread starter arconom
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arconom
Premium Member
Well I have 3 Fish now
I feed every 2 days. It's a chum mixture that Ross made it has just about every type of food in it. I have been slacking on my detritus vacumming since I thought "Hey Maybe I should leave a little trash in the clean tank"
Melev, my Phosphates are undetectable by The Deltec Test kit. I do a small water change ever week, to 2 weeks. My alk is 9.6, calc 420. I clean the riser every 3-4 days I love skimming wet. Also Melev your corals are far from Green I run Carbon in a phosban reactor and change it every 2-3 weeks. I need a little more flow going into the reactor but for now I think it's ok.
As far as algae...... I have 1 small piece of LR that has small batches on it. But I have to say Ross and Jay have lots of Algae and there corals look SICK! The reeflux's with the mag ballast are to pink. Ross will be coming over my house this weekend maybe he can take some pictures to show you guys.
All the toys in the world don't give my corals color
On a scale from 1-10, 10 being the worst which is a divorce outside the reef world.
In the Reef World my depression is about 9.5 with depression having to do with my tank colors. Guys the money I have spent on bulbs is sick!
It sucks when I know what my tank could look like and people come over and see my Blah colors.
I feed every 2 days. It's a chum mixture that Ross made it has just about every type of food in it. I have been slacking on my detritus vacumming since I thought "Hey Maybe I should leave a little trash in the clean tank"Melev, my Phosphates are undetectable by The Deltec Test kit. I do a small water change ever week, to 2 weeks. My alk is 9.6, calc 420. I clean the riser every 3-4 days I love skimming wet. Also Melev your corals are far from Green
I run Carbon in a phosban reactor and change it every 2-3 weeks. I need a little more flow going into the reactor but for now I think it's ok. As far as algae...... I have 1 small piece of LR that has small batches on it. But I have to say Ross and Jay have lots of Algae and there corals look SICK! The reeflux's with the mag ballast are to pink. Ross will be coming over my house this weekend maybe he can take some pictures to show you guys.
All the toys in the world don't give my corals color
On a scale from 1-10, 10 being the worst which is a divorce outside the reef world.
In the Reef World my depression is about 9.5 with depression having to do with my tank colors. Guys the money I have spent on bulbs is sick!
It sucks when I know what my tank could look like and people come over and see my Blah colors.
melev
Well-known member
Thanks for the images. Okay, you have two 250w 10,000K Reeflux bulbs like I do. Do you supplement with any type of actinics?
How high are the corals in relation to the lighting? Is it mostly along the top? If anything, I'm now leaning toward the theory your tank is too pristine, and the corals are hungry.
I'm so used to soupy water that it is hard to imagine a tank as clean as yours.
I bought a beautiful baby blue staghorn in January or so, and that thing is Gah-reen now. Let me find you a couple of pictures.
Jan 06:
March 06:
Maybe Travis will have some ideas for you. I think feeding a bit more might help, to be honest.
How high are the corals in relation to the lighting? Is it mostly along the top? If anything, I'm now leaning toward the theory your tank is too pristine, and the corals are hungry.
I'm so used to soupy water that it is hard to imagine a tank as clean as yours.
I bought a beautiful baby blue staghorn in January or so, and that thing is Gah-reen now. Let me find you a couple of pictures.Jan 06:
March 06:
Maybe Travis will have some ideas for you. I think feeding a bit more might help, to be honest.
Travis
10 and over club
I am surprised that many of the corals have so much brown to them. Usually, when nutrients are too low, the zoox density within the tissue decreases so the coral becomes less brown. Same thing happens when there is too much light. One thing that is for sure arconom, your coralline is thriving.
At least it has color.:lol:
I know this hobby has gotten to the point where a lot of people are downright scared of any phosphates at all. With sps corals we want very low phosphates, but 0.00 on a high end test kit is too low, IMO. The corals need some of that phosphate to feed their zooxanthellae. Most tanks are C limited but when you truly get your PO4 down to 0.00 then the tank becomes P limited. That might be the case here. I would try feeding the tank more. Why are you only feeding every other day? I hear of people doing this a lot and I kind of feel sorry for their fish. Mine get fed heavily 2-3 times per day along with a full sheet of nori daily. BB tanks are great at allowing the user to control nutrients, so great that you can actually have too low of a nutrient level and some people don't realize that they may actually need to add extra food to compensate for this.
Most people, myself included, worry about increased algae growth with increased feedings. That is usually what happens but I dare you to find any part of any reef that has no nuisance algae. It is all part of the ecosystem. IMO, as long as it is kept to a minimum and under control, it is worth it to be able to feed a little more for the corals.
When I was having problems in my tank a few months back I worried that I was feeding too little. I was only feeding once per day, just enough for the fish to eat in about 3 minutes along with a sheet of nori. This made a lot of my corals very pale and the tissue really thinned up on a few of them. NOTE: I can't say if this was from light feeding alone as I had made a lot of changes at the time. But what I did was added another 20 chromis so I could feed more. Right now, my colors are really popping but I have made a lot of changes recently so it is impossible to narrow it down to just one.
There are a couple ways you can increase your feeding. One is by adding more fish and feeding them more. The problem with this is that if you add too many, it is difficult to remove them so it is difficult to "fine tune" feeding by feeding your fish population.
Another way is to add coral foods like GP's, rotifers, artemia, cyclop-eeze, etc. Most of these are very rich and you have to be careful not to overdo it.
Another way is to add elements that corals require more of in a low nutrient environment. The ZEOvit line offers a wide range of these but you will need $$$$$$.
What I would do, is try adding some ZEOvit AAHC. It seems that ammino acid supplementation becomes necessary in a low nutrient environment like you have in your tank and seems to play a vital role in giving the coral energy reserves to devote to producing pigmentation. This seems to be a good supplement that actually "works". I would start from there and see what happens. I would also start feeding the fish you have at least daily.
At least it has color.:lol: I know this hobby has gotten to the point where a lot of people are downright scared of any phosphates at all. With sps corals we want very low phosphates, but 0.00 on a high end test kit is too low, IMO. The corals need some of that phosphate to feed their zooxanthellae. Most tanks are C limited but when you truly get your PO4 down to 0.00 then the tank becomes P limited. That might be the case here. I would try feeding the tank more. Why are you only feeding every other day? I hear of people doing this a lot and I kind of feel sorry for their fish. Mine get fed heavily 2-3 times per day along with a full sheet of nori daily. BB tanks are great at allowing the user to control nutrients, so great that you can actually have too low of a nutrient level and some people don't realize that they may actually need to add extra food to compensate for this.
Most people, myself included, worry about increased algae growth with increased feedings. That is usually what happens but I dare you to find any part of any reef that has no nuisance algae. It is all part of the ecosystem. IMO, as long as it is kept to a minimum and under control, it is worth it to be able to feed a little more for the corals.
When I was having problems in my tank a few months back I worried that I was feeding too little. I was only feeding once per day, just enough for the fish to eat in about 3 minutes along with a sheet of nori. This made a lot of my corals very pale and the tissue really thinned up on a few of them. NOTE: I can't say if this was from light feeding alone as I had made a lot of changes at the time. But what I did was added another 20 chromis so I could feed more. Right now, my colors are really popping but I have made a lot of changes recently so it is impossible to narrow it down to just one.
There are a couple ways you can increase your feeding. One is by adding more fish and feeding them more. The problem with this is that if you add too many, it is difficult to remove them so it is difficult to "fine tune" feeding by feeding your fish population.
Another way is to add coral foods like GP's, rotifers, artemia, cyclop-eeze, etc. Most of these are very rich and you have to be careful not to overdo it.
Another way is to add elements that corals require more of in a low nutrient environment. The ZEOvit line offers a wide range of these but you will need $$$$$$.
What I would do, is try adding some ZEOvit AAHC. It seems that ammino acid supplementation becomes necessary in a low nutrient environment like you have in your tank and seems to play a vital role in giving the coral energy reserves to devote to producing pigmentation. This seems to be a good supplement that actually "works". I would start from there and see what happens. I would also start feeding the fish you have at least daily.
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