codyreed29
New member
what size fuge do you have?
A Living Room Reef: 90 Gallon Mixed Reef Build
- Thread starter troubadour11
- Start date
Fishy 1
The Reefer From Downunder
If the lfs guy thinks 30 bucks is pricey then troub next time you see him you tell him that fishy has to pay 160+ for those shrimp:facepalm:
Fishy 1
The Reefer From Downunder
Hey Troub I just wanted to say that there's a new LFS opening in town here and I think it is going to be amazing and it might even rival the shop that Biggles has near him! I had a look on there facebook page and they showed some of the stuff they have and i'm very happy. They had a moorish idol that was feeding on mysis and pellets for $50 and they auctioned a beautiful schollie starting at 99 cents(didn't see what it sold for) and they have cheap shrimp!!! with coral banded shrimp for just 30 bucks and porcine crabs for 25. It sounds like they are going to be big time coral exporters that will be shipping to all over aus, and they will have 5-6 big coral bays by the sounds of it.
I know it has no relevance to your build but I'm so excited I had to tell someone:dance:.
I know it has no relevance to your build but I'm so excited I had to tell someone:dance:.
troubadour11
Member
Thanks Marty. I do have a pink montipora capricornis and orange montipora digitata in there still. But those are the ones that went through the recent ordeals and are still trying to hang on.
I went with the birds nest because we had one that was our first SPS and it's done as well as the 2 montipora pieces. All three were doing ok until I screwed up the SG once. Although right now, the original birds nest is struggling to hold on like the monti's.
So in case the monti's do end up recovering, I opted to add the new birds nest because it was the most stable piece I had until recently. That way if all the current SPS recover, I'll have 2 of each rather then 3 or 4 of one kind.
I did look around the store for a "more durable" SPS specimen to add as our SPS-gauge. But on this trip, I couldn't find any pieces that were less rare and less expensive then the little birds nest frag. But if there are recommended types I should look for, please give me any recommendations. Is stylophora typically more or less hardy for SPS? I've thought about trying one of them. But I haven't been able to find a lower cost piece of it lately. I'm not planning much SPS in the tank until I can maintain one piece looking good at least. I don't want to be killing things off and throwing money away.
- Hey there! Thanks for stopping by. My fuge is my old 75 gallon freshwater tank that I used to run. I cleaned it out, drilled the side panel to add an overflow, and then plumbed it back to the sump in my walk-in closet under the stairway.
The fuge has a DSB in it across the bottom. It's supposed to be 4-5 inches all the way across the tank. But I was a bit short on sand when I set up the system. So I am expecting to add a little sand to even off the DSB sometime in the near future. I made a couple tables out of egg crate and pvc-pipe legs to hold the eggcrate up about 1 inch above the DSB. These tables hold the excess dry rock I had from starting the aqua-scape as well as some extra pounds of live-rock that I seeded the system with.
The primary goal of my fuge is to hopefully serve a few functions.
1.) a safe haven for pod re-production. We are nearing the end of QT on a mandarin. So the fuge will hopefully be able to sustain the predation rate of our pod population which I am currently attempting to build by directly feeding this niche.
2.) Increasing the overall water volume almost double of what the system would have been.
3.) Extra biological filtration for livestock by holding excess live/dry rock suspended above the sand bed to keep detritus build up low.
4.) Nutrient removal. Originally I intended to do this via macro algae. But recently had to give up on using macro's for the short term because for whatever reason, my system can not sustain them. I am wondering if the large DSB (which can act as a form of nitrate removal) along with other filtration means (protein skimming, etc) is reducing the levels to quickly and in turn, starving any macro's that I add.
2.) Increasing the overall water volume almost double of what the system would have been.
3.) Extra biological filtration for livestock by holding excess live/dry rock suspended above the sand bed to keep detritus build up low.
4.) Nutrient removal. Originally I intended to do this via macro algae. But recently had to give up on using macro's for the short term because for whatever reason, my system can not sustain them. I am wondering if the large DSB (which can act as a form of nitrate removal) along with other filtration means (protein skimming, etc) is reducing the levels to quickly and in turn, starving any macro's that I add.
- Thanks for sharing that Fishy! It's ok that it doesn't directly relate to the build. This is a journal / conversation more then a direct build thread I guess anyway. So it does relate in a round about way... I have a tank... you have a tank... we all buy stuff for our tanks... you have, what sounds like an awesome, new place to buy your weapons of reefy destruction! So it's still interesting. Might be neat to see some pics when you get a chance to check it out and share. :thumbsup:
So you found a spot for cheap shrimp maybe! YEAH!!! What kind of shrimp? I know both cleaners (fire and skunk) seem to be super pricey over there. Do pistol shrimp go for the same expensive costs as the cleaners?
Fishy 1
The Reefer From Downunder
Yeh I suppose it is all related after all. The shrimp they said they had were coral banded. I don't think they will be open for another month or two as there still plumbing in the last few tanks and getting suppliers sorted.
troubadour11
Member
^^^ OOoOOoOOOoo ^^^ Coral banded shrimp. I'd be jealous if you went with one of them. I've always loved the look of them. Really even more then the cleaners. But because we have access to other types of shrimp that we can have multiples of, I'm choosing to leave it out for now because of aggression on the others.
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So I'm doing a bit of :reading: lately. Primarily reviewing my refugium concepts and taking the studying a bit further. This in turn has led to me to a lot of new reading on nutrient input and export as well.
Here's something I just came across that I thought is an extremely interesting point to make. Because I can say, I've been somewhat guilty of the misunderstanding he mentions.
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and the article I'm reading to back it up
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2012/3/chemistry
Almost the weekend :thumbsup: :smokin:
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So I'm doing a bit of :reading: lately. Primarily reviewing my refugium concepts and taking the studying a bit further. This in turn has led to me to a lot of new reading on nutrient input and export as well.
Here's something I just came across that I thought is an extremely interesting point to make. Because I can say, I've been somewhat guilty of the misunderstanding he mentions.
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and the article I'm reading to back it up
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2012/3/chemistryAlmost the weekend :thumbsup: :smokin:
troubadour11
Member
pmrossetti
Active member
Nice aquascaping.
markalot
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Hey troub.
Don't get too obsessed with phosphate. I say over use of phosphate media has harmed more corals than phosphate ever will!
... and then there's this study: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/blo...els-increase-growth-rate-in-acropora-muricata
:hmm5:
Don't get too obsessed with phosphate. I say over use of phosphate media has harmed more corals than phosphate ever will!
... and then there's this study: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/blo...els-increase-growth-rate-in-acropora-muricata
:hmm5:
troubadour11
Member
- Thanks for sharing the pics of your new acan Fishy! It looks REALLY sweet! I can only hope for such awesomeness from our little single polyp acan sometime far down the line!
So far our single polyp seems to be doing ok. I've never watched or observed them before since I've never had them. But they seem to expand, fold, and change shapes quite a bit. And I would say it's feeding tentacles are extended about 75% of the time at least. Is this normal or good for them? Or a sign of not enough food? It seems happy, I think... I've never seen one go bad though, so it's still tough to tell for this newbie.
- Thanks for the complement pmrossetti! I appreciate the feed back :thumbsup: I'm liking how it turned out so far. I think I will slowly add some rock to it as time goes.
Since I started, I've moved a small rock from the back, up to the front. And I've received my order for some extra dry rock to sculpt into a new tower for the back behind the arch (where I moved the small rock from). After getting it filled up with water and a few fish/corals/shrimp in there. I'm feeling like I could add in a bit more rockwork and still retain the somewhat minimalist feel with open areas for swimming and some open sand-bed areas. We will see in the long run. But I think another chunk or two of rock in there will be good. I always assumed I would add some more rock in as the tank developed. So I tried to go a bit smaller and minimal to start in order to let it grow and evolve as I started to stock the system.
I'm actually looking forward to holding up on stocking for a bit (maybe... if I can stay way from the LFS :facepalm::fish1
and work on the actual build a little bit more. I've got some tank build projects I'd like to dabble with and push a bit further still. Now might be a good time while I try to stabilize my Alk draw and let my corals settle down some.But maybe keep an eye out on here for some potential aquascaping fun in the near future... :jester:
- Good tip Maralot. And not to worry :uhoh3: I'm not freaking out over phosphate levels and media. Just doing some reading on things.Hey troub.
Don't get too obsessed with phosphate. I say over use of phosphate media has harmed more corals than phosphate ever will!
... and then there's this study: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/blo...els-increase-growth-rate-in-acropora-muricata
:hmm5:
Not a bad article to share either, thanks :thumbsup:
To be honest, I don't even have a phosphate test kit. I keep thinking about getting one. But never end up grabbing it because... A.) I always read about how the hobby kits don't test with low enough precision for what we're probably looking for... B.) the proof you gave and other reading I've done makes me think it's not important to monitor EXACT levels.
So I've been trying to train my eyes and base my decisions off how the tank, and more specifically THE CORALS look. As it's typically pointed out. If there's cyano and/or GHA, there's No3 and Po4 in the system...
So I do know I have it in there ;-) Just not at what levels. My expectations are to run the system with heavy nutrient import and heavy nutrient export in the long run. So I'm assuming I'll almost always have some trace levels of Po4 and No3 going in/out. If that's the case, I'm not sure it's worth necessarily monitoring the exact levels. If I can't beat the algae and stuff back out of the DT, then I may have to break down and try to monitor individual levels. So far though, we've managed a slow recession of GHA.
That could be due to semi-aggressive manual toothbrush scrubbing and turkey basting during our recent water change. And also due to the new lighting over the Fuge. I've been seeing lots more algae slowly show it's head in there. And the more algae I see forming in there, the thinner it gets in the DT :bounce2:
And I think I definitely agree on the GFO and phosphate media possibly causing issues. I think I ran into that ugly head after my SG dropped because of my mistake. So the SG dropping is what started my recent issues. Then as I corrected that, GHA exploded! We had been running small amounts of GFO during the SG screw up and fix. So when the algae exploded. I said "ok, well, time to replace the GFO anyway. So I'll slightly bump up the amount I'm using to compensate for the exploading algae."
^^^ I think that was a mistake. Within a week, to a week and a half; our red planet that was struggling, purple/blue sps that was struggling, and our millie (which was doing fine) all shed their skin from the base up and we couldn't stop it.
At this point, I'm guessing they were first damaged by the SG screw up, then when the algae exploded and I added new/more GFO, it stripped the water to quickly and the corals that were hanging on got blasted by SUPER clear water and did not like it. But that's just my hunch off of some reading and looking back at my log of events.
Either way, I'm not chasing those numbers much for Po4, No3. At least for now. I'd rather make sure my Alk stays rock solid more then anything at this point. If I can get Alk maintaining correctly, that will be a huge win for me right now. Because I'm hoping by the time that is all settled into place, my fuge will have algae and my DT won't. LOL.
troubadour11
Member
And I did test our levels this weekend to see how things changed 5 days after the water change.
Remember, the previous levels I tested BEFORE doing a 30 gallon water change.
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And then these numbers are from my memory because I forgot to take a picture of my notebook before when I finished testing.
SG = 1.0255
Temp = 80.2 - I've been keeping a close eye on this. It has never reached or passed 81 degrees F. Our first summer with the tank is in full swing, and here's hoping we will never need to add a chiller. I mean, the tank is the reason we added a whole-house air conditioner, right!?!? :headwalls: I may try setting up a fan or two at some point if it's needed. But so far, it's been hovering between 78 and 80.
PH = 8.1
NH3 = Did Not Test
No2 = Did Not Test
N03 = 5-10
Alk = 7.1 (this is for sure, it's really what I was testing for)
Ca = 445 - somewhere close to here. Either way, above 420, below 460.
Mg = 1200 - I think this is about where it was. It was significantly higher then pre-water change. And I'm pretty sure it was not above 1300.
Po4 = Never tested on system
Other then checking that out and watching how things react, I did play around with my power-heads and flow a bit. Nothing drastic, just trying a slight modification from where it had been to see if I can improve the flow along the front sandbed to help fight cyano down there.
I'm anxious to see how this barrel of ATO/Kalk does. I'm wondering what 75% less pickling lime maintains. I obviously don't have a huge draw on my system. So I dropped the saturation level of pickling lime down quite a bit and will very slowly step up the amount with each new ATO barrel (about 3-4 weeks depending on local temps). Only time will tell at this point. No way to find out quickly :strooper: As long as things keep looking better, I'm ok with it going slowly :lol2:
Remember, the previous levels I tested BEFORE doing a 30 gallon water change.
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SG = 1.026
Temp = 79.8 F
PH = 8.1
NH3 = 0
No2 = 0
N03 = 10-15
Alk = 7.0
Ca = 435
Mg = 1080
----Temp = 79.8 F
PH = 8.1
NH3 = 0
No2 = 0
N03 = 10-15
Alk = 7.0
Ca = 435
Mg = 1080
And then these numbers are from my memory because I forgot to take a picture of my notebook before when I finished testing.
SG = 1.0255
Temp = 80.2 - I've been keeping a close eye on this. It has never reached or passed 81 degrees F. Our first summer with the tank is in full swing, and here's hoping we will never need to add a chiller. I mean, the tank is the reason we added a whole-house air conditioner, right!?!? :headwalls: I may try setting up a fan or two at some point if it's needed. But so far, it's been hovering between 78 and 80.
PH = 8.1
NH3 = Did Not Test
No2 = Did Not Test
N03 = 5-10
Alk = 7.1 (this is for sure, it's really what I was testing for)
Ca = 445 - somewhere close to here. Either way, above 420, below 460.
Mg = 1200 - I think this is about where it was. It was significantly higher then pre-water change. And I'm pretty sure it was not above 1300.
Po4 = Never tested on system
Other then checking that out and watching how things react, I did play around with my power-heads and flow a bit. Nothing drastic, just trying a slight modification from where it had been to see if I can improve the flow along the front sandbed to help fight cyano down there.
I'm anxious to see how this barrel of ATO/Kalk does. I'm wondering what 75% less pickling lime maintains. I obviously don't have a huge draw on my system. So I dropped the saturation level of pickling lime down quite a bit and will very slowly step up the amount with each new ATO barrel (about 3-4 weeks depending on local temps). Only time will tell at this point. No way to find out quickly :strooper: As long as things keep looking better, I'm ok with it going slowly :lol2:
Fishy 1
The Reefer From Downunder
Hey buddy, I'm no Acan expert but I have read that they benefit from spot feeding (but it's not accentual )every two or three days with some mysis, krill or lps pellets. It sounds like it is perfectly normal for them to have their feeders out most of the time. Do you have a lord acan? If you need to feel better about spending money on corals just google 'sexy corals', the prices are...well...pricey but the corals are stunning:eek1:
troubadour11
Member
I was able to keep my acans fairly happy and increase coral color by broadcast feeding reef roids a few times a week. Makes the skimmate smell lovely as well!
Cool, thanks for the info :beer: That's what I was guessing on most of it from the little reading I've done on them specifically.
I'll have to check out those sexy corals later today while I eat some lunch or something. I can at least check out the look of them and dream from the sounds of it. ;-)
We do have Reef Roids and find that LOTS of our corals enjoy it when we mix it in when we target feed. We've cut down to using them once a week on the weekends though to try and fight the algae problem in the DT. I think I was being a little Roid heavy with only a handful of frags in the system.
But it sounds like, in general, they should be ok if we target feed once or twice a week with whatever food we're feeding and any Reef Roids it gets once a week. Along with any live phyto, if they utilize that, which we dose in the fuge a few times a week.
At least it sounds like we're on the right track. I'm not sure if it's a Lord or not. I've seen Acans listed as Acan and Acan Lord. But I'm not certain how to determine the difference. It was a single polyp cultured/tank raised frag that came from a local reefer to the store. So no label on it really. Just what you see is what you get kind of thing. I'd gladly like to find out if it's a Lord though. It makes my tank sound so much more noble to have a "Lord" in it :smokin:
So just to satisfy my curiosity. This morning I tested my Alk level before I left for work. It's a bit off from my normal testing time (11:00), but not by to much. I tested at 8:00am and Alk = 7.8!!! :celeb3:
I'm happy about this result because I think I realized I mis-read my last two tests that showed up as 7.0. Which is weird, because I know how to read it correctly. LOL :facepalm: So I noticed I read it backwards this morning (like the old Red Sea kit way) and I got 7.1 or whatever. Then I re-read the measurement correctly and it was actually at 7.8! So those last two 7.0 readings before/after the water change were actually closer to 8.0/8.1. So that means since 6/8/14 after the last water change I was at 8.5, and a month later I'm at 7.8.
Obviously it would be best if that number was perfectly stable. But between upper 7's and 8.5 is better then before and on the right track, yes?. I've been dripping the new Kalk with lower lime in it now for about a week. So I'm hoping that number might stabilize some. I'm going to keep testing every few days to see if it is stable or dropping still. If it continues to drop, I'll need to up the amount of lime I dilute into the ATO. Until the next barrel gets filled, I can supplement if it's really needed. But I'm hoping the little bit of kalk will keep up with the demand until the next water change and ATO fill.
Even though I feel really down on the whole system right now and feel like I'm worrying about the corals all the time. I think we're back on track and things are doing better over all throughout the system. It's been a long struggle to get this system to stabilize and we're still not there yet.
But a couple cool things. It looks like the fuge is slowly winning the war on growing algae instead of the DT for now. LOL. If I can't get rid of it, I can at least move it to the fuge in the closet :uzi:
AND
It looks like our pistol shrimp and YWG have decided to pair up :celeb3: At least the majority of the time during daylight hours. I'm fairly positive the YWG has been sleeping in it's den too. If not, I've watched it go in/out of the den during daylight hours. And it's awesome, the pistol shrimp comes out 99 times more then it used to before becoming friends with the goby. :celeb1:
So you know... at least we have that going for us :hmm4:
Next up. Finishing raising the QT to 1.026 (currently at 1.023). Then observe the Mandarin for a couple days and feed as much BBS to the tank as possible and get ready to transfer it up to the display!
Fishy 1
The Reefer From Downunder
That sounds great troub, I love goby and shrimp pairs. I hope the algae decides to move to the fuge for you so you don't have the terrible algae all over your rocks. Post a pic of the acan when you have time and I'll try and ID it for you.
In other news and while bello and Biggles are absent and that your a fellow SPS noob, I have to confess that I am planning a sneaky come back to this paused reef war, details are still confidential but it should be pretty sweet when I start building it and its ready for war:strooper:
In other news and while bello and Biggles are absent and that your a fellow SPS noob, I have to confess that I am planning a sneaky come back to this paused reef war, details are still confidential but it should be pretty sweet when I start building it and its ready for war:strooper:
troubadour11
Member
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It's definitely been a fun surprise that the YWG and pistol are paring up and sharing a den now. 1.) we see the pistol shrimp SO much more now. 2.) the interactions between them and the way the goby shows off and defends the burrow entrances from our orange dartfish is funny. The dartfish could care less and just cruises around eating food... but the YWG gets all angry and puffs up and blocks the entrance as it swims by.
Very definitely glad we added these two. Even more so now that the eventually paired up after like 5 months or something like that! Has anyone ever had good success with 2 pistol shrimp and multiple (different) gobies in a 90 gallon tank? It's something that has rolled around my head a bit...
I think the algae is picking up and moving locations fairly well over to the fuge now. I'll post some sump/fuge shots I grabbed the other day in a moment. I hadn't been taking many shots of the system because I've been so down on it. As I mentioned probably before, things seem to be getting better. But at the same time, the "better" everything gets, the more difficult I'm having with corals even though the chemistry and water quality side is better then it ever has been (as far as I can test/tell).
Checkout post #479 for the original acan pics: http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showpost.php?p=22897229&postcount=479
From the little bit I have read on Acan identification, I couldn't find out a way to ID it accurately without being able to see/measure the skeleton of a dead polyp. Which is of course impossible with my one single living polyp.
I don't really have any better shots of it right now. Maybe over the weekend...
I look forward to hearing about whatever sneakiness it is that you are up to. Until then, maybe I'll have to take a trip out to the LFS this weekend and see what I can find.
- Sure, as soon as they stop torturing me with those giant aussie corals that I have to grow out from a tip for 20x the cost. ;-) :strooper: I've got to use whatever ammo I can to stay alive in Reef Wars. LOL
Ok, no really. I'm pretty much done with the shrimp torturing for now. In the future, it will probably only happen when they invade the camera lens like photo-bombing Potatohead. But then they'll just have to learn to deal with it :clown:
Thank you so much for the vote of confidence! It's nice to hear we are in fact, doing well. :dance:
It sure hasn't felt like it lately with the trouble I've been battling to hang onto the few precious corals we have. There's nothing more demoralizing then feeling like you're "doing everything right," but corals seem to be doing worse the better and more stable conditions get.
But I keep trying to look at the positives (less GHA in the DT, pistol and YWG paired up, about to add a new Mandarin).
AND, so far the Seri (electric green bushy birdsnest) we got appears to be doing all right. We added it on 6/21 and so far it appears unchanged to me. LOL So I'm thinking unchanged is probably good
I'll grab some close-ups for comparison this weekend. But to my eyes, it seems the same as when we first added it. Each night it retracts it's long polyps. But every day, they pop back out and look like a long, green, fuzzy pipe-cleaner.And probably more important then PE to my observation is that the skin color and look seems to have remained the same. With my previous few SPS pieces that I've been having trouble with, PE was less of an issue. They all had PE for the first few weeks to a month. Then slowly closed up. Once they closed up, they never came back out and the skin slowly thinned until it was gone and just bare white.
So again, I'm hoping the failing pieces are still fallout from my SG screw up months ago now. I've been testing Alk fairly more often to try and really pin it down. It seems that since about mid-May, start of June, my Alk has been pretty consistent between 7.7 and 8.5. 8.5 was the highest I've ever tested, and was directly post water change.
This week I've tested multiple times between 7:30 and 8:00 am. It seems like my Alk drops approximately 0.1 or a little less per day right now. This week I've seen it test at a clear 7.9, 7.8 (two times in a row), then this morning it started to change at 7.6 but fully changed at 7.7/7.8.
So tomorrow (Saturday) I'll test everything in the AM and see where we are at. I've barely used any ATO since the last water fill. So I'm considering adding a fan that runs from maybe 11:00am until 8:00 pm to increase evaporation slightly and lower the temp a degree or two. Without a chiller and just running the whole house AC, it's been sitting between 80 and 81 consistently this summer. So it might help to get that just a smidge lower. And maybe with the slightly increased evaporation, the kalk will keep that Alk number even more stable near 7.8-8.0.
Now I'll break this post here and drop a few random pictures of the closet and The Great GHA Migration.... :fun2:
troubadour11
Member
Some Euphyllia close-ups for fun... I had these just sitting around from whenever I snapped them recently.
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Here's a feeding we give to the tank on occasions... since we've been hatching BBS to feed the Mandy in QT, it doesn't hurt to toss a batch into the DT for a little live feeding on occasions. The fish LOVE it!!!! I'm pretty sure we will continue to hatch BBS for occasional tank feedings in the future. It's SUPER easy.
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Here is our sad, sad, sad Ric. I don't know if I'll buy anymore that look like this. This was our second try with a light purple polyp with bright orange nubbies on it. No matter where I've tried them in the tank, they were not happy. This includes on the same rock that our other Ric-Yuma and Red Jawbreaker (discosoma, I believe) are doing just fine on.
This little bugger has SLOWLY paled ever since going in our tank. It was moved from low light right by the other shrooms to even lower light under an overhang on the same rock area when it first started to pale.
We kept it there for a couple months trying to let it settle in, but it just continued to pale and then started to shrink in size despite target feeding.
So being completely befuddled with it, and having watched one with the exact same color and look to it do the same thing when we first started a year ago. That original one eventually shrunk down to a bump and then disappeared when left in a low light/flow position. DisBeReef and I discussed it and decided to attempt a lateral move in the tank to see if there was any change. Because at this point, it's just been slowly withering away. So we thought maybe a slow move out into more light, but still at the bottom of the tank might show us something.
We moved it straight across the middle of the tank to the front, bottom, center for observation. Slightly stronger flow and more direct light here. But still at the sand bed level below the little bit of shadow from the center brace.
It obviously must not have liked this. LOL Within a week, it had disappeared. I'm wondering if it just said "NOPE, TO MUCH FLOW!" and let go of the rock to float/roll around the tank and find a new home it liked. But I have not seen a sign of it since. Other then the rock that it vacated. :-/ So it either melted or is hiding in a crevice trying to recover on it's own.
So now we know. A bit of a learning experiment there. It was slowly dying as it was and was really upsetting me. So I thought maybe it wanted more light/flow instead of less. It appears that it did not. LOL :angryfire:
Anyway, here's what it looked like after months in a shadow and low flow next to shrooms that were happy. Oh, and this was just after I moved it to the new spot and took a pic.
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So sad :-( I have yet to fully figure out shrooms. We've been able to have a 50/50 average with them so far. 1/2 of them we put in do just fine. The other half slowly pale and shrink no matter what I do...
One last shot of the hammer close-up just so we don't end this post on something so sad.
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***photo / afternoon coffee break***
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Here's a feeding we give to the tank on occasions... since we've been hatching BBS to feed the Mandy in QT, it doesn't hurt to toss a batch into the DT for a little live feeding on occasions. The fish LOVE it!!!! I'm pretty sure we will continue to hatch BBS for occasional tank feedings in the future. It's SUPER easy.
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Here is our sad, sad, sad Ric. I don't know if I'll buy anymore that look like this. This was our second try with a light purple polyp with bright orange nubbies on it. No matter where I've tried them in the tank, they were not happy. This includes on the same rock that our other Ric-Yuma and Red Jawbreaker (discosoma, I believe) are doing just fine on.
This little bugger has SLOWLY paled ever since going in our tank. It was moved from low light right by the other shrooms to even lower light under an overhang on the same rock area when it first started to pale.
We kept it there for a couple months trying to let it settle in, but it just continued to pale and then started to shrink in size despite target feeding.
So being completely befuddled with it, and having watched one with the exact same color and look to it do the same thing when we first started a year ago. That original one eventually shrunk down to a bump and then disappeared when left in a low light/flow position. DisBeReef and I discussed it and decided to attempt a lateral move in the tank to see if there was any change. Because at this point, it's just been slowly withering away. So we thought maybe a slow move out into more light, but still at the bottom of the tank might show us something.
We moved it straight across the middle of the tank to the front, bottom, center for observation. Slightly stronger flow and more direct light here. But still at the sand bed level below the little bit of shadow from the center brace.
It obviously must not have liked this. LOL Within a week, it had disappeared. I'm wondering if it just said "NOPE, TO MUCH FLOW!" and let go of the rock to float/roll around the tank and find a new home it liked. But I have not seen a sign of it since. Other then the rock that it vacated. :-/ So it either melted or is hiding in a crevice trying to recover on it's own.
So now we know. A bit of a learning experiment there. It was slowly dying as it was and was really upsetting me. So I thought maybe it wanted more light/flow instead of less. It appears that it did not. LOL :angryfire:
Anyway, here's what it looked like after months in a shadow and low flow next to shrooms that were happy. Oh, and this was just after I moved it to the new spot and took a pic.
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So sad :-( I have yet to fully figure out shrooms. We've been able to have a 50/50 average with them so far. 1/2 of them we put in do just fine. The other half slowly pale and shrink no matter what I do...
One last shot of the hammer close-up just so we don't end this post on something so sad.
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***photo / afternoon coffee break***
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