A Living Room Reef: 90 Gallon Mixed Reef Build
- Thread starter troubadour11
- Start date
markalot
...
JMorris271
New member
I hate open ended threads.
:wavehand:
:wavehand:
Fishy 1
The Reefer From Downunder
Yeah I think it was too as that had nothing to do with troub at all. Good jobI think it's nefarious activity.I reported the post.
troubadour11
Member
Sorry it's been awhile everyone. I've been busy on a job, letting things sit and see what happens while I was dabbling with the lights, then a much needed vacation where DisBeReef and I got to dive in a 1.8 million gallon aquarium!
It's just been taking me extra long. It's been slow from the start. So between my building sessions, I just try to journal and keep track of things that have been going on. I'm well over-do for a good update right now. So maybe this weekend I'll try to put together some pictures for everyone.
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Well, we went on our first big vacation since having the tank up and running. We were gone for a week and had a friend watch the dog, tank, and house. I set up ATO/Kalk, emptied the skimmer, did a 15 gallon water change, and had food separated out into a little pill container for each day. So all our sitter had to do was defrost the food in some tank water and dump it in for the week.
First and foremost, there are still things alive in the tank other then algae and bacteria!!! :bounce2::bounce3: So at least we have that going for us.
On the somewhat frustrating side. Our hammer that seemed to be doing so well was covered in a white bacteria film when we got back. So I'm assuming that is a goner :facepalm: I was quite upset about that. It had been growing and doing so well. I have no clue what caused it to vanish while we were gone. Especially after developing a new mouth and growth. Basically the same story of everything in the tank. If it starts to do awesome and grow, then it's about to mysteriously die... The other negative event while we were away was our giant feather duster lost it's crown.
Everything seemed to run just fine while we were gone. I was able to monitor lights, temp, etc. through my phone while on the trip. The only parameter that changed was our Alk. It went from 8.4 at the beginning of Sept slowly up to 8.7 when we got home from vacation on the 27th (last weekend). Our PH was up slightly from where it normally is. About mid 8's rather then 8.1/8.2. I'm guessing that was because the house sitter probably just ran the AC for the week. We tend to open the house up a lot when we are home and it is nice. I am assuming that that Alk rose because the hammer died and the Alk demand dropped a little bit. That's my best guess at least.
Another upsetting thing is our Orange Firefish is missing. I didn't see it in the sump or refugium. And we had the screen tops on while gone, so it didn't gho carpet surfing. So it's either in the DT alive and hiding, in the DT dead, or maybe in the overflow box. Fingers crossed it shows up. I'm not sure what would have caused that. But we were gone, so there's not much of a way to figure it out.
Well, enough of the negative things in the tank. One thing we did notice is that our Duncan appears to be developing another head! This came about while we were gone too. But if our tank history has anything to say about that, it means it's about to die off for no apparent reason. Our Pink Monti-Cap survived as well. It's looking slightly more bleached/pale since we left. I'm guessing that could be for 2 reasons. 1.) screen tops on cutting the light to low levels. 2.) the Alk shifting slightly up over the 3 weeks since the hammer died. We had noticed it started to get lots more color in the 2 weeks before vacation once we added the optic lenses and removed the screen tops. So I'm hoping higher light levels will help there. But heck, it's still alive at least!
Our mushrooms are still doing good. The Red Jawbreaker is bigger then it ever was. Our long lost orange/blue Ric that showed back up now has even darker color and seems to have grown (or is expanding more). And our new Yellow/Pink mushrooms are still opening up and expanding nicely.
I haven't removed any of the trumpet skeletons yet because there are still some of the heads with small mouths on them that appear to be getting bigger.
Oh, and the 2 blastos are just as fine as always. Same with the Raptors Peace Favia.
Well, I wanted to get back in here and say hello and give a quick update. It had been awhile and I didn't want you all worrying. Unfortunately, it's still the same hit and miss with our corals. But for every bad thing, there is usually a new good / interesting thing that shows up. I'm just really hoping we can get this tank to turn a corner soon.
Next up... adding in our new rock tower that I built and left in a barrel of water with a powerhead while we were on vacation. I want to get that rock in there and I'll try to snap some pictures of things when I do that to update you on all the pieces... both good and bad :wildone:
- Thanks for checking in and the kind words bcool! :thumbsup: I always appreciate my lurkers ;-) I wouldn't be where I'm at now if it wasn't for lurking on quite a few other threads before I started to build my system.
Yeah, sorry it's been awhile. I was letting things sit for a bit trying to get a new fish through QT.
- Ummmmm... well, it definitely could be going worse. But in general, things are good enough I suppose. A few upsetting things, but a few things that are kind of cool as well. More on all that later.Yeah I'm wondering the same thing. Hope everything is going smoothly troub
- Well thanks for taking care of it :thumbsup: I'm not sure what I missed. I had been letting the system sit and adjust once I got all the optics installed and slowly started bumping up the lighting intensity. I haven't gone up much yet, but I'm working my way up to more optimal levels. Just going EXTRA slow raising the power up on the lights so I don't blast anything that's still sticking around.I think it's nefarious activity.
HA! Well, it isn't exactly open ended. One day I will finish the rest of the "build." I promise
It's just been taking me extra long. It's been slow from the start. So between my building sessions, I just try to journal and keep track of things that have been going on. I'm well over-do for a good update right now. So maybe this weekend I'll try to put together some pictures for everyone.- - - - -
Well, we went on our first big vacation since having the tank up and running. We were gone for a week and had a friend watch the dog, tank, and house. I set up ATO/Kalk, emptied the skimmer, did a 15 gallon water change, and had food separated out into a little pill container for each day. So all our sitter had to do was defrost the food in some tank water and dump it in for the week.
First and foremost, there are still things alive in the tank other then algae and bacteria!!! :bounce2::bounce3: So at least we have that going for us.
On the somewhat frustrating side. Our hammer that seemed to be doing so well was covered in a white bacteria film when we got back. So I'm assuming that is a goner :facepalm: I was quite upset about that. It had been growing and doing so well. I have no clue what caused it to vanish while we were gone. Especially after developing a new mouth and growth. Basically the same story of everything in the tank. If it starts to do awesome and grow, then it's about to mysteriously die... The other negative event while we were away was our giant feather duster lost it's crown.
Everything seemed to run just fine while we were gone. I was able to monitor lights, temp, etc. through my phone while on the trip. The only parameter that changed was our Alk. It went from 8.4 at the beginning of Sept slowly up to 8.7 when we got home from vacation on the 27th (last weekend). Our PH was up slightly from where it normally is. About mid 8's rather then 8.1/8.2. I'm guessing that was because the house sitter probably just ran the AC for the week. We tend to open the house up a lot when we are home and it is nice. I am assuming that that Alk rose because the hammer died and the Alk demand dropped a little bit. That's my best guess at least.
Another upsetting thing is our Orange Firefish is missing. I didn't see it in the sump or refugium. And we had the screen tops on while gone, so it didn't gho carpet surfing. So it's either in the DT alive and hiding, in the DT dead, or maybe in the overflow box. Fingers crossed it shows up. I'm not sure what would have caused that. But we were gone, so there's not much of a way to figure it out.
Well, enough of the negative things in the tank. One thing we did notice is that our Duncan appears to be developing another head! This came about while we were gone too. But if our tank history has anything to say about that, it means it's about to die off for no apparent reason. Our Pink Monti-Cap survived as well. It's looking slightly more bleached/pale since we left. I'm guessing that could be for 2 reasons. 1.) screen tops on cutting the light to low levels. 2.) the Alk shifting slightly up over the 3 weeks since the hammer died. We had noticed it started to get lots more color in the 2 weeks before vacation once we added the optic lenses and removed the screen tops. So I'm hoping higher light levels will help there. But heck, it's still alive at least!
Our mushrooms are still doing good. The Red Jawbreaker is bigger then it ever was. Our long lost orange/blue Ric that showed back up now has even darker color and seems to have grown (or is expanding more). And our new Yellow/Pink mushrooms are still opening up and expanding nicely.
I haven't removed any of the trumpet skeletons yet because there are still some of the heads with small mouths on them that appear to be getting bigger.
Oh, and the 2 blastos are just as fine as always. Same with the Raptors Peace Favia.
Well, I wanted to get back in here and say hello and give a quick update. It had been awhile and I didn't want you all worrying. Unfortunately, it's still the same hit and miss with our corals. But for every bad thing, there is usually a new good / interesting thing that shows up. I'm just really hoping we can get this tank to turn a corner soon.
Next up... adding in our new rock tower that I built and left in a barrel of water with a powerhead while we were on vacation. I want to get that rock in there and I'll try to snap some pictures of things when I do that to update you on all the pieces... both good and bad :wildone:
troubadour11
Member
Well, we managed to accomplish quite a bit this weekend!
I updated the code on my Reef Angel unit. I'm happy to report that I no longer have to turn the phyto culture light and the refugium lights on/off manually through the phone app anymore. The code takes care of it all! Yeah. Less daily work for me.
I also updated my lighting schedules and power a bit. I added the moonlight channels in to run as some extra actinic-UMPH throughout the day. Right now we are at about 80% max output for 2-4 hours at peak time for the whites/color/blues/uvs. I've been slowly bumping those up about 10% every 3-5 days. Now I'm adding in the additional moonlights up to 30%. I'll slowly start creeping them all up to 100% output during peak hours. Then once the tank is adjusted for that. I will probably extend the peak daylight hours so they run a bit longer at full power each day. When testing with the PAR meter, it seemed like all channels at 100% with optics gives pretty good target levels. So I'm working my way towards that.
Besides working on the RA unit and programming. We ended up at the LFS and picked up a new fish to start on QT and a new coral. I also added around 30 pounds or so of rock by adding in that rock tower I built a little bit ago into the DT. So that made for quite the dramatic aquascape change! And I didn't break my glass tank either!
Now for a few photo updates.
- New 2-headed Duncan we picked up back at the end of August. This is the day we added it.
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FTS after adding the Duncan. You can see the spot it fills currently over on the middle right of the tank. (This is with the old rockscape).
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Here it is chowing on some food now from the beginning of October. You can even make the new head that is starting to form. Just barely.
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And hanging out with the Mandarin. You can see the new polyp starting more clearly here.
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Here are the new yellow-ish mushrooms we picked up. They are a pale pink/purple fleshy base with hues of neon yellow, pink, blue dots with a greenish sheen to the whole thing sometimes. It really depends on the current lighting. But they are extremely colorful under actinics!
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...when we first got them at the end of August...
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Recently after our trip when I hit the mouth dead on for one of them and it showed an immediate feeding response.
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Blasto #1. This is the frag that was cut oddly down the center edge of the polyps. You can see it has been doing well and re-growing it's tissue. We're all the way back to full-round polyps now. You can see where it was cut where the center green pattern stops and it filled in with red.
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Blasto #2 is trying to scarf down 2 giant pieces of mysis shrimp. It got both pieces down... I saw it throw up the 2 heads of them later the next day.
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And our Red Jawbreaker mushroom is still chilling. Seems like it's doubled in size since we got it. And it's foot is spread between 2 rocks. I'm wondering if it's going to try and split where it's stretching it's foot out. You can't see it in this shot. But here is a top-down for you. The shroom fully spread out is about 3 inches or so.
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Now for a quick photo break and the last couple updates...
I updated the code on my Reef Angel unit. I'm happy to report that I no longer have to turn the phyto culture light and the refugium lights on/off manually through the phone app anymore. The code takes care of it all! Yeah. Less daily work for me.
I also updated my lighting schedules and power a bit. I added the moonlight channels in to run as some extra actinic-UMPH throughout the day. Right now we are at about 80% max output for 2-4 hours at peak time for the whites/color/blues/uvs. I've been slowly bumping those up about 10% every 3-5 days. Now I'm adding in the additional moonlights up to 30%. I'll slowly start creeping them all up to 100% output during peak hours. Then once the tank is adjusted for that. I will probably extend the peak daylight hours so they run a bit longer at full power each day. When testing with the PAR meter, it seemed like all channels at 100% with optics gives pretty good target levels. So I'm working my way towards that.
Besides working on the RA unit and programming. We ended up at the LFS and picked up a new fish to start on QT and a new coral. I also added around 30 pounds or so of rock by adding in that rock tower I built a little bit ago into the DT. So that made for quite the dramatic aquascape change! And I didn't break my glass tank either!
Now for a few photo updates.
- New 2-headed Duncan we picked up back at the end of August. This is the day we added it.
-
-
FTS after adding the Duncan. You can see the spot it fills currently over on the middle right of the tank. (This is with the old rockscape).
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Here it is chowing on some food now from the beginning of October. You can even make the new head that is starting to form. Just barely.
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And hanging out with the Mandarin. You can see the new polyp starting more clearly here.
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Here are the new yellow-ish mushrooms we picked up. They are a pale pink/purple fleshy base with hues of neon yellow, pink, blue dots with a greenish sheen to the whole thing sometimes. It really depends on the current lighting. But they are extremely colorful under actinics!
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...when we first got them at the end of August...
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Recently after our trip when I hit the mouth dead on for one of them and it showed an immediate feeding response.
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Blasto #1. This is the frag that was cut oddly down the center edge of the polyps. You can see it has been doing well and re-growing it's tissue. We're all the way back to full-round polyps now. You can see where it was cut where the center green pattern stops and it filled in with red.
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Blasto #2 is trying to scarf down 2 giant pieces of mysis shrimp. It got both pieces down... I saw it throw up the 2 heads of them later the next day.
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And our Red Jawbreaker mushroom is still chilling. Seems like it's doubled in size since we got it. And it's foot is spread between 2 rocks. I'm wondering if it's going to try and split where it's stretching it's foot out. You can't see it in this shot. But here is a top-down for you. The shroom fully spread out is about 3 inches or so.
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Now for a quick photo break and the last couple updates...
troubadour11
Member
Here is our Pink Monty-Cap update.
But it doesn't look nearly as bad as it does in this picture. It had paled (I called it bleaching) quite a bit at one point.
But we've found that as we increase the lighting intensity, you can almost see the pink color flood back into it. So this looks really pale here. Some of that is due to the lighting/camera. But the whole thing is really the pale pink color you can see at the edges here. There was the one spot of some die off where you see the green. But it seems like we stopped that and the rest is getting pinker by the day right now. At least from watching it over the weekend.
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Then we grabbed a new pink-tipped torch coral when we got our fish for QT this weekend.
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It's got a nice neon-green flouro center. With some purplish tentacles and light pink tips! At the store the tentacles looked like they had more of a flouro-green sheen to them over the purple. I'm hoping that shows up more as it acclimates to the tank and our lighting. We get hints occasionally.
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Spookiness after stirring everything up doing the rock work. Look at that white, white, white rock!
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The new right end of the tank starting to clear...
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I still need to epoxy the couple small pieces that make the mini-arches and layers into place. But the big piece is in and we're checking out some ideas of ways to dress up the base rock with a few wisely placed chuncks of rock in the future.
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Time to get back to work... at least you can see what we've been up to lately. :thumbsup:
But it doesn't look nearly as bad as it does in this picture. It had paled (I called it bleaching) quite a bit at one point.
But we've found that as we increase the lighting intensity, you can almost see the pink color flood back into it. So this looks really pale here. Some of that is due to the lighting/camera. But the whole thing is really the pale pink color you can see at the edges here. There was the one spot of some die off where you see the green. But it seems like we stopped that and the rest is getting pinker by the day right now. At least from watching it over the weekend.
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Then we grabbed a new pink-tipped torch coral when we got our fish for QT this weekend.
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-
It's got a nice neon-green flouro center. With some purplish tentacles and light pink tips! At the store the tentacles looked like they had more of a flouro-green sheen to them over the purple. I'm hoping that shows up more as it acclimates to the tank and our lighting. We get hints occasionally.
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Spookiness after stirring everything up doing the rock work. Look at that white, white, white rock!
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The new right end of the tank starting to clear...
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I still need to epoxy the couple small pieces that make the mini-arches and layers into place. But the big piece is in and we're checking out some ideas of ways to dress up the base rock with a few wisely placed chuncks of rock in the future.
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Time to get back to work... at least you can see what we've been up to lately. :thumbsup:
markalot
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Excellent update, things are looking good! Duncans are a great indicator coral. When tank conditions are good mine never close up, even when fighting with them to release a bubble algae I don't want a head to have. I swear Duncans have a personality! 
With LED's remember to add 20% to your PAR numbers. I am targeting about 300 (unadjusted) for my SPS which seems to be working well.
^^ IMO of course, no expert here.
With LED's remember to add 20% to your PAR numbers. I am targeting about 300 (unadjusted) for my SPS which seems to be working well.
^^ IMO of course, no expert here.
troubadour11
Member
Excellent update, things are looking good! Duncans are a great indicator coral. When tank conditions are good mine never close up, even when fighting with them to release a bubble algae I don't want a head to have. I swear Duncans have a personality!
With LED's remember to add 20% to your PAR numbers. I am targeting about 300 (unadjusted) for my SPS which seems to be working well.
^^ IMO of course, no expert here.
Thanks Markalot! :thumbsup: I'm glad you're feeling like things are looking good. Despite the recent losses while we were on vacation, there are still some good things that seem to be slowly happening. So it's still exciting despite the frustrations of getting my 1st system running.
Oh, that reminds me. Next time I can, I'll try to grab a shot of that Ricordea Mushroom we thought we had lost and recently showed back up. I'll see if I can get a good shot and do a before/after with it. That's another thing that makes me feel good about things right now.
And good tip on the Duncans being open a lot. They've slowly been becoming one of my favorites. :bum: And they are pretty much open all the time. I haven't seen them close up like the picture from the first day in quite awhile. They are usually really open all day. And then close about 70% of the way. Their tentacles and expansion gets shorter but the polyps stay open with shorter feelers during the night usually.
I definitely appreciate the reminder for the offset on the PAR levels for the LEDs. :beer: DisBeReef was jotting down numbers on a little sketch of the tank as I was calling them out when testing them. So I do have a couple maps of the tank at varying levels. But really the only one needed is the map with all channels at 100%. Because that's the only time I was really pushing higher PAR levels with everything set up the way it currently is.
I'll try to get that PAR map scanned and loaded in soon. But in general. I should be just slightly on the low end before any adjustments for measuring LEDs. If I remember correctly, we were pushing around 300's (maybe a bit higher in a few hot spots) just below the water surface. Everything pretty much 50% of the way down the tank was typically hitting 150s to upper 200's. And below mid-tank was more like 30-110 depending on corners, rocks, etc.
So I'll work on that soon for you. But thanks for the tips and for the vote of confidence! :beer:
troubadour11
Member
Oh, I'm still here and around. I've been lurking and watching the fun on Biggles tank and updates lately. I saw you all pulled him back out of his shell and got some updates. I just haven't had time to drop a message on there. It's been a busy weekend over here celebrating DisBeReefs b-day with a trip to the LFS :love1:
I agree with mark, all our tanks have gotten over their little hiccups and are now doing well
Things seem to be going ok. I tested our levels yesterday before we headed out to spend all our $$. :hmm5:
Mg = 1290
Alk = 8.8
Ca = 430
SG = 1.026
PH = 8.2
No3 = 0.5ppm
So we're still looking good there. I just set up a new barrel of ATO/kalk and did a 15 gallon water change on Friday. And these levels have been stable now for quite a while. 3-4 months now of having things basically set here. Our Alk has bumped up from like 8.2 to 8.8. But I think that was because we lost those couple things over our vacation recently. And that happened at least over a week or more.
I can't remember if I mentioned it. But since we went on vacation, we have not seen our Orange Firefish or our Mandarin. So we were a bit :angryfire: about that. I immediately started QT on a new fish. I have a bit of a goal to get the stock list up as quickly as possible on the tank for the fish.
Despite our No3 showing 0 to trace amounts. I know we have some No3/Po4 in the tank because we have some tufts of hair algea in places and a constant state of "beginning of hair algea" spread around the rest of the place on the rocks.
So our new fish is going to be a bit of a tank cleaner choice. We are 8 days through the tank tranfer method on a new Tailspot Blenny. I haven't been able to observe it much in the buckets. But it is still alive and doing it's thing. On Friday morning, we will be able to transfer it to the 10 gallon QT for a week or so. After the TTM, we will have treated for Ich and Flukes/worms because I dosed Prazi-Pro on transfers 2 and 4. So we will observe it in the glass tank for a bit and make sure all is good before moving it up to the DT.
But that means next weekend we can pick up a new fish again to start the TTM on. Because we can be transferring buckets while the Tailspot Blenny is in the 10 gallon QT. So we can have a bit of an assembly line for getting some fish stocked over the fall. :thumbsup:
I'll get some pictures of the Tailspot once we get it into the 10 gallon glass tank.
Other then fish... we lost the hammer and our acans over our vacation. But the ducans are growing a new head, the blastos are growing and looking good. The favia and mushrooms are still doing great. We added that Pink-tipped Torch and it seems to be really happy. Our Pink Monti-cap is surviving. It had some die off, but seemed to stop. As we've bumped the lighting slowly up to our target levels, it seems to have gotten deep color and more polyp extension. So while it doesn't look the best with some dead algea covered spots. The flesh that is there is a deep/rich pink, with good PE. I'm hoping it holds on and the raised lighting power nurses it back to health. Oh, and our 1st coral ever. A large branch of Candycane Trumpets are trying to come back still. It's down to a small branch with 3 polyps. But they're small and growing. Good signs of recovery there! I guess all-in-all, things seem to be going well and improving to my inexperienced eyes.
So in light of all that and to celebrate the birthday this weekend, we went and picked out some new SPS to try out.
- Fresh cut frag of Lime Green Pocillopora from the 10 inch mother colony in their 800 gallon display tank. About a 2 inch knob
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- Mounted on a new chunk of rock and ready to go!
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- Mystic Sunset (or Reverse Superman) encrusting Montipora. Again, a frag from their platter size parent colony in the 800 DT.
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The color doesn't show up quite as good here. But it's a neon pinkish/red base with bright blue polyps. And the encrusting Monti was the birthday girls choice!
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- Also a 2.5-3 inch Purple Stylophora!
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troubadour11
Member
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And finally, our new pale purple and green ricordea mushrooms to add to that rock.
:thumbsup:
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And finally, our new pale purple and green ricordea mushrooms to add to that rock.
:thumbsup:
troubadour11
Member
Thanks for the complements on the choices! I'm sure DisBeReef will take the credit since it was a birthday trip. What can I say, she has good (and expensive) taste. I wasn't going to argue against it though. hehehe
I'm really, REALLY hoping what you say is the case. I have my stylo up top getting pretty much direct flow from a powerhead about 1/3 tank away set on else mode (Jabeo-WP25). Since putting it in on Saturday, it's had good PE the whole time. Hopefully that stays that way.
Looking great troub. I'm not sure how I didn't see the scape but it looks amazing!!!
Hey thanks Fishy! :beer: Here is hoping all the new additions find things favorable! The Duncans, shrooms, balstos, zoas, and torch all seem to be really happy right now. So I'm really hoping to see these SPS fair better then previous attempts.
And I'm glad you're liking the updated 'scape! It's still a work in progress. I probably won't build/cement any more towers or anything together. But I'm sure I will epoxy some additional pieces to what is in there now. Just to add some jaggedness and randomness to the structure. Plus, that way I'll be able to remove a few encrusting pieces to frag and maybe keep them from overtaking the entire structure.
This new piece definitely changed up the look of things. I need to epoxy the couple small rocks into place. but they're wedged in pretty well and giving me the feel of where it is all headed maybe.
The new tower was just a hair to big. I thought I had a bit more space behind the arch. But by rotating the center tower 45 degrees and sliding it forward. I was able to fit it in pretty well. And depending on the angle you look form, there are still good caves, open spots, and swim throughs in there.
Here is a little photo session of FTS and varying views of the tank from last weekend...
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And I finally got a somewhat decent shot of the state of that Pink Monti-Cap that had some troubles but seems to be trying to recover. This piece used to be pretty bleached (or severely pale from low light maybe) and had some tissue recession. Since I've started raising the lighting levels up. The tissue recession has stopped and grown over with algae. And the healthy tissue that is left seems to be getting "thicker" with a MUCH deeper hue of pink to it. Plus, I see the polyps extended out of the healthiest spots quite often now!
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troubadour11
Member
Hey there! Thanks for keeping an eye on the build and chiming in. :thumbsup: I hope to actually BUILD a bit more onto the system soon. I've got some more cabinetry / wood working to do still.
Plus we're really hoping to increase or fish stock a bit more soon. If I can't fill the tank up with chorals super quick, at least I can get some more fish life in there!
I'm going extra slow on corals, but once things hit the sweet spot, I'll be so happy and excited to see it grow in and mature. Lots of empty grow-out space in there right now. :dance:
troubadour11
Member
Here's a better shot of our newest mushroom addition. It's all opened up here and showing off. The exposure is a little blown out and it lost a bit of the green color on it's nubbies in this pic. But the blue and purple are pretty accurate looking
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I tried to get a good shot of the Purple Stylo frag with the lights off using the flash. This was the best I could do.
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Same thing for the encrusting Monti. Just another close up with the flash.
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Then I played around with the Green Pocci. These turned out pretty good and are a couple good representations of what it looks like in the tank. The first one is a little grainy because it was low light. But a good representation of color.
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Then with all the lights off and just the flash. :thumbsup: The polyps were starting to come back out after the lights clicked off.
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Since I should be around the house more during the days this weekend. I'll try and grab a picture or video of our newest fish pick up. The Tailspot Blenny has made it through TTM and is in the 10 gallon QT now. We also treated Prazi-Pro for flukes/worms on buckets 2 and 4 during TTM. So the Tailspot should be healthy and is looking great! Nice color and is eating bits off the algae sheet I've got rubberbanded to a piece of pvc.
It's lots easier to see/observe it in there with the glass panels ;-). \
I'm getting close to adding it up into the DT. The SG was a bit lower then the DT, so we've been letting it evaporate until it matches. Basically once it reaches the same stats and the DT, the little fishy is ready to go!
I don't really expect this fish to keep up with our algae completely, but it should help keep things in check with the snails. At least until we get towards the end of our fish list and add in a tang or other larger algae eater. Plus, it kind of looks cool and has different color then anything else in the tank.
DisBeReef went to the LFS during the week and picked up a Royal Gramma to start TTM on. So we've already got another little swimmer in the works. We might assembly line a bunch of new additions in over the next few weeks. I'm thinking increasing the fish # in the tank will help it develop and mature further at this point.
You might have seen from the FTS's posted a few posts earlier. But the lighting changes and new power heads and additional rock have made a HUGE, HUGE, HUGE impact on the system. To start with, we really have no more cyano on the sand bed during the days. That used to come and go in large sandbed patches with the light cycle. I count that as a huge win! :blown: That and the Pink Monti-Cap trying to recover and showing good PE is making me think the flow and low light levels might have been my main problems.
Now we have tufts of GHA and areas of algae spread around on the rockwork. It's there and a nuisance, but it's not out of control. So I can manage the look for now. One day, corals will get all the light instead of the bare rock where algae can get all the energy. I'm hoping the new Tailspot helps to keep that looking a little better though.
That's it for now. I'm waiting on DisBeReef to get home and then going to try to convince her to go on a LFS run :love2: hahaha, that sounds much better then yard work!
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I tried to get a good shot of the Purple Stylo frag with the lights off using the flash. This was the best I could do.
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Same thing for the encrusting Monti. Just another close up with the flash.
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Then I played around with the Green Pocci. These turned out pretty good and are a couple good representations of what it looks like in the tank. The first one is a little grainy because it was low light. But a good representation of color.
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Then with all the lights off and just the flash. :thumbsup: The polyps were starting to come back out after the lights clicked off.
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Since I should be around the house more during the days this weekend. I'll try and grab a picture or video of our newest fish pick up. The Tailspot Blenny has made it through TTM and is in the 10 gallon QT now. We also treated Prazi-Pro for flukes/worms on buckets 2 and 4 during TTM. So the Tailspot should be healthy and is looking great! Nice color and is eating bits off the algae sheet I've got rubberbanded to a piece of pvc.
It's lots easier to see/observe it in there with the glass panels ;-). \
I'm getting close to adding it up into the DT. The SG was a bit lower then the DT, so we've been letting it evaporate until it matches. Basically once it reaches the same stats and the DT, the little fishy is ready to go!
I don't really expect this fish to keep up with our algae completely, but it should help keep things in check with the snails. At least until we get towards the end of our fish list and add in a tang or other larger algae eater. Plus, it kind of looks cool and has different color then anything else in the tank.
DisBeReef went to the LFS during the week and picked up a Royal Gramma to start TTM on. So we've already got another little swimmer in the works. We might assembly line a bunch of new additions in over the next few weeks. I'm thinking increasing the fish # in the tank will help it develop and mature further at this point.
You might have seen from the FTS's posted a few posts earlier. But the lighting changes and new power heads and additional rock have made a HUGE, HUGE, HUGE impact on the system. To start with, we really have no more cyano on the sand bed during the days. That used to come and go in large sandbed patches with the light cycle. I count that as a huge win! :blown: That and the Pink Monti-Cap trying to recover and showing good PE is making me think the flow and low light levels might have been my main problems.
Now we have tufts of GHA and areas of algae spread around on the rockwork. It's there and a nuisance, but it's not out of control. So I can manage the look for now. One day, corals will get all the light instead of the bare rock where algae can get all the energy. I'm hoping the new Tailspot helps to keep that looking a little better though.
That's it for now. I'm waiting on DisBeReef to get home and then going to try to convince her to go on a LFS run :love2: hahaha, that sounds much better then yard work!
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