Its been a little while since my last update, so I though I'd post some good news and bad news.
The good news is I picked up a purple hammer frag and it is looking nice and happy as are most of my zoas. The rastas zoas dont stay open all day so I'm not sure whats going on there, but I'm seeing a few baby zoas popping up on the other frags. My trochus snails are still cruising around the tank and I added a couple of nassarius snails. I have only seen one pop out of the sand one time since I put them in though. The hermits have started changing to different shells that I have added to the aquarium. Not sure if i saw one that expired or a molt last night though. my numbers are still looking great as far as calcium, alk, mag, ph. phosphates and nitrates are still undetectable with my red sea kit.
Now on to the bad. I noticed my smaller black snowflake clown had a single white dot on his fin a week ago. well it was a bit concerning but it went away on its own. a couple days later I noticed a few more spots were back so I decided to quarantine both of them even though the female hadn't shown any signs and both were eating like pigs and active. From what I've read, brook kills super fast so I decided to treat this as ich. Set up a 10 gallon petsmart
tank with a seachem ammonia badge, hob, heater, lid, a 3" pvc elbow and about a third of my marine pure gems in the hob and over a 2 day period dosed cupramine up to a 0.5 concentration as per my salifert copper test. their 30 day copper treatment ends on January 17th. My nuvo 20 cannot have fish in it until March 2nd. So it looks like I lost this gamble and will not be making that mistake again!
Lessons Learned:
even though the LFS may run their livestock through copper treatments, it may or may not be at therapeutic levels.
Quarantine! Quarantine! Quarantine!
a $40 topfin 10 gallon kit from petsmart and a $3.26 pvc elbow and $7 ammonia badge is well worth the investment for nano sized fish
Now to end on a more positive note, this has prompted me to begin my bedroom nano I have ordered the following parts
Nuvo 10
Cobalt MJ 1200 (wanted to try something new this time around. I am going to swap it with a Sicce 0.5 as the MJ is too loud for a bedroom tank. The flow is really nice though)
IM spinstream
75w cobalt neotherm heater
Micmol Aqua Mini Light
10lbs carribsea special grade
Intank floss holder
Intank refugium basket
IM Chaetomax refugium light
Autoaqua Smart ATO
2 quart Marinepure 1.5" spheres
Some left over dry rock that I didnt use in my nuvo 20
100ml biospira
