I'm curious to why the nitrates are high. Inetmug, how much and how frequently are you performing water changes? Had any fish or larger CUC go missing?
Me too.....
No fish missing, nor CUC that I can count. Ammonia/nitrite continue to be zero, and have always been since the cycle. Water changes were 1/month, and sometimes they went to 6 weeks. For the last month, been doing one about 2-3 weeks of 50G, which should be about 15-20%, using RC salt. Regarding my 50G, I am sure it saw some spikes here and there over 8 years. This seems to be a gradual thing, accumulating.
I have a French angle, another angle that I forget the name of the specific type, a high hat, surgeon, convict tang, pajama cardinal, atlantic cardnal, and one clown. I also have a pair of band corals, and a spanish lobster, and a sallylightfoot, and three fighting conchs. There are numerous CUC types that are small, with two good sized serpent stars. I have one leather coral, three trumpets, several frogspawns, and yumas, and two small kenya trees, and two rose bubbles.
The triumpets and kenyas are doing poorly, the leather is fair. The anemones were absolutely rocking but are now doing poorly. Frogspawn and yumas are fine. Some of this for the corals and leather is due to the angles picking, they are on their way out as soon as I find a home (I have seen them do it). The bubble tips were perfect, and I mean perfect, until right around the time that.... the black clown found them, and I started dosing CA/ALK/MG to keep it right. No telling which is the key. But the clown moved from the big one to the little one, and now both are not so hot. I hand feed the lobster to keep him happy.... and what a show that gets to be....
, really fun to watch, he has become very social. I have had several molts of the lobster and the sally lightfoot, which I am told is a sign of "good" water quality.
Some of these fish came from my 55G, some from my bud that passed away. They were added to the tank slowly, after the tank initially cycled via dead shrimp for a month. About 50% of the rock was live, and 60# of sand was live versus the rest, which was the right seeding ratio prescribed by caribsee. I did not start the skimmer initially in the first 2 months. The dead shrimp were monitored and were seen to get gelatinous and clear in 2 days.From what I could see, I got the normal cycle with the ammonia, then diatoms, then green, etc. I did do a few rock additions over time, which did disturb some things.
I have a big ampmaster pump, which should in theory be doing 20 changes per hour, but with plumbing loss I would say 10-15 would be a safe bet. I have LEDs 20k high output from buildmyled (new). The tank had good flow, but did have some dead spots I am sure.
I believe three things happened. The first was I was probably overfeeding a bit. The second, is I was using pads, and was not changing them frequently enough - now no pads nor socks and I can not really see a difference. The third is I did not have enough flow, and I was getting dead spots - I took care of that this week. A fourth thing, is that even though I added a fish or two every two weeks or more, it was still too much.
The nitrates were 5 at best for a long time, and things seemed to changed after introducing the anemones and frogspawns. I understand corals put out a lot of mucus, and perhaps my skimmer is not enough. I am looking for an additional used external now.
One other thing, we just noticed that in the AM, we get a beam of sunlight that comes through a window into the tank. This is a winter thing only. Going to hang a towel on the tank in the AM.
No hair algee, nothing else on the rocks, all purpling up nicely due to parameter maintenance. Minimal growth on the acrylic faces, but it is brown. The only thing that "looks" out of place is the sand, and of course the corals/anemones as mentioned.
Week three now of vinegar dosing, following the tables from the advanced aquariest.
