help again!

- Overstocking
- Low pH or wild pH swings (<0.1 per day is safe, IMO)
- Insufficient water changes
- Low oxygen levels

overstocking: i have 3 chromis and 2 gsm. an rbta (about 8" across fully happy) and a blenny. about 20 crabs and snails.
5 rics, 1" of dig (lol), 100 polyps of zoo, 1" of frogspawn, kenya tree, gsp, dendro.

40 pounds of rock, 3" of sand.

10g tank w/6-7 G of water for sump.
reef octopus nw-110. cheato. 5500 k 65w light 16 hours a day.

everytime i have checked, ph is between 8.2 and 8.3. i can come in and check at night to see what happens. i'll do it tonight.

water changes: at least 10%, every week.

o2:

you know, i just dont know. we have the tube that runs from the overflow, and it splashes. i have an HOB filter in the display that creates ripples. the skimmer was modded with a larger air hose. the tank doesnt have a canopy.


sidenote, nicole do you do database management? if so, pm that part! :)

thanks,

tim
 
Tim,

Your skimmer should be aerating your tank enough. That's a big skimmer for a 44 gallon tank.

You don't need to measure pH at night. Take a pH measurement before you turn on the light in the morning and then another one late in the afternoon.

The pH swing of less than 0.1 is a pretty tight spec. I cannot say that my tanks stay within that range. My pH used to stay within 8.2 plus or minus 0.1 range when my tank was very lightly stocked. I am afaid that I lost the control...

Tomoko
 
I agree with Tomoko - your skimmer is almost certainly enough aeration. Unless there isn't enough O2 in the house. Some people who keep their house closed up all the time can get pretty low level of O2 in the house, so aeration doesn't work.

You can buy O2 tests, but if you already have a pH meter and an air pump/air stone, there's an easier way. Just look up "pH aeration test" on Google or RC and you should find a description of testing the pH after running an air stone in a cup of water for a few minutes in a few different ways.

With a pH in the day of 8.3, you probably don't have an O2 problem. I wouldn't spend any money on investigating it -- I was just throwing it out there with the other reasons. Having a swing of 0.1 isn't bad, especially not for a new tank.

Overstocking... I would say yes, if not now then definitely when those fish get to full size. And that RBTA will just get bigger and bigger... or more and more of them! So it's just something to keep in mind in the future as you focus in on what your favorite things are. Who knows, maybe you will go with a pair of GSM's and just their anemones some day. :)

Once upon a time I held a rock solid pH of 8.4 in my old (big) system with multiple tanks and sumps. The final piece of the puzzle was a reverse lit 'fuge. Of course, that was before I downsized and then had so much fun trekking across the country and finally moving AGAIN. It will take months to stabilize the tank again. At least my pH is steady... at 8.0. :o
 
It’s not easy (at least for me) to keep all the water parameters rock solid. I have day and night and day to day variations in all of my tanks. Especially pH and alkalinity. There’s always something that requires my attention or knocks things out of balance. Just as I thought I got my equipment working just right, the output of my calcium reactor is slowing down, my top off container is out of water and the micro jet pump in it is screaming, or my fuge needs a new light bulb, etc. Luckily the inmates are tenacious and adapt well to these variations ;)

Tomoko
 
I am definitely in the KISS camp. The "gear" you have, the more stuff you have to mess with and may mess up. Been there, done that. Fancy gear doesn't replace good husbandry, which is where a lot of people seem to go with adding on gadgets. It also won't cure poor planning in the first place, which is another thing people like to do with it.

They don't seem to save time or money either. :) But some people like playing with them, and hey, it's a hobby. Whatever floats your boat.
 
LOL

lets stick to 'new arrival husbandry' for a minute, and we can go back to tank management in a few.

the last of the shipment arrived today, and i now have four QT tanks. i was afraid to QT new things together--i figured why contaminate each other in addition to protecting the display tank. if i had kept the hammers separate from the beginning...

the last arrivals are all on great rocks. they're not even in the water yet, and we can see fans, small pods and bristleworms on them. they are almost all small zoo frags, and i was going to do mucho reef's ro/lugol's dip (the same way i did the frogs, until i learned that was for zoos and not frogs...), but my concern is killing all the good stuff that came with it.

should i put that last shipment together (i think they were all from same private tank) in the 10G by themselves and just wait and see what happens instead of dipping them?
 
Some equipment certainly makes life easier for me although it's not a good idea to rely totally on automation. Machines breaks down periodically, but I have to take a few negatives with positives. I wish I can automate some of my household chores, too ;)

I also automate my garden as much as possible with timers and drip irrigation tubing like I do with reef tanks. I probably cannot keep a single potted plants alive if it weren't for them. My new puppy loves to chew things and I am dreading to find one of my prized plants wilting one day when I come home. But it's better than the alternative - not having plants at all...

Tim -

As for quarantining your livestock, I recommend that you slow down on your acquisition. You can load up as many QT tank as you want, but it's easier to keep an eye on one thing at a time. I wonder if your display can keep up with ever increasing bio load so quickly.

You can observe your new livestock for a while instead of dipping them right away. Watch out for some of the really hard to find parasites such as sea spiders and nudibranch on zoanthids.

Tomoko
 
Last edited:
i didnt think it was a lot when we were talking about it...it wasnt until i realized it was eight pieces from three places and a fish from a fourth that i finally went 'oh no!'

the frogs look much better--i think they were ok, and i was beating them.

the newly arrived zoos had tons of bristleworms (five on six rocks?) and they all came out in the dip.

i am really tempted to put the frogs in the QT with the zoos (and one torch...) but even though the torch looks ok, i'm nervous about it. i'm just nervous in general now...

water changes make me feel better... :)
 
I agree with Tomoko -- slow down!

It is relatively safe to QT corals together, especially if they are from the same source. The 6 week QT there is mostly to protect the fish from diseases they may bring in, and also to eliminate pests. You can do that together -- but the 6 weeks starts from the date of the latest arrival, always.

Fish, I QT separately so they don't potentially share diseases AND to reduce their stress levels so they can begin eating well and acclimating to captivity. The only exception would be mated pairs. Otherwise sharing a QT tank is not a helpful situation for them.
 
I usually QT coral frags together if they happen to come from the same source. When I got a few of them from the regional frag swap last January, I QT'd all acro's together after dipping them with lugol's solution, then Interceptor and finally Fluke Tabs (separate solutions.) If I know the source really well (to be free of nasties), I QT them for observation instead of doing the dip first so that I won't stress my acro frags unnecessarily.

I dip my zoanthids with Mucho Reef's method regardless of the source since the dip never seem to stress any zoanthid frags. I always find a few dead amphipods in a dip, but I try to rescue as many as possible before hand.

As for keeping an LPS and other coral frags together in QT (in future not this time), I would keep them well separated in a QT tank and keep a close eye on the LPS for striking other corals. LPS coral packs a strong punch in its nematocysts. It can also reach very far with the nematocysts. They are really mean.

Tomoko
 
right now we have the tank at 76, 1.023, 10x flow, 15 watts of CF.

the zoos are on one end, the torch are at the other and i want to put the frogs in next to the torch.

on an even weirder note, since we've put the po4 reactor in the tank, the hair algae growth has really taken off...of all the things i expected, that wasnt one :)
 
we had the water tested by an outside source yesterday (newby @ cra).

the salinity was higher than we thought, the alkalinity was lower, and the ca was WAAAAy high...520.

i had only been doing water changes for the last 4-8 weeks. i dont think we've supplemented anything.

we used reef builder to bump up our alk just a tad, and we'll test and adjust again in a few days. our thought was 'fix it slowly, as everything we've done quickly was bad.'

i am going to check water with my swing arm dip thingy today, and then take it to be tested to try to determine any variance.

pH was also very low. same course of action as the alk.

we have no idea how alk and pH were low but calcium was through the roof.

1.032
7.95
3

today:
1.028
8.1
1 teaspoon of reef builder
 
I am glad that it's not 3 dkh. NSW is about 7 dkh except for some area like Red Sea, but it's a good idea to keep it a little higher in our aquariums for an extra safety margin.

Please be sure to include units with your numbers for water quality parameters. I also try to encourage newbies to find out the species names for livestock if possible. Common names can be confusing at times.

Tomoko
 
i forgot that i was dosing one thing--chelated iron right into the cheato section of the sump.

everything in the QT looks better--the frogs are relaxed somewhat, but looking very bleached. i can see their mouths, but they are closed.

good article on the supplements. i feel better now.

on that note, is there anything we can add to the qt tank like vitamins, etc for health? with so many small water changes, i think the new water will mostly maintain chemical levels. should i be testing those anyway?

thanks so much--everything is already looking better, and to be honest, we feel less stressed around here!!!

tim
 
I would not add anything. If they are doing well, just don't do anything more to complicate things. I've used vitamins and amino acids in the past, but I absolutely could not tell if they did anything for my corals.

I would test for alkalinity since CO2 that animal exhales, phosphoric acids from decaying organic matter and GFO all drive down the alkalinity level.
 
GFO all drive down the alkalinity level

could that be why my main tank alk dropped so low? i just started the p04 reactor this week...
 
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