Isn't that a lot more work?

[Dustin07]

OK making progress. keeping the lights off until about 12-1pm lately seems to keep the blooms in check, but allows the corals to start opening up and potentially thrive again. all the fish seem to be doing great! We added 2 more shrimp, 5 more nassarius, and a skunkback this weekend.

this hippo tang has been through a lot, but she's back to her old self. pretty social, and eating the nori strips since the other fish taught her how. she ignored them for months until the sailfin and foxface were pigging out on the nori.

you can see in thie pic a little brown developing by late afternoon on the sand, and the palys still not quite opening up but they're getting better

Random 2 head hammer colony I got off a local a couple months ago for $20 is thriving

the two fishies nori feeder has been great. the digi you see that fell has been relocated, and the kenya tree there which I have left to sink or swim during the outbreak, I finally moved back into my 4g to rehab itself.

 

[Dustin07]

The snow is from feeding the fish while I was taking a couple pics. doesn't look like much yet, but this is MAJOR progress after a month of fighting the outbreak with closed polyps.

This was a single utter chaos frag from before my last tank crashed that I had salvaged in my 4g, now has 4 or 5 polyps and starting to do pretty well:

needs a little more time here. the top ones are Rastas when they open. the pink diamonds are growing like crazy and starting to pen again. the 4 orange polyps I never did get the name of, but I had bought a single polyp off a local. Its been so long since thigns opened up, the leggy looking ones that are still closed I don't even remember what they are... lol

getting there. not everyone is happy yet but slowly improving and definitely not getting worse:

 

[Reefing102]

Glad things are coming around

 

[Dustin07]

Glad things are coming around

slowly but surely. I haven't had to cycle a tank in about a half decade it seems, lol. I truly expected this to go faster. I'm not longer worried about this year, but my wife and I have created a plan to fight back against long days next spring should they cause an issue again. the tank isn't next to the window, but I do think it's getting enough indirect sunlight across the room that when our 16hr PNW days hit in June/July it caused the extra havoc. at this point, within a month, daylight and LED light will be basically same schedule anyways so I'm not super worried about it.

 

[Dustin07]

I haven't really shared a lot of pictures of my 4 gallon nano tank so I thought I'd post that up. I got this thing going when I had the 40g and My best solution was simply a piece of live rock and about 50% water from the 40g, and 50% new salt water. I now only do water top offs, I don't supplement, it has a cheapo $30 amazon light on it. tons of pods growing like crazy, some snails, and my emerald crab finally died but it's other wise been a fantastic frag tank. I have an SPS in there growing like crazy that I didn't even know I had. my acro frags seem to be doing better in here than in the big tank.

I have used this tank to seed my big tank with frags from my past 5 years so there is some nostalgia plus I love how that GSP has the back wall covered.

top down, encrusting sps bottom right that yellowish/greenish blob as quadrupled in size.

other top down

I have multiple frags of my blowpop zoas in here already reproducing pretty well too

 

[griss]

That looks really nice.

 

[Dustin07]

I feel like I'm spamming my own thread now, but a quick recap since I'm seeing improvements daily. so a quick summary:

looks like official water in tank day was Mar 30th.
attempted the fast cycle approach using dr tims
still had mini cycles
did a big cleaning on July 3rd, attempting to have tank presentable when guests arrived on 4th of July
damn near crashed my tank doing this (I'm sure mostly from overly stirring up sand)
spent the last month trying every hack I could to recovery. I did lose a torch during this process from what I believe was cyano
finally started beating the cyano with a lights off period.
I've changed my lighting pattern from all day, to zero, to where I am now which is turning on lights at about 1-2pm until normal evening time (7-8pm)

last night for the first time in weeks ALL of my zoas were open. my devils hand is showing polyp extension, all my GSP are opening up. my hammers and frogspawn are looking huge. all my fish are still alive and look much happier/healthier.

my 4g is crawling with pods/bugs and it really makes me think I need to continue to double down on the micro animals /bugs in this new ecosystem. however, I am confident this tank will be in good shape and ready for winter coral shopping with my wife if I can get nitrates up. everything else is a strong improvement!

I've also been adding nassarius as often as I can find them, usually 5 at a time. I think I could easily add 5 more. I love watching them come out like soldiers marching across the sand when I feed, lol. but they're my favorite sand stirrer I think.

 

[Dustin07]

also I have not done the reefmat conversion. I do not like having socks at all in the sump, so I'm looking forward to those fall/winter months when I can sit down and focus on the plumbing to incorporate my reefmat. I also have the 12g ATO tank and a redsea ATO setup ($$$) still new in box that will be incorporated at some point. I don't know if I'll ever truly move to an auto doser though because I like tinkering with the tank myself, I'm not 100% convinced that additives have had a strong contribution, and the risk of an auto doser over dosing seems too high, lol

 

[Dustin07]

you can see very very obvious improvements last night from my last pics:

these were a frag I pulled over from my 4g:

these will probably get relocated higher in the water column because despite looking pretty good, they're sorta leggy and reaching:

GSP all opening up, you can see my paly frag back there is a little bleached but they'll rebound I'm sure:

Nori time:

new skunkback is doing well:

I have a large duncan colony I'm fairly exciteda bout, right now it's the only frag in the tank that is still not wanting to open up all the way for some reason. it did the other day when everything else was closed but this week had stayed puckered up for some reason. There is a possibility that I have the nero a little more direct on it than I did before so I could toy with that some. see if maybe the duncan would prefer less direct flow.

 

[griss]

Everything is looking good. I've never had a Duncan so, I've got no suggestions there.

 

[Dustin07]

With the exception of the duncan, the tank is looking fantastic. Almost like magic, just suddenly one day all the zoas, gsp, gorgonians, nems, everyone just seems happy and fully opened and reproducing already, lol. I did add two little blue cleaner gobys on Monday and their darting streaks of blue are pretty cool in the tank.

Still in a bit of a holding pattern in terms of adding new corals, want to let the tank really develop further and I want to focus on my little ecosystem, more pods, cuc, etc.

 

[Dustin07]

no progress on the duncans, I'm going to get more glue and move them either to my 4g or a different area in my big tank and see how they respond.

last week I made prawns for my wife's bday dinner, I had removed all the heads and froze them up. this weekend I took out a head and chopped it in half so it was still a pretty big chunk and dropped it in the tank cautiously. I was a little worried about excess nutrients and whatnot but holy cow the fish went after it like piranhas! sometimes all three tangs would be holding on to it at once dragging it around the tank and spilling it into the water column so all the other fish could get into the action. they clearly loved it. the little bits that made it to the bottom were quickly devoured by the nassarious snails.

the whole tank other than the duncan colony seems incredibly happy and my zoas area already popping new polyps!