Isn't that a lot more work?

Just saw a guy post this device he setup in his DT for clown fry he expects to hatch tonight. I'm curious to see how his attempt at raising fry from the DT goes. It's not cheap but the design is interesting.


 
Just saw a guy post this device he setup in his DT for clown fry he expects to hatch tonight. I'm curious to see how his attempt at raising fry from the DT goes. It's not cheap but the design is interesting.


Interesting.
 
as of now, my two BTA's both seem to be doing well. the original that split, is darn near as big as it was before the split again. pretty much everything just seems to be healthy and adjusting well. We have started to add quite a bit to the bioload as we put a bigger emphasis on fish lately. I'm very excited about our hippo tang, and we've added a Coral Beauty Angelfish which comes with mixed reviews in terms of reef safeness. some Banggai Cardinals, 2 more Chromis, and a little scooter blenny my wife named Waldo for probably obvious reasons :ROFLMAO:

My Pagoda Cup is exploding though. it's nearly covered in polyps. It took some damage when my old damsel pushed a torch too close, but that wound seems to be 95% healed so far.

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I've really developed a fascination with the Euphylia family of corals since my frogspawn has grown so much, but I'm not seeing any real growth from my torches or hammer despite their flesh bands all looking pretty good, so I'm experiementing with how and what I feed them. Lately I've noticed my torches grabbing food and sorta pulling it in very similar to the nem, so I'm watching that. again 50/50 some people suggest that target feeding torches can increase their exposure to bacteria, others swear by it. overall, the flow is pretty high in my tank though.

I noticed this torch has a fork in one tentacle which is also really interesting to me because I don't see that in any of my other torches:

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The clowns have never "hurt" it by hosting to it, but I do wonder if it's growth is stunted so I'm thinking of moving it and replacing it with a rock that my BTA clone has moved to and see how the clowns react. It's interesting that when I moved everyone from my 40g to the 425L system, the clowns immediately found their torch and stuck a claim again. Mobile home?
 
Oh and I got a six-line wrasse finally which I'm really happy about. My Petco experiences were not great this weekend.
one shop had a hippo tang covered in ich, for sale for $140. pass.
another shop had about $150 in fish I wanted, but they made it clear they weren't interested in selling fish because they were "understaffed"
then we went to another one, I found the wrasse I wanted, but the staff were unable to pull him from the tank. they pulled out about a dozen pieces of live rock, then completely lost the wrasse (probably in a rock??) and then basically told me I was wrong, they didn't have a wrasse in stock. (they did, my wife and I both saw it before we asked for it, lol).

A couple of our local(Ish) stores have small holding tanks that are easy to catch fish in. a couple of the stores are filled with more live rock than fish in the tanks, and they can never catch them. I watched these people work for about a half hour (2 of them) to catch a single small chromis and a couple snails for me.................................................... as we walked out I told my wife, the cost in labor to collect those fish was higher than the value of the fish sold.

we really have a shortage of "good" saltwater sources in the south puget sound. You can find stuff, but it's not great. The only "great" stores I know of really are closer to the Seattle / Redmond areas ($$$$). which makes sense, but it seems like someone could do well down here if they made a great store.
 
From what I've over the years cryptic sponges are ubiquitous in reef systems. When ever I've moved or reaquascaped a system there have been cryptic sponges. Steve Tyree started promoting them for filtration back in the '90s. It's de Goeig's work that showed how essential they are for corals and the food webs in reef ecosystems One of de Goeig's discoveries was at least some of these cryptic sponges have a mitosis rate of just 6-8 hours. But instead of growing at some phenominal rate, they are shedding huge amounts of cellular detritus rich in nutrients back into the ecosystem. This process of converting DOC into particulate detritus explains why coral aren't killed in short order by algae scrubers or by adding DOC to promote bacterial growth to be removed by skimmers.

sorta funny but for the first time ever I have noticed something just pop up in my tank that might be a sponge. although it doesn't look anything like sponges I've seen before. it's very white and only on a particular area of rock. it sorta looks like how the rock would look if I took it out of the tank and split it in half, exposing the parts of it that haven't taken on color from being in the tank for a while. I'll try to get a picture tonight...

I keep reading 50/50 feedback from whether or not people think sponges are good in a tank. although I'm not certain that's what I have either yet.
 
@Dustin07 It's almost certainly a sponge. There's several different species that will show up in systems that are white. Steve Tyree championed sponges back in the 90's and he almost seems prescient now that we know how critical they are for a healthy reef ecosystem. Work done by researchers show most sponges primarily feed on the DOC that is produced in reef system and some cryptic sponges can remove it 1000X faster than the bacteria in the water column (of which only a subset is removed by skimmers so they are only skewing the microbiomes to unnatural microbial counts). To reiterate my previous posts (#302 & #303), DOC is directly implicated in coral decline and causes both chronic and acute issues with corals. By very quickly converting DOC to Particulate Organic Carbon, POC, sponges are feeding the complex food webs that exist in reef ecosystems and removing compounds detrimental to corals.
 
Personally I think they are good filter feeders.

@Dustin07 It's almost certainly a sponge. There's several different species that will show up in systems that are white. Steve Tyree championed sponges back in the 90's and he almost seems prescient now that we know how critical they are for a healthy reef ecosystem. Work done by researchers show most sponges primarily feed on the DOC that is produced in reef system and some cryptic sponges can remove it 1000X faster than the bacteria in the water column (of which only a subset is removed by skimmers so they are only skewing the microbiomes to unnatural microbial counts). To reiterate my previous posts (#302 & #303), DOC is directly implicated in coral decline and causes both chronic and acute issues with corals. By very quickly converting DOC to Particulate Organic Carbon, POC, sponges are feeding the complex food webs that exist in reef ecosystems and removing compounds detrimental to corals.

Is there a point where you just cut them out when growing too wildly? I've seen people say they intentionally dose with silicates to increase sponge growth, but I've also see people post pictures of what appear to be sponges, overtaking small colonies such as zoanthids... the one that appeared on my rock (I still need to take a picture) seems to have slowed growth, if that's what it is.

Generally speaking the new tank seems to be doing very well. My Pagoda cup, GSP, some zoas, frogspawn, and a few others have grown like CRAZY. I think my frogspawn and one torch have split or are trying to. I moved my baby hammer from my 4g to the 120g system this week and it looks like it's doubled in size already. I'd like to see more growth from my torches but next on my agenda is to learn more about SPS. there are quite a few animals in that world that are really interesting to me and with our larger tank I'd love to give them a shot.

I'm also needing to learn a LOT more about dosing. I have so many brand new items that were given to me (iodine, aminos, and much more) that I've never used before. I also went to a higher quality phyto (reef nutrition) to test it out and it seems like my corals are responding well.
 
I don't 100% understand all the relationships but as an experiement I've been mixing a heavy dose of phyto when I dose the tank with reef roids. Reef roids have developed this reputation for spiking phosphates. I've noticed historically when I dose reef roids more than once a week or maybe only once but heavily, I seem to get an outbreak of dynos briefly. Since dosing phytos, I feel like its less of an issue potentially?

Maybe I'm way off my rocker. I gave it a try with my remedial understanding of phytos competiting with dynos for the same nutrients. either way, I have not seen a negative.


I'm also trying to learn more about proper feed for my hippo and beauty coral. they do like my frozen herbivore food, but do not take to my algae sheets at all. I also have some ominvore pellets they love. I'd just like to be able to offer them more because I feel like the rest of my corals and fish do well when I mix up their meaty foods between krill, mussels, oyster, blood worms, mysis/bbs etc
 
Is there a point where you just cut them out when growing too wildly? I've seen people say they intentionally dose with silicates to increase sponge growth, but I've also see people post pictures of what appear to be sponges, overtaking small colonies such as zoanthids... the one that appeared on my rock (I still need to take a picture) seems to have slowed growth, if that's what it is. . . .

The species that will grow in the same spaces as corals might need some prunning occasionally, just like corals growing together. I would be hesitant to remove a lot at one time though. They are removing DOC at a phenominal rate and dumping nutrient rich detrituys back into teh food webs very quickly. Removing a lot of sponge at one time would likely disrupt the food webs in a system as well as make a lot of DOC that is potentially detrimental for corals readily available. As far as dosing with silcates I would want to see some research since many papers show sponges feed primarily on DOC. As there is research that sponges process "good" DOC differently than "bad" DOC there's also the question whether if grwoing more sponge than would occur incidentally with the existing food webs would be a good thing or bad thing. What is the right balance for the ecosystem and corals to thrive? Taking a cue from the problems arising from industrialized farming practices, just becaus we know how to grow something faster doesn't mean it's a good thing if we can't do it sustainably and end up sterilizing farmland.

There is a cautionary note for corals growing in bright light. A black encrusting sponge, Terpios hoshinotos, is a sponge that does well in bright light and will quiuckly grow over corals. Fortunately I have only seen it once in a friend's system but it requires a lot of work to erradicate. I want to emphasize it's a black encrusting sponge that likes bright light as there are black sponges that are beneficial. I have one black species that likes bright light but it grows tree like and will not grow over corals. The black cryptic sponges I leave alone when ever I find them moving stuff around
 
Last night I was looking at this torch and enjoying its progress. It's been a little bit of a rescue and I can tell its fleshband has been growing back quite a bit. the closed side went from very long tentacles to slightly shorter ones as I watch the head shift and the flesh increase. My understanding of torches, is that this is indicative of a split coming (good!). But on further review today of the pictures, it also looks like there could be some damage on the skeleton I need to investigate further.

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In this next picture there are two interesting things. I've started dosing trace amounts iodine, potassium, iron, and amino acids in addition to my weekly 5% WC and calcium. Only recently did I bring MAG dosing back in. I'm seeing more vibrant colors from my pavona and monti. I have another torch who's tentacles are crazy long, and this torch has brought some gold into his tentacles that I think is beautiful.

the other thing is that lower head I have circled. zero fleshband. it was damaged in a fire fight with a galaxia. after getting the two further separated I found that even though the fleshband was damaged, the rest of the head seems to continue to fight and heal. In the torch/ euphylia groups I'm in, they almost always predict instant death in this situation but I'm actually seeing the fleshband grow back.

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I pruned a lot of my less desirable peachy/brown zoas from my main zoa rock the other day and took a before and after picture of the healing. I wish I had taken the before from before the pruning though!

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Lastly, my new baby BTA is almost as big as the mother piece was before they split:

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The original is getting huge again. makes me wonder if I can keep growing it for if it will split again. I feed it meaty foods almost daily and it gobbles them up and seems to grow nearly daily.

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here's a snapshot of that torch from above in a video I made of it. It's normal for it to close up pretty much every early evening around 4-6pm for a brief while then open back up and look beatiful

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They are removing DOC at a phenominal rate and dumping nutrient rich detrituys back into teh food webs very quickly. Removing a lot of sponge at one time would likely disrupt the food webs in a system as well as make a lot of DOC that is potentially detrimental for corals readily available. As far as dosing with silcates I would want to see some research since many papers show sponges feed primarily on DOC. As there is research that sponges process "good" DOC differently than "bad" DOC there's also the question whether if grwoing more sponge than would occur incidentally with the existing food webs would be a good thing or bad thing. What is the right balance for the ecosystem and corals to thrive? Taking a cue from the problems arising from industrialized farming practices, just becaus we know how to grow something faster doesn't mean it's a good thing if we can't do it sustainably and end up sterilizing farmland.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Kinda ironic but my wife and I over the years have decided that 9 times out of 10 it's best for us to "leave things alone" when a coral looks ill, mother nature tends to heal it better than our fumbling intervention. On the flip side, a lot of work goes into keeping the tank healthy and "natural" with good water, temperature, oxygenation etc. So I guess our goal is to provide the environment for success, then let God's design do it's thing there in the small world we've created.
 
Been trying to learn more about the Euphylia and torches. I keep reading that they like higher kh. I was aware that calcium would be important for a number of my corals, but I hadnt ever tested for kh before. so this weekend took some tests:

cal = 420
kh = 7.7
mag = 1280

I haven't dosed mag in a while but used to have great luck when I ran it a bit higher around 1350+. I did some reading on how to boost kh but I didn't like the idea of throwing baking soda into my tank without having any idea how much to use. Talked to the folks at the LFS and picked up Reef Fusion, and also dosed my magnesium I already had. By the next day I was about:

Cal = 450
kh = 8.0
Mag = 1350

I don't think my calcium or mag needs to be any higher. But I think that the tank could still benefit from a little bump up in Kh and I also think that a tiny bit more mag could be beneficial but also probably not necessary.

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but here's a rookie mistake I need to check tonight when I get home. I switched over to redsea salt when I launched the 425L system. I didn't even pay attention to which one I grabbed. I noticed the normal stuff on Red Sea's website could potentially be lower than I want right out of the bucket. I've also noticed my salinity spiking when using this stuff. I took measurements this weekend with two different hydrometers and was coming in around 1.028+. so I slowly brought that down to about 1.025/1.026.

We'll see what this week brings. I think one of my torches are starting to spawn a new head off to the side. that would be great because my torches are about the only coral I have that i haven't truly noticed real growth from yet.


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While they don't have dosage amounts for Reef Fusion, BRS has some Reef Calculators on their site that have worked great for me over the years. But, I use their supplements.
 
I feel obliged to give the 2 step fusion product a try since I bought it and it won't last that long on a 120g system I'm thinking, but last night ran the tests again and here's what I found:

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Ammonia was 0-.25 it was the lightest reading on my scale so I'm not worried there.
ph seems low though? Cal and Mag might have come up a little bit but I'm going to continue working on increasing cal, kh, and mag while I learn more about ph...

Seems like my numbers should be a bit higher, so I'm going to do another small WC after mixing up the salt as well as I can in the bucket. I'll test the water before I add it to the tank, because the product I bought should be considerably higher on the kh it seems. CA and Mg are a little low but much closer.

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Picture doesn't do it justice, I think because I wasn't using a filter but this weekend I picked up a pearl jawfish on sale at the local petco that we had been watching for a couple weeks. They had a pretty decent sale going on, so I snagged this blue duncan for free basically:

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I thought it would be a cool contrast to my green duncan colony

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the jawfish picked the perfect place for his burrow in the front left corner of the tank where he can see everything and we can enjoy his old man lifestyle. everytime he comes out I imagine him yelling at some kids to get off his lawn

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Looks good. Agree on the pH being a little low. I was having a problem with low pH a while back. But, since I've started dosing soda ash daily, my pH has been around 8 at night and 8.2-8.3 during the day.
 
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