Looks like the orange Zoa may be a Bam Bam but not certain (unless the colors are off in the pic)
Isn't that a lot more work?
- Thread starter Dustin07
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thats good advice, although too late on the revive. I actually did give it a revive dip last Friday I think, and I removed the portion that was turning white out of an abundance of caution. It may end up being a live and learn scenario as it's my first acro. I've had a lot of luck with easier SPS like pavona and montis. actually, we have this cool frag.. I snipped 3 small pieces off a pavona we had on our old tank as an experiment and plunked into my 4g nano. I'm glad I did because they survived our big tank crash and are now in the new tank. They're growing really well already and I find it interesting that they're encrusting over the plug first which I never noticed on the mother colony. I"ll try to get a picture later.
thank you for the compliments, and I'll look into the cholride solution! in the revive dip, I saw a number of critters come off that I did not recognize. but from pictures I see on the internet, I may very well have shook some AEFW off, as well as a brittle star I think. I didn't even know I had a brittle star, it's amazing how such tiny buggers can hide on even an SPS frag...
isn't that funny? today I was just thinking for the first time since January I'm at work and pretty excited to get home and check on the tank, feed the tangs, dabble with stuff.
I'm testing the AB+ product at the moment because it has rave reviews until I can get into the distribution of my local girls phyto. Her live foods business has taken off so well that all the local reefers have subscriptions with her so I'm "on the list" to get worked into that as she ramps up production. Anyways, I like to dose things like that in the morning before work so the water is clear when I get home. Today I noticed that new BTA had decided to move in the middle of the night so we'll see.... my old BTA was awesome. front and center, growing like a weed, hand fed, splitting...
here is the pavona I split last summer and luckily had in my nano tank. I had simply cut a few ears off and glued them down, I didn't even notice that it had taken to encrusting over the plug I had located it too, so my assumption is that it's healthy...
bargain bin Gorgonian my wife loved this weekend next to a beautiful digi.
my two original types of GSP now in the big tank, setup to grow along the back wall
I had picked up a lawnmower blenny to keep hair algae under control
However within about 2 days of adding these characters, all green disappeared off my rocks.
my wife had been eyeing the anthias as well ever since seeing a handful of them in the LFS's 900 liter system.
The tank really feels like something again! adding the Foxface and the Scopas was enough activity to pry the hippo tang out of hiding who now spends more time out with the other fish than hidden in her caves, and has gone from ONLY eating pellets, to eating mysis, nori sheets, and anything else I throw in there.
The water was so crystal clear when I got home last night I almost got nervous so I fed extra and this morning made sure to put in fresh nori at 5am before headed off to work.
here is the pavona I split last summer and luckily had in my nano tank. I had simply cut a few ears off and glued them down, I didn't even notice that it had taken to encrusting over the plug I had located it too, so my assumption is that it's healthy...
bargain bin Gorgonian my wife loved this weekend next to a beautiful digi.
my two original types of GSP now in the big tank, setup to grow along the back wall
I had picked up a lawnmower blenny to keep hair algae under control
However within about 2 days of adding these characters, all green disappeared off my rocks.
my wife had been eyeing the anthias as well ever since seeing a handful of them in the LFS's 900 liter system.
The tank really feels like something again! adding the Foxface and the Scopas was enough activity to pry the hippo tang out of hiding who now spends more time out with the other fish than hidden in her caves, and has gone from ONLY eating pellets, to eating mysis, nori sheets, and anything else I throw in there.
The water was so crystal clear when I got home last night I almost got nervous so I fed extra and this morning made sure to put in fresh nori at 5am before headed off to work.
I think you're right. when we were looking at getting back into seahorses gorgs were one of the few corals considered safe and they were very hard to find locally, plus expensive to mail order so we skipped them. This one was $15 and so we picked his brain about it a bit and his only real thoughts were good flow so it could capture enough food but not have sediment sitting on it. the takeaway I had from that was aside from the lighting, similar to euphylia/torches. so far it seems happy! Its kinda pretty feels like some sort of japanese maple/bonzai/cherry tree coral hybrid.
This morning I did see a little PE on the acros which made me quite happy. I'm not going to stress over them since everything in the tank is doing well, I'll just stay the course, feed heavily like I do and see what becomes of things. the less I tinker with coral placement the happier they usually are, lol.
Indeed it is , Diodogorgia nodulifera I believe. With heavy feeding it may fare okay
whats your idea of heavy feeding in terms of actual food and frequency? since my bioload is now heavier again I have recommissioned my auto feeder for a small feeding a couple times in the day after lights come on while I'm at work, and in the evening I feed frozen which everyone in the tank seems to love. since my tanks have finally discovered the nori sheets, I'm going to have to figure out a better long term solution there because they can destroy one in an hour or two, lol the two little fishies magnetic feeder has been GREAT, but its going to need a lot of use.
the tank seems crazy clean right now. I am considering attempting to run the tank with zero filtration before long. Since I started dosing that AB+ I am seeing PE again on the purple acro which I'm pretty excited about. it wasn't amazing, but at 4am this morning I turned on the flashlight and definitely saw improvements.
the BTA I think has picked his home which is a good location. The Tangs have eaten all the hair algae off the rocks it seems (there wasn't very much) and are going through nori strips faster than I expected...
auto feeder drops some pellets 3 times in the morning hours, then I feed the little piggys a mix of mysis and other frozen foods at night. as of right now, things seem to be in a pretty good place!
we are travelling next week for 4-5 days so I'm working on establishing "must do" items for the house sitter.... generally I think it will be just feeding and water top off with cleaning being optional. I'm going to stress the nori sheets though because the tangs really love them. my theory is the fish eat when they need/want so I shouldn't starve them.
the BTA I think has picked his home which is a good location. The Tangs have eaten all the hair algae off the rocks it seems (there wasn't very much) and are going through nori strips faster than I expected...
auto feeder drops some pellets 3 times in the morning hours, then I feed the little piggys a mix of mysis and other frozen foods at night. as of right now, things seem to be in a pretty good place!
we are travelling next week for 4-5 days so I'm working on establishing "must do" items for the house sitter.... generally I think it will be just feeding and water top off with cleaning being optional. I'm going to stress the nori sheets though because the tangs really love them. my theory is the fish eat when they need/want so I shouldn't starve them.
I just wish I could get some better day time pics. we set up the larger tank all the way across the room from the old location, on a wall with no glass but I did not think about the fact that the opposite wall is a wall of windows. I had setup the 425 during winter where it's dark by 4pm here in the PNW so for viewing pleasure, it was fantastic during the winter. now that the days are longer the glare is a bit annoying.... but I can't really stress over it too much because quite frankly its the best place in the house for a tank that size. I keep thinking that now I have something to really look forward to in the winter anyways.
plus whatever natural light it's getting doesn't seem to be an issue from an algae standpoint. maybe I'm lucky, or maybe I've learned enough to handle it with natural approaches (maybe 50/50). I think the natural light probably wakes the tank up earlier than I had intended, but I have my LED's set to come on I believe at 9am and shut down around 7-8pm so the full intensity is much less than the natural light its getting indirectly. I try really hard to have the room completley blacked out at night when we go to bed. I'm more OCD about making sure lights are turned off in the living room etc at night now.
With NPS gorgs, small daily feedings of fine micron foods is ideal, but often hard to pull off without ending up with elevated N/P and algae issues. Twice a week Id strive to provide a feeding of suspended food such as Julian Sprungs "phytoplan" aka spray dried phytoplankton as well as Benepets benereef as they offer correct particle size and nutrition without dramatically increasing phosphate compared to something like reefroids, another old school trick the great Peter Wilkens (godfather of modern reef keeping) did to keep NPS corals long term in conventional reef aquariums is he would often stir a small section of his sandbed to kick up particles and bacteria flocculents into the water column for the devout filter feeders. Luckily diodogorgia nodulifera seems to be one of the more common and easier NPS gorgs to care for
that's good advice!
I know my local LFS calls this the slow season as reefers seem to really get serious in the winter time here in the PNW and my own setup feels the same. I'm currently only running the socks now, skimmer turned off, no reef mat, no macro reactor. tank seems stable but not thriving. I feed frozen once or twice a day for the fish/tangs, and I add a strip of nori daily as well which the tangs devour. I have been adding a little of the redsea AB+ as an experiement because its so highly reviewed but so far I don't see what people are so crazy about. Corals seem unchanged and the amount of cleaning on glass is about the same as if I was running reef roids.
Everything is "good" but I would not say thriving yet. My tank is of course only a couple months old though so my current plan more or less is to care for it, enjoy it, feed it, clean it and get it through summer time until our "peak" reefer season hits in the fall. which I'm sure my wife and I will go nuts then as we usually do with more fish store dates and random bargain frag pickups, lol. even my zoas which historically I've done very well with are open and doing well, but in my opinion not "thriving". everything seems fine but the tank needs more time to really settle in I think to start seeing the epic levels of growth my old garden had.
No pictures but a couple updates:
I've been really unhappy with my light settings but I think I finally found the sweet spot. Apparently, my corals think so too. I could tell something wasn't balanced yet because my GSP of all things, was really finicky. I had the whites maybe too high (for the SPS) and it was pissing off the GSP. even my torch and frogspawn were "OK" but not thriving. well a couple days of a more blue based light setting and now everything is opening up. the torch has doubled in size, I have 3 different strains of GSP and they're all full open again.
We had two BTA's in the tank only about a $.25 piece in size. I was fully prepared for them to pick spots in the tank that would hide them but both seem to have set up homes in optimal viewing places so I'm pretty happy with that.
I've permenantly removed the skimmer which has been IN my sump, but off for a week or two. So that, and the macro reactor are both in storage until I can take the time to measure and photograph them for a local that wants to trade me for them.
I cleaned the socks (still haven't plumbed in the reef mat) and did a small water change to help fight the red in my white sand.
My refractometer I believe needs to be calibrated. It was showing 1.025 consistently and for some reason I grabbed my hydrometer before I did my WC this weekend which showed me over 1.028. I actually trust the hydrometer more because my gorgonians were not opening up at all since my last WC so I by using about 1/2 dose of salt in my new fresh water this weekend I brought salinity down to about 1.025 (according to hydrometer) and immediatley noticed improvements in both my gorgs as well as one of my zoa colonies that had been closed up.
Normaly zoas have been my canary in the coalmine for salinity issues, I didn't really think of it this time because I had them placed so low I thought they were just upset about par.
I've been really unhappy with my light settings but I think I finally found the sweet spot. Apparently, my corals think so too. I could tell something wasn't balanced yet because my GSP of all things, was really finicky. I had the whites maybe too high (for the SPS) and it was pissing off the GSP. even my torch and frogspawn were "OK" but not thriving. well a couple days of a more blue based light setting and now everything is opening up. the torch has doubled in size, I have 3 different strains of GSP and they're all full open again.
We had two BTA's in the tank only about a $.25 piece in size. I was fully prepared for them to pick spots in the tank that would hide them but both seem to have set up homes in optimal viewing places so I'm pretty happy with that.
I've permenantly removed the skimmer which has been IN my sump, but off for a week or two. So that, and the macro reactor are both in storage until I can take the time to measure and photograph them for a local that wants to trade me for them.
I cleaned the socks (still haven't plumbed in the reef mat) and did a small water change to help fight the red in my white sand.
My refractometer I believe needs to be calibrated. It was showing 1.025 consistently and for some reason I grabbed my hydrometer before I did my WC this weekend which showed me over 1.028. I actually trust the hydrometer more because my gorgonians were not opening up at all since my last WC so I by using about 1/2 dose of salt in my new fresh water this weekend I brought salinity down to about 1.025 (according to hydrometer) and immediatley noticed improvements in both my gorgs as well as one of my zoa colonies that had been closed up.
Normaly zoas have been my canary in the coalmine for salinity issues, I didn't really think of it this time because I had them placed so low I thought they were just upset about par.
the rest of my time has been this project. we had our deck rebuilt in Feb and it's a bit of a monster... about 40+ft long and 10-12ft wide. I knew once the weather got warm enough in late may or early june, I'd have to start the sanding/staining part of it so... here I am. I expect to have about half to 3/4 of it finished up by this upcoming weekend, then move to the other side of the house where we have another deck about 36ft x 8ft to do as well, but it's much simpler, no stairs, bar or pergola on that one.
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