sp4zzy
New member
Hello everyone! I just registered to the forums a couple of days ago, and I'd like to share my ongoing journey with my first reef tank!
I've been keeping aquariums for a good portion of my life, and about 6 years ago got my wife into the hobby as well. We started with freshwater planted tanks and at one point had 8 running tanks + a pair of axolotls. After a fairly recent move and having to downsize, we decided to jump into the world of nano reefs and this is our adventure! Images will be imgur.com links, as I don't want to massively flood a forum post. If anyone wants more specific images or information, I'll answer what I can.
Starting out and first post-cycle shots
We started out with a 15gal column tank that we picked up at a fish club auction along the way. Being fairly unique, I always wanted to do something different with it, but no opportunities presented themselves until early January. We started off slow and did a little over a month long fishless cycle with a small amount of live rock and a single peppermint shrimp to clear up quite the mess of Aiptasia. The Tail Spot ended up in the wrong album, he's a recent introduction!
The tank itself had a light built into the hood, which I tore out and replaced with a High Output LED kit from Aquastyle. I had to dremel quite a bit of extra plastic out of the top to make everything fit, but in the end it looks better than I could have hoped. The current light setup is 7x 10,000k white, 6x Royal Blue, and 2x Violet (420nm) LED's with 60° lenses. Moon lights are more or less double-sided taped to the inside rim of the tank (above a sheet of acrylic with a hole cut for feeding). Both sets of lights are automated as of fairly recently.
We also started with just a HOB filter and weekly water changes. Before long we realized it wasn't going to be enough and added a Jebao RW-4 powerhead/wavemaker to increase water flow. After cycling, we added a couple of Damsels as our first livestock. (Side note, lesson learned there. Getting them out was beyond difficult). We slowly added new corals over a period of several months and everything seemed to do well. We upgraded the tank a piece at a time, adding more rock and new gear - I replaced the HOB filter with a CPR Aquafuge2 and installed a Hydor SlimSkim to help keep the water quality better.
Until recently - a few weeks ago we had a cyano outbreak. We tried manually removing as much as possible, syphoning it out, increasing water changes, etc but it was there to stay. After a bit of research, we decided to dose the tank with ChemiClean. I'm a bit on the fence, because while it worked incredibly well I don't know if it contributed to what happened next. Within days of the cyano clearing up, there was Dino absolutely EVERYWHERE. Manual removal was futile, every day it was back just as bad. Corals and rock were totally covered, nothing was opening, and everything started withering. After checking all of our parameters for a solid week, on kind of a whim we decided to pull everything out of the tank, give it a light scrub and a brief freshwater dip - long story short, no more dino! By some bit of luck, it worked and didn't throw our tank back into a new cycle, but now our tank looked like hell.
A couple of shots of the damage.
Color loss and RTN everywhere. We weren't sure if anything would survive, and sadly our Sunburst Montipora frag was already lost. I didn't take any pictures of the Zoas/Palys as they were just clamped shut the entire time.
That was 8 days ago. In the meantime we've let nature run its course and just kept up with monitoring water quality and dosing supplements. Here she is now!
On the road to recovery
Everything else has managed to spring back, and MUCH faster than I thought was possible! I picked up the "Toxic Splatter" Goniastrea yesterday, and it seems happy so far! There's also a Green Clown Goby in the tank somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can get a good shot of him (recent addition, hasn't come out of hiding yet).
I've been keeping aquariums for a good portion of my life, and about 6 years ago got my wife into the hobby as well. We started with freshwater planted tanks and at one point had 8 running tanks + a pair of axolotls. After a fairly recent move and having to downsize, we decided to jump into the world of nano reefs and this is our adventure! Images will be imgur.com links, as I don't want to massively flood a forum post. If anyone wants more specific images or information, I'll answer what I can.
Starting out and first post-cycle shots
We started out with a 15gal column tank that we picked up at a fish club auction along the way. Being fairly unique, I always wanted to do something different with it, but no opportunities presented themselves until early January. We started off slow and did a little over a month long fishless cycle with a small amount of live rock and a single peppermint shrimp to clear up quite the mess of Aiptasia. The Tail Spot ended up in the wrong album, he's a recent introduction!
The tank itself had a light built into the hood, which I tore out and replaced with a High Output LED kit from Aquastyle. I had to dremel quite a bit of extra plastic out of the top to make everything fit, but in the end it looks better than I could have hoped. The current light setup is 7x 10,000k white, 6x Royal Blue, and 2x Violet (420nm) LED's with 60° lenses. Moon lights are more or less double-sided taped to the inside rim of the tank (above a sheet of acrylic with a hole cut for feeding). Both sets of lights are automated as of fairly recently.
We also started with just a HOB filter and weekly water changes. Before long we realized it wasn't going to be enough and added a Jebao RW-4 powerhead/wavemaker to increase water flow. After cycling, we added a couple of Damsels as our first livestock. (Side note, lesson learned there. Getting them out was beyond difficult). We slowly added new corals over a period of several months and everything seemed to do well. We upgraded the tank a piece at a time, adding more rock and new gear - I replaced the HOB filter with a CPR Aquafuge2 and installed a Hydor SlimSkim to help keep the water quality better.
Until recently - a few weeks ago we had a cyano outbreak. We tried manually removing as much as possible, syphoning it out, increasing water changes, etc but it was there to stay. After a bit of research, we decided to dose the tank with ChemiClean. I'm a bit on the fence, because while it worked incredibly well I don't know if it contributed to what happened next. Within days of the cyano clearing up, there was Dino absolutely EVERYWHERE. Manual removal was futile, every day it was back just as bad. Corals and rock were totally covered, nothing was opening, and everything started withering. After checking all of our parameters for a solid week, on kind of a whim we decided to pull everything out of the tank, give it a light scrub and a brief freshwater dip - long story short, no more dino! By some bit of luck, it worked and didn't throw our tank back into a new cycle, but now our tank looked like hell.
A couple of shots of the damage.
Color loss and RTN everywhere. We weren't sure if anything would survive, and sadly our Sunburst Montipora frag was already lost. I didn't take any pictures of the Zoas/Palys as they were just clamped shut the entire time.
That was 8 days ago. In the meantime we've let nature run its course and just kept up with monitoring water quality and dosing supplements. Here she is now!
On the road to recovery
Everything else has managed to spring back, and MUCH faster than I thought was possible! I picked up the "Toxic Splatter" Goniastrea yesterday, and it seems happy so far! There's also a Green Clown Goby in the tank somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can get a good shot of him (recent addition, hasn't come out of hiding yet).
