My 65G Shallow Reef Tank

It doesn’t really mean anything of significance, I don’t think..
It’s just all those large colonies in a relatively small volume of water. I always find it amazing..
If you ever stopped dosing ca and alk, you could probably see hourly incremental drops in levels as those huge colonies pulled the elements out of the limited volume of water..
 
Photobucket have recently notified me that despite their promise that I would be able to use their third party hosting support for one year, they decided to terminate that support from next month. This means that majority of my photos in this thread will be inaccessible in due course.

A UK forum of which I am a member has used a piece of software that imports photos stored in Photobucket to their database automatically. I have gone through my thread and can no longer see a single reference to Photobucket images. Excellent service me thinks.

As for this forum, having seen what is possible, I have decided not to manually move my photos to another host. I have the original copies of my photos on my iMac. So, I can do so if I have all the time in the world, but this now seems unlikely.

I hope that this forum's owner(s) will one day decide to migrate from VBulletin to more advanced software platform, such as Xenforo, so that people's photos can be recovered without much effort.
 
That gomezi is truly beautiful...you made me remember how much I love that coral. Also the sarmentosa is definitely a stunner!

I got hit by the photobucket thing too I can't see them lasting in the long run I've closed my account.
 
drawman said:
That gomezi is truly beautiful...you made me remember how much I love that coral. Also the sarmentosa is definitely a stunner!

I got hit by the photobucket thing too I can't see them lasting in the long run I've closed my account.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your positive feedback.
 
I fragged my largest tabling Acropora colony earlier this evening for the very first time as it got rather too big for my tank. I introduced it to my tank as a small frag on 13th June 2015.

Acropora microclados (the frag at the bottom)

Having inspected the colony and the way branches fused together, I nearly gave up on the procedure as I feared that I may have caused irreparable damage to its shape.

The mother colony before fragging for the first time

I then went ahead after taking a deep breath. The end result was very pleasing. I ended the procedure with a minimum damage to the mother colony. Equally importantly, I managed to keep a fairly nice shape of the mother colony considering that more than 40 square inches of coral was removed from it. I am proud of myself. The thickness of the base is 15 mm. I wonder how long it will take for the cut section to regrow.

Thye mother colony after the fragging procedure

The thickness of the base ensured that during the fragging procedure the colony did not shutter into many pieces
 
That is down right incredible, Bulent.
Very nice job.
I give it 2-3 week to be fully healed up.
Bulent, question- I remember you asking Jo about his colonies, if they were soft like biscuits or very hard.
I find that my colonies at soft and biscuity which is obviously not normal. What is your theory as to why?
 
reefmutt said:
That is down right incredible, Bulent.
Very nice job.
I give it 2-3 week to be fully healed up.
Bulent, question- I remember you asking Jo about his colonies, if they were soft like biscuits or very hard.
I find that my colonies at soft and biscuity which is obviously not normal. What is your theory as to why?
Click to expand...

I appreciate your encouraging reaction, Matt.

I believe that very strong flow I provide plays an important role in the formation of very thick coral skeleton. For example, I cannot break my Acropora granulosa colony with my fingers despite this coral having fairly thin branches. I struggle even with my fragging tools.
 
Here are two ultra-short GoPro videos of the two frags I cut yesterday:






The top frag measures 4" X 4.5" and the bottom one measures 5" X 4.5".

Photos will follow.
 
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That go pro take really nice video.
Those shots look like bending over with a mask while standing in low tide on the gbr.
Except there are no feet in the shots!
Very nice Bulent.
 
reefmutt said:
That go pro take really nice video.
Those shots look like bending over with a mask while standing in low tide on the gbr.
Except there are no feet in the shots!
Very nice Bulent.
Click to expand...

Hi Matt,

I really liked the way you described my short videos. It is simply brilliant. Thank you.
 
Everything is looking great Bulent.

The PE on your milles is insane, I wish mine were like that. I have good PE but not that good.
 
Wow!
That coral before fragging was absolutely massive!
One of the largest colonies I've seen in a hobbyist's aquarium that's not thousands of gallons. Very impressive!!

I'm glad everything is continuing to do well for your tank and corals, it's all so inspiring to look at!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Bulent your tank and coral choices have deeply influenced the amount of acros I put in my display. I love how big your corals have gotten. I am striving for coral like yours one day!
 
codydemmel4 said:
Everything is looking great Bulent.

The PE on your milles is insane, I wish mine were like that. I have good PE but not that good.
Click to expand...

Hi Cody. Thanks for your feedback.

I have not yet figured out what exactly causes this sort of polyp extension in my tank. Is it the flow, temperature, free floating food particles, high nutrient concentration in the water column (or lack thereof)? Whatever it is, I use the polyp extension as one of my indicators for corals' contentment.

To demonstrate the point, I will use my latest experiment with TM Reef Actif's effect on water quality and subsequently on polyp extension as example.

As you know I have recently stopped dosing TM Reef Actif as I felt that after the amount of dosing reached a certain point polyp extension in certain coral colonies started to recede. Take Acropora millepora (sunrise) as an example. This is what it looked like in March 2017 before TM Reef Actif dosing had begun in May 2017:

Acropora millepora (sunrise) showing good polyp extension

Dosing TM Reef Actif certainly had some interesting effect on this coral in that both the growth and polyps extension were insane (September 2017):

Acropora millepora (sunrise millepora excellent polyp extension

The polyps of the same coral looked like below around the time when I decided to halt the dosing temporarily at the beginning of this month (note that this photo was taken in April 2017 after blowing them the polyps of this coral with turkey baster):

Acropora millepora (sunrise millepora shopwing lack of polyp extension

Now the water quality is somewhat different and the same coral responds to it:

Acropora millepora (sunrise millepora) showing some recovery
 
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