My minimalistic 180g SPS tank

codydemmel4 said:
Over the past 4 weeks, my phosphates has tested 0 every time on my hanna tester so I just took my GFO offline to hopefully get some phosphates and color up my SPS.

I am going to monitor my phosphates probably once every 3 days for a little then once a week. I also will see what it does to the color of the SPS, hoping it darkens majority of them. I am hoping for phosphates between 0.02-0.15. I also havent been able to grow cheato, and I am thinking this will help and keep my tank more stable.

The real test will be to see if I have to up my 2 part dosing which means my coral are growing more and consuming more alk and calc, thats what I am hoping for most :)
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going to do the tests tonight to see what has changed over the past 2 days. I also have been feeding my fish 4-5 times a day and mostly flakes but still have not touched the cleaning magnet on the glass and there are barely any marks, making me think that the phosphates are still very low.
 
sad day:

Just sold my regal angelfish and I have now put up my emporer angelfish for sale because first they started bulling eachother, so i got the regal angelfish back to great health and sold him.

well now I noticed the emporer taking some good chunks out of my SPS, especially ones with a yellow tip which is usually my favorite type of SPS so unfortunately both of my favorite fish are about to be out of my tank but hopefully they will mean great growth and PE for my corals in the next 1-2 weeks.
 
Randy27 said:
Ah, sorry to hear about you having to ditch the angels. I've had to pick corals over fish so many times as well..
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one good news is that I am actually going to start setup of my 8 foot FLOWR tank so I am going to keep the angelfish. Plan to have the FLOWR setup by next week, going to keep the angelfish in the fuge part of my sump which is around 36 x 24 inches so he should be perfect fine for 1-2 weeks in there. He is only 4-5 inches
 
took out almost all of my acros, any that were close to the others that have lost PE or I thought may have AEFW.

Well after the dip, I still cannot find any big bite marks or anything that I am 100% sure if bite marks or AEFW and this is after inspecting in the dark with a LED flashlight with a 7x magnify glass. Going to keep things the way it is for the next week and see if things get better that I dipped these and got the angelfish out.

I am dosing Flatworm stop so we will see if that has any benefits.
 
Do you have any Valida or Tri color acro in your tank?
AEFW loves to eat those corals, so they would be the first to get it. Not all Acro will get AEFW. Green slimer is one of those corals that will never get AEFW ever. Anyway, AEFW is very easy to see and recognize if you actually have them. Since you can't tell if you have AEFW or not, I don't think it is a good idea to pull out all of your corals to dip them. That would just stress them out even more. AEFW is quite easy to eradicate actually if you are willing to pull out all the corals.
 
GSMclowns said:
Do you have any Valida or Tri color acro in your tank?
AEFW loves to eat those corals, so they would be the first to get it. Not all Acro will get AEFW. Green slimer is one of those corals that will never get AEFW ever. Anyway, AEFW is very easy to see and recognize if you actually have them. Since you can't tell if you have AEFW or not, I don't think it is a good idea to pull out all of your corals to dip them. That would just stress them out even more. AEFW is quite easy to eradicate actually if you are willing to pull out all the corals.
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Thats funny you say that because thats the exact opposite of what is happening in my tank.

The green slimer is the one I was most concerned about (because of sudden PE loss and coral was browning some but now I am thinking it had to do with the angel picking at it )and the tri color has been doing the best so thats interesting you say that. I am not going to change anything till at least next weekend and see what happens
 
little update:

had an alk burn and some of the corals suffered pretty bad as it went from 7.5 to at least 9. I took the doser offline and let it drop back to 7.5 and now it has been steady there for a couple days. The corals still obviously have the burnt tips but are showing great PE at night which is giving me hope they can recover without me having to clip the tips off.

I am hoping that everything will color up and everything settle in within the next month as I am not changing anything in my routine and leaving the flow/lighting the same during that period.
 
not sure what is going on with my tank but it is struggling right now. just had about 3 corals RTN overnight out of nowhere that had great PE a couple days ago. All the tips of my one wild colony are looking horrible and the tips of my green slimer lost all color. the montiporas are like bleaching or something and now algae is growing on them. No idea how they would be bleaching as the lights have been the exact same the whole time this system has been setup.

my wild milles are losing PE and lack color on the tips.

I am really confused as I have had the alk stable now at 7.5 since i had the alk raise to at least 9. the calc is stable at 420. phosphates is always below 0.05, nitrate I try to keep around 2-4 and mag is 1350.

Really frustrated and confused
 
You can see the effects of an alk swing for months. Is your coralline algae still growing? Has it turned white?
 
My alk swing killed off many corals in my tank and several showed only minor discoloration prior to rtning. It took a good couple of months for my tank to recover and throughout that period I had random deaths of sps.
Sometimes acros don't show signs of stress right away..
Sometimes they die weeks after a stress event.
Just keep things as stable as possible. Good luck!
 
reefmutt said:
My alk swing killed off many corals in my tank and several showed only minor discoloration prior to rtning. It took a good couple of months for my tank to recover and throughout that period I had random deaths of sps.
Sometimes acros don't show signs of stress right away..
Sometimes they die weeks after a stress event.
Just keep things as stable as possible. Good luck!
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Thank you!

Luckily I don't have any really high end stuff as I wanted to wait till my tank hit the 7-8 month mark to get any of those. But sucks that almost all the branches on the majority of my mini colonies took a hit. Losing at least 4-5 inches total on each Colony. Could have been some nice frags before this hit haha.

At this point I just hope I don't lose any whole colonies.
 
Every tank reacts so differently to stress..
You'll hear people who's tank parameters swing dramatically and almost nothing happens and then you'll hear of small change having drastic results..
I guess it doesn't really matter what happens to other people's tanks.. you have to observe what happens to yours, employ best practices for tank health and stability and wait it out..
Hopefully, they begin to recover right away.
 
reefmutt said:
Every tank reacts so differently to stress..
You'll hear people who's tank parameters swing dramatically and almost nothing happens and then you'll hear of small change having drastic results..
I guess it doesn't really matter what happens to other people's tanks.. you have to observe what happens to yours, employ best practices for tank health and stability and wait it out..
Hopefully, they begin to recover right away.
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Yeah that is true, I am sure it doesnt help that my tank is considered new since I moved and got all new rock and started with dry rock only about 3 months ago so I assume that had something to do with the rough hit.

I assume since the inside of the mini colonies that got hit still have good color and PE that the coral is in good shape overall, just took a bad hit on most of the tips besides the ones at the bottom of the coral. The one Tenuis that got hit hard actually had really good PE on the tips last night when the lights were off but has no PE during the day on the tips
 
reefmutt said:
Every tank reacts so differently to stress..
You'll hear people who's tank parameters swing dramatically and almost nothing happens and then you'll hear of small change having drastic results..
I guess it doesn't really matter what happens to other people's tanks.. you have to observe what happens to yours, employ best practices for tank health and stability and wait it out..
Hopefully, they begin to recover right away.
Click to expand...

I really can't wait to see this tank when the colonies grow out. Going to very cool.

I stopped chasing precise numbers a long time ago. First of all, our hobby test kits just aren't sufficiently accurate or reliable to be that precise. Second, contrary to common belief, sea water varies in temperature, turbidity, trace elements etc. pretty widely even during a single day. I really think we do more damage trying to dial things in too much. Then again, after my last tank was overridden by Bryopsis, what the heck do I know. :)
 
Stolireef said:
I really can't wait to see this tank when the colonies grow out. Going to very cool.

I stopped chasing precise numbers a long time ago. First of all, our hobby test kits just aren't sufficiently accurate or reliable to be that precise. Second, contrary to common belief, sea water varies in temperature, turbidity, trace elements etc. pretty widely even during a single day. I really think we do more damage trying to dial things in too much. Then again, after my last tank was overridden by Bryopsis, what the heck do I know. :)
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Thank you!

Yes I really need to get everything stable and just let it be. if some acros die because of the alk swing, then thats what it is. I need to stop changing everything to try to save one coral, when it is potentially hurting a lot more. the corals have greatly increased their PE and the ones with burnt tips actually have PE during the night which i think is a good sign so I am thinking positive. I also am getting PE from some acros that I havent had in a long time
 
this is the PE and happiness I am missing from almost all my acros since the move in December, I am hoping they will be back to these colors and PE within the next couple months but right now I am just focusing on keeping alk steady between 7.5-8.2 and calc around 420 with a little big of phosphate around 0.02-0.1 and nitrate anything off 0.

I am just going to dose 2 part, flatworm stop and coral booster to hopefully promote growth and color, NO GFO or Carbon and just cheato with a skimmer.

Here are the corals before when I had my tank steady before the move, makes me want to get back to these happy corals so bad. I can see the great growth in some of the pieces, and some no growth at all, also I had to throw some out with bad experience with the move, when i thought I had AEFW (I think this hurt my corals the most by dipping them in bayer) and also the alk burn.

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Those were all just shot with my iphone and a gel filter
 
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