New Coral Farm build in Oz

[bdepp]

Update time:

It's winter over here so things are starting to get cold. Our insulated facility is brilliant. We havn't run any kind of heating or cooling for a couple of weeks and the temperature of our tanks stay at a constant 24 degrees C. We've been running really well for a while now but the things we want to do we never do.

We have been running and experement with some old halide globe that look like they are 8000k-10000k to see if that will increase growth rates. Thus we have had a large issue with algae. We've now changed over to 20,000k globe for the rest of the experiment and the algae is starting to really go away now which is great.

We are still having dosing issues... mainly becasue it's not automated yet. We really need to get a calcium reactor for our main prop system as that would solve alot of issues we have had in the past.

We've also just started experimenting with mass production of frag plugs by using a silicon mould. We've made our test mould and are currently making sure that we have the right ratio of cement to sand/agronite mix. up till now we really have been using sand to mould our frag plugs we have used to mount our frags

The biggest thing we need to do is more fragging. Our acro stock is going really well and have lots of frags on the go. However our Zoa's, mushrooms and ricordeas have taken a back seat while we've been focusing on the acro's. We now have alot of zoa mother colonies ready to go but lacking frag tiles/disks to put the frags onto to grow. we have been thinking of the marble route but still not to sure.

Will post photo's soon

Depp

 

[buzzy]

Nice work mate!!, cant wait to see the new pic's

 

[kmacartney]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=15372839#post15372839 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by buzzy
Nice work mate!!, cant wait to see the new pic's

Ah, I was wondering if there are any NZ reefers out there!

 

[bdepp]

how goes the NZ reefing scene buzzy? do you have online stores over there?

 

[Jackza]

Wow nice read....I'm busy setting up a frag project in South Africa and it's great to see it working on Oz...

Please keep the updates going...

 

[Plankt0s]

I don't know why but I keep forgetting that the entire southern hemisphere of the planet has winter opposite of us here in the states. How cold does it get there? I am in Northern Minnesota and if you are at all familiar with the US then you know that Minnesota gets REALLY cold in the REALLY long winters -35°C.

 

[mnemonix]

In Brisbane where Bdepp is located the average low temp is 15.5C (60F) and average high is 25.3C (78F)

Record low -0.1C (32F)
Record high 40.2C (104F)

It's a tropical part of coastal Australia subject to seasonal swings.

 

[bdepp]

yep not too cold around these parts but i lived in melbourne for 30 years before moving up to brisbane last october. It gets cold down there but nothing compared to you bio.

Because we ship all over Australia we have to be very mindful of the weather in other states especially melbourne and canberra as they get the coldest.

I think that makes it a bit easier on the corals because of our mildish weather, thus DOA's are very, very rare.

Depp

 

[CLINTOS]

Do you have any close up pics of Yuma's?

 

[bdepp]

Quick update:

Spend most of tonight cleaning our main propogation tanks. Detritus gets everywhere and it's not that easy to get rid of. i ended up blasting it with a powerhead to keep it in the water column. it's a start

Our acro's are doing really well, growing and colouring up great. Our acan's however haven't been happy for some reason. Still working that out. Coraline is really starting to grow over everything which means the algae problem is going away!

Spent 30mins squirting aptasia's with joes juice. they seem to be poping up all over the place. We get them whenever we see them. We are winning battles with them but the war wages on.

cleaned up our mushroom and zoa propogation system. It's much better now and we can actually see what we have in stock and everything else is growing.

A quick video of the zoa tank
http://www.coralmania.com.au/P7240042.MOV

We've recently stocked up on snails by the hundreds. what a great idea that was. our tanks haven't looked cleaner.

 

[bdepp]

Yes i do Clintos, and here you are. Enjoy!
image removed due to commercial watermark

 

[CLINTOS]

I love the square frag plugs are they created from a silcone mold?

 

[CLINTOS]

Thanks the last yuma is my favorite

 

[bdepp]

thnka clintos. I like the last best too. it's so beautiful.

those frag plugs are bought but i'm waiting on the silicon to arrive to mould them so we cna make a ton more.

 

[CLINTOS]

I like the size they look like they would be perfect for single yuma's I'm using something similar but they are 1"x1" tumbled marble for my high end single zoo's now that I found out that tumbled marble are reef safe

 

[bdepp]

the tiles are about 30mm in size. I think that 1 inch and a quarter for you. They are a Great size and don't take up too much space either, so we can fit 640 of them in each tank. That's a lot of zoas

 

[CLINTOS]

Would that size be good for a single yuma?

 

[bdepp]

yea it would ge a good size because when they get big enough they will envelope they sides and grow over it, so you wont see any of the tile. that's my guess anyway

 

[CLINTOS]

That's what I was guessing too that the edges would hang over the side only a bit but not too much then if pushed into the gravel the shroom would look like one perfect shroom by its self on the gravel but attached solidly to a surface

I'll keep an eye out for that size or just cut some larger tiles thanks

 

[bdepp]

Update on the system,

Business is going well and we are starting to get a nice stockpile of wild corals and aquacultured corals in our system.
We've started to get overloaded with corals in our current 3 running systems, so we've had to start another system up and running. this leaves us with one system left that we can use.

We've had a breakout of mudibranchs in our zoa propogation tank which hasn't been fun. these critters are small but you can see where they have been via the part that usually a zoa will be closed whenthe rest of the colony is open. We ended up fishing out around 30-40 of the suckers.

image removed due to commercial watermark

Did a massive cleanout of our main propogation system the other night and syphoned out all the detritus and rubbish that i could get too. This made me notice that our acan's are starting to die. We aren't sure why this is happening but we have moved them to another system for the time being just to make sure. We have lost about 4 motorcolonies at this stage and still no real answer why. We are still looking.

We'll we've taken the plunge and ordered some shrimp. We didn't really think this through too well though. When we got them, we thought about it and realised it was going to be pretty darn hard to catch if we put in our systems but as that's all we have running we had to just put them in. We are now hunting around for some good designs for inverts to go into. Can you help??

Some pictures

image removed due to commercial watermark