New Deodronephthya sp. study group?

I have this exact coral. It has been doing ok for me, hasn't exactly exploded in growth, but hasn't declined either. It has the exact same habits as the purple "Neospongodes" that I got from Erik.
 
Japanese Tank

Japanese Tank

Does anyone have update pics on this tank?.
http://www.cpfarm.com/

I'm not sure how long it's been running, but this is the only pic I have seen of it. The Dendro's seem to be doing well though.....

Mo
 
i believe that was a staged photo, not a setup tank for any period of time. Beautiful but just done for photo opt.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=14399099#post14399099 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Kreeger1
i believe that was a staged photo, not a setup tank for any period of time. Beautiful but just done for photo opt.
Click to expand...

I'm going to agree, I believe it was just set up for an exhibition or something if I remember correctly. There was a lot of discussion about it awhile back.
 
He uses Reed's products, Shell fish diet and Roti feast. His tank is no longer. He's starting a small 30 gal tank to see if he can reproduce his results small scale.
 
Kreeger1 said:
He uses Reed's products, Shell fish diet and Roti feast. His tank is no longer. He's starting a small 30 gal tank to see if he can reproduce his results small scale.
Click to expand...

Just dug this up again. Could someone please report on the demise? The failure is just as important as the success from a learning perspective.
 
It wasn't a failure in the sense that Chuck's methods didn't work. He was having great results with dendronephthya. He just had a major power outage that winter that killed his tank.
 
Anyone try a algae turf scrubber along with a refuge so large amount's of food can be dosed/grown while exporting inorganics and keeping the food inside?
 
Yes

Yes

Yes I have an ATS and a refugium. I don't run anythink else.

I have a 130 gallon main tank and 55 gallon sump/refugium that is fill to the brim with a special coral rubble from Caribsea. It is very porus but unfortunatly it is not offered for sale to the public.

I use a dump bucket style Algal Turf Scrubber (ATS). You can see is running on Youtube using these links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRoKX8AjEbI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARl3jzpVd0g
There were taken right after is was installed.
By the way, I raised it up until the splash was strong enough for my liking, which is purly cosmetic and not for the health of the tank. I like the look and the soothing sound of the splash, which is quieter with the cabinet doors closed.
You can also see my website with some old articles on my last project and some rendering on that project and my new one, by clicking on this: http://asaherring.com

I started my tank about 10 months ago and I have been biulding up the feeding regement slowly as I work up the filter feeding higherarchy. I wanted to feed heavily and not have the food skimmed out right away. Instead, I wanted to food to circulate as long as possible. That is why I pulled out my old dump bucket that I used for about 10 years without an refugium and re-used it.
I have lots of feather dusters and am starting to find sponges growning on a few of the rocks. I also have a couple of gargonions as well. Dendros are next on my list but I didn't want to simply let them wast away until I was ready. Now I am.

I have worked up on the feeding, using lots of powders and other things but I have a mixed use tank that also includes SPS and LPS as well so I have high light levels and am keeping the rock clean as I increase the feeding. I have never had a messuable cycle spike, which is typical for well built ATS tanks. Also, I am never able to messure any nutrients of my test kits.

I don't get any algae growth at all on the rock but it does turn a little dark if I rush the feeding. I don't think that the ATS effects the bacerial load which seems to help the snails. The turbo snails and asteas starved to death long ago becuase of the lack of hair algae but I bought some small soft shell snails that like the brown coating.

My ATS was running fine until I hooked up my 55g refugium about 4 months ago. In just a couple of weeks, after a harvest, the algae stopped growing back. The nutriant levels were always too low to measure on normal hobby test kits or at the store but they fell so low that the fast growning turf algae didn't grown back.

Basically, the refugium went into compatitoin with the ATS. I seeded the rock with a little bottled bacteria and a small sample of the oldest piece of live rock that I could buy from the store. If you look at the licks above, you will see that there is lots of air exchange from the energetic splash so oxygen was never an issue even though the ATS was no longs doing anything but offer insurence against an occational over dose of food or additives. If that happened, th algae grew for a short period of time once and a while but then return to a no growth state. At first the ATS started growing lots of brown slim from the powder and other foods but than it's growth also slowed and then stopped.

All was fine but my pH begain to fall and I had to add 8.4 and Balance more and more. I search around the web and confirmed that a rise in CO2 will cause that problem so I bought some birds nest macro algae and put it in the dump bucket. It didn't grow much at all but it did breath under the close by lighting. The CO2 went down and the pH stablized.

I am up to 18 fish and enogh coral food to completly cloud the water to the point that you can't see anything in the tank. ...but no alae ....all clean rock.

I am working on new feeding formuli as I get ready to go to the dendros. I am confedent that the tank is quite read. I have not been adding the growned squid and stuff like that because I have nothing to eat it yet. When I do, the scrubber should kick back in. In my old tank, I added fish furtalizer to keep up the algae production when I over scrubbed so this should be no problem. I think that I have lots of capacity that I have not tapped yet.
 
That's what I was told about the ATS aswell that it would out compete cheato

a ATS is the next thing that I'm adding to my refugeless/skimmerless DT and I'm leaning towards dosing alot of phyto and meaty food

I'm hoping to add a tester dandro someday

Does anyone know which specific dendro might consume nano phyto?
 
Last edited:
herring_fish that is an awesome design you have there, please let everyone know how it works out for you with the Dendronephthya
 
I wonder if those are pods indroduced live shortly before feeding or grown in population?

or live at all?
 
Jens Kallmeyer said:
Hi Fred

I think that Dendros and several other non-photosynthetic species feed on coral mucus, or rather the sstuff that is on and in the mucus. I came to that conclusion after a few experiences:
1) Once I went through all my UW pictures of Dendros etc. and did not find a single picture where there wasn't a piece of this snot hanging somewhere.
2) THere are several publications out there that show that coral mucus is quite nutritious. Coral mucus traps a lot of debris and detritus, adding to its nutritioal value or at least making its nutritious spectrum somewhat broader.
3) Coral mucus in nature is rapidly colonized by bacteria, this has been shown in several studies. Bacteria break the polysaccharides into smaller chunks, thereby dissolving the material
4) Over the last few decades, people tried to keep Dendros alive with basically no luck, not matter what they actually fed them. The only long-time success that was reported was from Peter Wilkens, he claimed it to be a result of using his Product Combisan. I don't think so, but he stirred his gravel several times per week, and apparently then the coral opened. What did the coral eat? Not the Combisan, but the detritus. The detritus itself contains a lot of stuff, its composition is depending on what is in the tank. However, all this material is colonized by bacteria.
5) When I used some live or preserved Phytoplankton the Dendros opened, the question is now: What causes this reflex, the Phyto or the bacteria living in the Phyto broth? In an Experiment at the University of Stuttgart some sponges were fed with a bad batch of phyto which was completely contaminated by bacteria. The next day the sponges showed more activity than ever before as measured by several techniques.

UltraPac mimics the coral mucus, not perfectly but it is a start. By binding other stuff to it,either particular material like unicellular algae or dissolved stuff like Amino acids it is possible to at least partially recreate the mucus. As I said it is still less than perfect and I am working together with Fauna Marin on some improvement, but this may take a little while longer. Danny Dame from Holland is using the stuff for the last few months and he has some very good success with it, as well as several other people.
The two US distributors just got the stuff last week or so, it may not be on their website, I would just drop them an email.

The only problem with this kind of food is that it pollutes the water quite heavily. I am using a skimmer plus a refugium, PO4 Adsorber , a just to keep NO3 and PO4 at halfway decent (NO3 20 ppm, PO4 0.1 pm) levels.



Best wishes

Jens
Click to expand...



I had dendro's that I kept for several years before my ex killed my tank and then later my house burned. But until then I had kept them for about 3 to 4 years, but i took a syringe and blew detris from the rock every morning and evening and then buried the end of the syringe in the sand and blew air through it to stir up the dirty corners sometimes as much as 3 times a day.

yeah i spent way to much time with my tanks. lol
 
herring_fish said:
Yes I have an ATS and a refugium. I don't run anythink else.

I have a 130 gallon main tank and 55 gallon sump/refugium that is fill to the brim with a special coral rubble from Caribsea. It is very porus but unfortunatly it is not offered for sale to the public.

I use a dump bucket style Algal Turf Scrubber (ATS). You can see is running on Youtube using these links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRoKX8AjEbI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARl3jzpVd0g
There were taken right after is was installed.
By the way, I raised it up until the splash was strong enough for my liking, which is purly cosmetic and not for the health of the tank. I like the look and the soothing sound of the splash, which is quieter with the cabinet doors closed.
You can also see my website with some old articles on my last project and some rendering on that project and my new one, by clicking on this: http://asaherring.com

I started my tank about 10 months ago and I have been biulding up the feeding regement slowly as I work up the filter feeding higherarchy. I wanted to feed heavily and not have the food skimmed out right away. Instead, I wanted to food to circulate as long as possible. That is why I pulled out my old dump bucket that I used for about 10 years without an refugium and re-used it.
I have lots of feather dusters and am starting to find sponges growning on a few of the rocks. I also have a couple of gargonions as well. Dendros are next on my list but I didn't want to simply let them wast away until I was ready. Now I am.

I have worked up on the feeding, using lots of powders and other things but I have a mixed use tank that also includes SPS and LPS as well so I have high light levels and am keeping the rock clean as I increase the feeding. I have never had a messuable cycle spike, which is typical for well built ATS tanks. Also, I am never able to messure any nutrients of my test kits.

I don't get any algae growth at all on the rock but it does turn a little dark if I rush the feeding. I don't think that the ATS effects the bacerial load which seems to help the snails. The turbo snails and asteas starved to death long ago becuase of the lack of hair algae but I bought some small soft shell snails that like the brown coating.

My ATS was running fine until I hooked up my 55g refugium about 4 months ago. In just a couple of weeks, after a harvest, the algae stopped growing back. The nutriant levels were always too low to measure on normal hobby test kits or at the store but they fell so low that the fast growning turf algae didn't grown back.

Basically, the refugium went into compatitoin with the ATS. I seeded the rock with a little bottled bacteria and a small sample of the oldest piece of live rock that I could buy from the store. If you look at the licks above, you will see that there is lots of air exchange from the energetic splash so oxygen was never an issue even though the ATS was no longs doing anything but offer insurence against an occational over dose of food or additives. If that happened, th algae grew for a short period of time once and a while but then return to a no growth state. At first the ATS started growing lots of brown slim from the powder and other foods but than it's growth also slowed and then stopped.

All was fine but my pH begain to fall and I had to add 8.4 and Balance more and more. I search around the web and confirmed that a rise in CO2 will cause that problem so I bought some birds nest macro algae and put it in the dump bucket. It didn't grow much at all but it did breath under the close by lighting. The CO2 went down and the pH stablized.

I am up to 18 fish and enogh coral food to completly cloud the water to the point that you can't see anything in the tank. ...but no alae ....all clean rock.

I am working on new feeding formuli as I get ready to go to the dendros. I am confedent that the tank is quite read. I have not been adding the growned squid and stuff like that because I have nothing to eat it yet. When I do, the scrubber should kick back in. In my old tank, I added fish furtalizer to keep up the algae production when I over scrubbed so this should be no problem. I think that I have lots of capacity that I have not tapped yet.
Click to expand...

I have also read these kind of things. To that end once a week I just make my green slimmer mad.
 
It seems Ultra Pac, the artificial coral mucus, has been replaced with Ultra Min D. From Claude:

"Current results obtained from Fauna Marin research in both natural coral reefs and in experimentally set up reef tanks provided us with important information for the development of a new food system powerful enough to let your Dendronepthya grow even in captivity.

We found that animate, nutritionally improved coral mucus is the key factor in Dendronephthya nutrition. Our research goals have practically been applied to our new artificial coral mucus ULTRA MIn-D. The Dendro System allows for both the efficient nutrient upgrade and nutrient transport to the coral"

When I look at the back of the bottle, the ingredients are exactly the same as ULTRA Min S, but the color of the fluid is much different. I wonder if they took Ultra Min S (amino acid supp) and added Ultra Pac to it.
 
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