OK, let me try to answer your questions and we'll hopefully get this figured out together. This is a rather lengthy, detailed post, so please be patient and read carefully.
try dosing the Ca and ALK slower, it shouldn't cloud the water like that.
For the
Liquid Reactor, this kind of cloudiness is normal and expected. The other products don't cloud up like this.
your clam is turning white, there can be little doubt that your clam needs more light and fast. if you look at the mantle, you can see a few spots of blue left but the majority is turning a pale white.
For what it's worth, the good news here is that the clam is actually bluer "in person" than you can tell from the photo. I'm not disputing what you're saying, only that it's not quite as desperate as it appears.
you need to increase the amount of light the clam is getting immediately. it needs to be done very carefully at this point to not shock the clam as this may cause him to dump the remaining zoox., which could be fatal.
This is where it gets a little tricky. How much can we increase the lighting, how fast? Hold that thought - more discussion down a little farther.
can you post a pic of your lighting fixtures?
do they have individual reflectors??
As you can see, there's no room for individual reflectors. However, as may (or may not) be apparent, the entire inside surface around the bulbs is reflective (I'm guessing aluminized mylar, but that's only a guess), so the vast majority of generated light is going into the tank.
how old are the bulbs?? what kelvin are they?
Three of the four bulbs are less than six months old - the actinic (420 nm) and two of the 10,000K bulbs. The other 10,000K bulb is a year or so old - looking at the fixtures turned so the bulbs are facing up, it looks as though its light output is fairly close to the other 10,000K bulbs.
That's the good news. The bad news is that while I thought these were all 54W bulbs, as it turns out only the older bulb is 54W. The newer bulbs are all
28W bulbs. Again, hold onto that thought for now; we'll discuss more in a moment.
can you move him up??
As a practical matter, no.
This illustrates what I said above in an earlier post. The ruler ends 1/4" or less below the surface of the water, and even with the top and the fixture thickness the bulbs are only about an inch from the surface. So you can see the clam is only about 5" from the lights, which provides not much potential for substantially increasing the available light by moving it higher in the tank. Which brings us to issue number two.
As you can see, the clam has worked itself over a raised area so it's sort of straddling a projection in the rock, with its foot and byssal fibers on either side. It's fairly rough, so I can't see a good way to even consider cutting it off. We placed the clam a couple inches farther back, and over the course of about a week it moved itself to its present location, where it's been anchored ever since - call it two months.
So, the bottom line is that currently the clam is under 2x28W 10,000K, another 10,000K that's supposed to put out 54W but currently putting out about 28W, and a 28W actinic. Add to that a 26W 6500K CF bulb in a 5 1/2" round metal reflector directly over the clam, which got added yesterday - and is (as it turns out) a larger percentage jump than I thought it would be, as the output of that bulb is nearly the same as the other individual bulbs but is concentrated on the clam. So there's already been a significant light increase, although admittedly not what will eventually be required.
Returning to earlier discussion points, the clam needs more light, but not so much more so rapidly that it dies from shock rather than lack of light. The immediate options I see (which aren't mutually exclusive) are as follows:
1)
Increase the T5 output by putting replacing the 28W bulbs with 54W bulbs. This one is relatively straightforward - the one fixture already has a 54W bulb in it (although it's old enough that the output isn't where it should be). I've already paired that with a 54W actinic (vice the 28W). The downside of this is that I don't know how safe it is, given this is twice the power draw the unit was designed for. In fact, I've noticed that the clear acrylic cover over the 54W bulb is beginning to melt just over the joint where the glass meets the metal end cap. I also noticed that it's partially cracked there, so there may be something else going on that's responsible for the melting. Either way, that bulb's got to go, but it's unknown if that's a viable option overall.
2)
Replace the actinic with another 10,000K bulb. That increases the white light from the two twin fixtures by 25% - my understanding is that while the actinic is pretty, it really does almost nothing in terms of photosynthesis. As I mentioned, for tomorrow I've already swapped out the 28W actinic for a 54W, but that's as much to see how the fixture deals with two 54W bulbs as it is for light output.
3)
Increase the time. Right now, my timing cycle is 10am to 10pm, with the actinic/white combo on at 10, the twin white on at 12 and off at 8, and the actinic/white combo off at 10pm. I've put the 26W spot on the same timer as the actinic/white combo. Resetting the timer to have the full set on for a longer period would increase the effective light, although there's obviously a limit (and potentially diminishing returns) with this approach.
4)
Add another 26W 6500K CF. While this is only a stop-gap, and isn't actually equivalent to 54W of 6500K (due to the diameter of the parabolic reflectors - I'm guessing effectively about 40W total), it's quick and easy.
5)
Add yet another 26W6500K CF by removing enough of the black tank background to aim its reflector through the back of the tank onto the clam. It would be somewhat farther than from the top, but probably still not more than a foot from the focused bulb to the clam. This would also be obnoxious in the long run, but probably bearable for a little while.
I'm hoping some combination of these will do the job until we see which (if any) are viable and sufficient over the longer term, or a better solution can be worked out. However,
assuming the existing fixtures can handle the additional power requirement, by doing all five of these we could easily
triple or quadruple the light on the clam literally overnight. And most likely kill it from the shock in the process (not to mention what it might do to the rest of the zooanthellate population of the tank - probably the same).
So, with all these factors/alternatives in mind, how fast can we safely increase the light so as to return the clam to health without causing it and the rest of the tank undue shock and stress? Which steps should we add, and in which order? What do you think?
