Pete's 110 build

[psteeleb]

I'll be back home after two weeks away later tonight. Friday I expect to be adding to the tank:
another Yellow Ricordia
another pink&aqua Ricordia
5 Scarlet herimts
50 Blue leg hermits
20 Mex Turban snails
25 Nerite snails
1 Atlantic gray cowrie
1 pencil urchin
another Harlequin Serpent starfish (the first one I got was so small he is lost int the rock work)

3-5 lytail anthias (all female)
1 bristle tooth tang (kole or tomini)

I also need to recalibrate the Ca reactor, I cut it back to 6 hours but it the Alk was still increasing, so for now it's turned off, I may just need to raise the effluent pH from 6.5 to 7ish

My main goal is to figure out why my house router isn't working with the path forwarding. I thought i was all good to go as it works fine from inside the house using the external host name, but from outside the house, I get nothing.

almost forgot, that I may trade a frag ot the ORA pearlberry for a watermellon chalice

 

[justin_g]

Wow!

 

[psteeleb]

Wow!

thanks Justin

 

[psteeleb]

got in late tonight and the actinics were already about 50% but I got a few videos
sorry the tank was dark so the camera was having a hard time keeping focus

the ORA pearberry - looks like the polyps are multi color
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Favia
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sunset monte - you can see a couple of those net casting worms on it
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here are a couple of ball nems - they get a nice multi color glow at night
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the $500 efflo
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[psteeleb]

here are my first set of results as I'm dialing both reactors in and trying to maintain the overall Ca/ALk demands.

Below is a graph showing the affects of using timed and pH constrained use of Ca and Kalcwasser to narrow the 24 hour pH swing

The Ca reactor is run when the lights are on to help off set the highs or upward swing and the Kalcwasser is run when pH is bellow 8.15, I'm not showing it on this graph for clarity. You can see where the Kalc cuts off by the change in the up slope of the line, the increase slows when it hits 8.15 (or off)

My Alk was getting way to high so I cut the reactor back from the original 9 hours, to 8 hours, to 6, then off . Kalc in the reactor was spent (or used up) as of yesterday so you can see the affect not using the Kalc has on the lower end of the pH graph on the last day (last night)

 

[frankpayne32]

Great build and your old 300 gal was amazing as well!

 

[drummereef]

Nice graph Pete. :thumbsup: Other than the Alk getting too high seems like the plan is spot on to me. Where do you like to keep your Alk (if you had to choose a number)?

 

[psteeleb]

Great build and your old 300 gal was amazing as well!

thanks Frank

Nice graph Pete. :thumbsup: Other than the Alk getting too high seems like the plan is spot on to me. Where do you like to keep your Alk (if you had to choose a number)?

thanks Brett - I like to keep the Alk around 9 to 10
and I think I'm going to be happy with the approach once everything gets dialed in. I think the high Alk may be due to my pH probe being off by about 0.2 making the reactor more like 6.3 instead of 6.5. I'll recalibrate it in the morning.

some more vids from the past 24 hrs

early morning full PE on the pearlberry
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the $500 efflo was going nuts today, is this a feeding response or defensive response? - there's a lot of controversy on this one. I use to get the same reactions to cyclopseze on my blue tort. In this case I did some things different that may have stimulated this response.
first off about 30 minutes earlier I finished using some superglue in the tank
secondly I fed mysis before the cyclopeze when I usually feed the cyclopeze first.
Take a look, it's a long video but there are some pretty long streamers on this little coral
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next up; with adding a bunch of blue leg hermits there are always some casulties. My wife and I watched as what was left of a hermit float by, and watched a couple fish nipped at it. Then as it went to the bottom of the tank the male mandarin decided to have some fresh crab meat. I grabed the camera as I thought he was choking on it, but as it turns out he was just trying to bite off a chunk. As you can see in the video, they are not built for this kind of eating. Sorry the glass is such a mess, that's what I get for being out for 2 weeks.
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[psteeleb]

not 5 minutes after his crab feast, the male madarin was showing off
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the new Kole tang
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and the new symposium coral - not much to look at yet
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in between all the other things going on I captured one of the cleaner shrimp fanning its eggs
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[psteeleb]

I'll be back home after two weeks away later tonight. Friday I expect to be adding to the tank:
another Yellow Ricordia
another pink&aqua Ricordia
5 Scarlet herimts
50 Blue leg hermits
20 Mex Turban snails
25 Nerite snails
1 Atlantic gray cowrie
1 pencil urchin
another Harlequin Serpent starfish (the first one I got was so small he is lost int the rock work)

3-5 lytail anthias (all female)
1 bristle tooth tang (kole or tomini)

I also need to recalibrate the Ca reactor, I cut it back to 6 hours but it the Alk was still increasing, so for now it's turned off, I may just need to raise the effluent pH from 6.5 to 7ish

My main goal is to figure out why my house router isn't working with the path forwarding. I thought i was all good to go as it works fine from inside the house using the external host name, but from outside the house, I get nothing.

almost forgot, that I may trade a frag ot the ORA pearlberry for a watermellon chalice

All new additions are in the tank and doing great with exception that I did not get the anthias and there was at least one casualty (a blue leg hermit)

I reset the Ca reactor with a higher pH setting

And the best news of the day is I got the APEX running from the internet. Turns out I needed to restart the APEX for the router to properly find and establish the IP address for port forwarding.

 

[psteeleb]

night video includes FTS of front, back and end

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[drummereef]

Congrats on getting the Apex running! What is the intense green SPS next to the purple acro at 3:00 in the video? It shows up right at the beginning but there's a closeup near the last 5 seconds of the video. Once again, awesome footage!

 

[psteeleb]

Congrats on getting the Apex running! What is the intense green SPS next to the purple acro at 3:00 in the video? It shows up right at the beginning but there's a closeup near the last 5 seconds of the video. Once again, awesome footage!

Unfortunately the white balance washes all blue and makes them look green but at 3:00 the video shows from left to right; Chips, ORA Pearlberry & Turaki. All 3 of these acros are on the blue side with the Pearberry having purple highlights.

Talking about the acros I pulled all of them and dipped them for 20 minutes each in a mixture of tank water, interceptor and ReVive. This is the second time I dipped them and it's more for a maintenance thing then anything else as I have fought the redbug and AEFW battles and don't want to go there again.

The Mille I have did have AEFW's on it when I got it but I scrubbed all the eggs off with a medium stiff toothbrush, dipped it for an extended period of time, then cut off the base and remounted it. I have seen zero signs of the pest since.

I saw a couple redbugs on another acro but the first dip treatment seems to have taken care of them as no signs since. Anyway I have been exposed to both of these common acropora pests and decided to do a routine dip to keep their numbers limited if not eradicated.

Pests or not, I have always experienced great results with ReVive on acropora, and other SPS, they always seem to respond extremely well to it. I suspect it does a good job cleaning slime and other tissue build-ups off the coral that may otherwise impede excellent coral health.

 

[psteeleb]

I woke up this morning, did a quick glance of the tank and went and made coffee. As I was making the coffee, I as thinking there wasn't much movement in the tank and kind of blew it off thinking its early, everything is still sleeping.

I went back by the tank and noticed a couple hermits upside down and thought it was odd, then I noticed several more just sitting there and then noticed none of the hermits were moving.

I guess I overdosed interceptor in the coral dip and the residual was enough to kill or stupify the hermits. I changed the carbon (it needed it anyway) and after a few hours a few of the hermits started to move around, but my guess is I killed 75% of them.

Lesson Learned: if you dip using a 50X portion of interceptor you better rinse

So I'm looking for a place that doesn't charge an arm and a leg to ship hermits :lol:

 

[psteeleb]

FTS with lights this time
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[drummereef]

Great vids again Pete. I'm surprised the shrimps made it through the interceptor mishap. Strong little buggers. Glad to see everything is looking good despite a small crab boil.

 

[psteeleb]

Great vids again Pete. I'm surprised the shrimps made it through the interceptor mishap. Strong little buggers. Glad to see everything is looking good despite a small crab boil.

thanks Brett

I'm glad the shrimp made it as we realy enjoy watching them.

I just hope some of the scarlet hermits pull througha s they are expensive lil buggers

 

[psteeleb]

It looks like I lost more than 70% of the hermits and the arrow crab died yesterday after being fairly lethargic for the past 2 weeks. I'm still amazed that just the residual amount of interceptor left on the corals from the dip did that much damage. The pod population also appears to have taken a hit but there are enough live mysis in the system to keep the mandarins fat and happy.

I'm still seeing outbreaks of several algeas, but raising the Mg level to around 1700 is starting to take its toll on the bryopsis. Even though Po4 and No3 have been reading zero I added GFO to one of my reactors in an attempt to curb the growth of the other algeas. Funny thing is, I was running the reactor empty amd when I opened it up to clean it for the GFO I found a nice clump of cheato. I thought all my cheato was over come by the Caulerpa in the sump but some mst have work its way into the reactor and grew to a nice size clump that I put in one of my other sump chambers to let grow out.

Not much else to report for now other then the corals, fish, clams, shrimp and all other life forms appear to be doing fine.

I'll place an order for some more hermits this week to replace the others.

I did get a few pictures but that's about it for last weeks status.

my acans are making a nice comeback but are not as colorful as they were. I still atribute the loss to the large pH swings I was getting

I've said it before but I do need to get this hyacinth remounted as it's encrusting on the plug and I need to get it mounted to a pegged rock

here is an unknown acro I got from trueblue aquatics (a local seller). It was initially very fuzzy but had some red bugs so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a full recovery

The Undata continues to do well

as is the new symposium (another coral from TrueBlue)

here are just a couple of my 30 or more Ricordea Florida, a couple have already budded off this grouping

 

[drummereef]

Dang. Sorry to hear about the hermits and Arrow crab, that's a bummer. But glad your other inhabitants are doing well. Did the live mysis first come on your live rock or did you seed the tank with some?

 

[psteeleb]

Dang. Sorry to hear about the hermits and Arrow crab, that's a bummer. But glad your other inhabitants are doing well. Did the live mysis first come on your live rock or did you seed the tank with some?

I did seed the tank with copods but I think the mysis came from some small pieces of live rock I pulled from my 29g as it is loaded with them.

here are a few more pictures from last weekend

these look like kid reds, the colony started with about 8

this mille is far nicer then what I can capture on camera.

for a slow grower the efflow is coming along nicely

you can see some of the algea issue I'm having in this picture, I pulled it all out shortly after this was taken. Otherwise this favia is doing very nicely

this coral rescue is making a great comeback

these candy apple reds started as one polyp, now there must be close to 50

turaki - another slower growing acropora that is doing nice

my dendro has at least 6 new baby polyps growing out

next weekend, 2/26 our local club is having their big yearly event, "Nextwave" and "coral farmers market". I plan on going to see if I can pick up a few new pieces of eye candy.