Project 58!! (Image intense)

Every tang, Ive ever had...
Wasnt really an issue either...if they didnt eat immediately, they did when they got hungry enough. The longest I had to wait was on a Scopas tang...took 3 days.
I'm thinking that I just got lucky with the two Chevrons I had in the past and assumed they were just like every other tang with regards to feeding....
Nick
 
so starve him and don't feed the tank till he eats nori??

the 6-line and tang will be added first. 6-line will have plenty to eat and if the tang runs out of algae in the tank i guess he can take to the nori?
 
Eric,
Thats what I did in the past...I dont think thats the way to go with the Ctenochaetus family of tangs. I really think I just got lucky with the previous two. I especially wouldnt go that route if you have the fish in a Q tank. He's already eating formula two, so I'd say your on the right track already. I'd honestly just keep doing what your doing, and try working the Nori in.
Maybe throwing some forumla two and Nori in a blender, (dont use the wife's favorite blender...they get mad when that happens) then when you feed, the tang is still getting Nori, just with other things it associates with food.
Make sense?

Nick
 
Thanks Marc! They arent quite up to Travis Staut Standards, GregR, or you...but this was a new camera, and I didnt have the benefit of an instruction manual. I was shown how to resize the images I ahve taken so far w/o making them thumbnails...so i might be adding them up later.

My buddy is making noises like he wants to sell his D rebel and upgrade....I'm thinking I would love to buy his or the new D-Rebel XT.....
either way, I know I'm gonna be looking for a Melev top down photo box in the very near future....assuming you know who I can contact to get one??????

Nick
 
maxx - i hear you...i have tried putting nori (cut w/a knife) in w/ the mysis and such...he didn't eat it. i will sneak it in where i can like my parents when we needed to take meds..they would sneak them in other foods :D i might get him eating nori w/ other stuff but off the clip...i doubt :(

digital rebel..i want one BAD!

Lunchbucket
 
My buddy came over today and showed me a way to resize the images I took using his Digital Rebel so they didnt come out looking like thumbnails...so i thought I'd post up some more pics. these arent the best pics out there...but I'm working on it!

Here is the right side of the tank.



Here is a right side end shot, (right looking left)



Here is a shot of my 3 most active fish in the tank, The Tomini Tang, Female Bellus angel and Cleaner wrasse. (I was still trying to figure out how to underexpose in this shot...the white cutting board bottom really throws off the on board camera meter....my apologies.



Here is a photo of the Cleaner wrasse in the corner of the tank. You can see the timy 1/4 - 1/8 th inch frags of the green table behind the cleaner wraasse.



And finally, here is another photo of the teardrop crocea. I really need to get a good top down shot of this one, but the lights sit right on top of him so the reflection is nasty. All kidding aside, this is where a top down photo box would be nice to have...



Nick
 
03-25-05

Update, some good some bad....

Yesterday, the anemone moved around on the rock I had it on. I dont know why this surprised and annoyed me since I'm always telling everyone to "put 'em where you want, they'll move where they like." It partially attached to my Teardrop Crocea.....grrr......it would have been tough to dip the clam again, (if necessary) with an anemone attached to it. So I peeled it off the clam gently. I saw some messentarial filiments while peeling but didnt think too much about it since I'd seen them while peeling it off Nikki's rock work.

Woke up this morning to check the tank and saw I now had two RBTA's. Thye are both on the same rock, just on different sides. It split from the botttom up. The daughter is approximately 1/3 the size of the mother and doesnt have a mouth yet, just an open ragged looking hole. Interestingly enough, the edges of both anemones are whole and fully closed.

I noticed a small area of tissue recession on the blue tipped table coral two days ago...doesnt look like RTN, just a small area that is stripped of flesh. Rest of the coral is healthy with good polyp extension. No further signs of tissue loss.

I turned off the Phosban reactor yesterday, and changed out the return tube since it was a little short and had spilled a little water out of the tank on two occassions. It was functional, I just cut it too short originally, by about 3 inches. And occassionally while putzing around in the sump, (acclimation for example) I would accidently cause a spill. So I shut it down, cut a longer piece of tubing, and connected that. I started the reactor right up again and let it rip full bore. This is the same media I've been using since I sewed the bottom filter sponge down, (about 3 weeks or so), so I didnt think anything of it.

Last night after coming home from the gym I saw a patch of white dead skeleton on the purple tipped acro on the bottom left side of the tank. I dont know what could have caused it, but I saw the acro crab clearing the dead tissue away. I know for a fact it wasnt there before I left for the gym.

I woke up this morning to see how it looked, and saw it had spread a little, but not much. I will be fragging some smaller branches off this one just to be on the safe side. The tissue loss seems to have slowed down considerably. I have absolutely no idea what is causing this. My parameters are stable, (will re-test again today), and I'm seeing encrusting growth on almost all my corals, (fairly sure I'm seeing it on the green table frags now too..but not 100% since the tissue receded initially.)...
Both of these are aquacultured corals, (grown in the open ocean) as are the Green table and the Peach table I had to frag earlier...

So thats the state of things at the moment....Pics will follow, but will not be from the D-rebel, so I dont know how close I get to show the tissue loss of the two corals....


Nick
 
3-30-05

The clams currently look fine. I did give them a 45 minute RO/DI bath two days ago. They opened up shortly after being placed back in the tank. The lab that Barry has sent the clams to studied has reported back that it is indeed caused by a protozoan. An exact ID wont be done due to the increased expense this would cause. The lab did determine that a freshwater bath of 5 minutes was all that was necessary to kill the protozoan. They are also working on finding something to dose which would kill the protozoan. This is needed because the clams close up during the RO dip which convienantly protects the protozoan from the hyposaline treatment. Right now its looking like the drug used to treat the protozoan infestation would also wipe out the bacterial population of the tank so in all likelihood, a seperate tank will be required to treat them in...I'll let folks know more when updates become available.

As far as my tank goes....today was a fairly productive day of maintenance. I cleaned the skimmer out yesterday, (happens at least once a week, sometimes twice), did an 18 gallon water change, (only the 2nd since setting up the system...need to be more regular with them...), hooked up two of the B-11 battery back up airpumps, (Power goes out, airpump kicks on until power is restored or battery dies...5 days later) and did some plumbing mods.

The plumbing mods were to the chiller return. I removed the loc-line returns and hard plumbed two new ones that are not going to cause micro bubbles. I didnt realize when I first started plumbing this that Loc-line isnt air tight. Mojo told me, but I didnt quite get what he was saying...until I saw them all. The loc-line joints will pull air in with the water generating micro bubbles.

For some reason, the locline returns from the chiller and the sump return were generating more bubbles when I ran the Mag 7 along with the Iwaki 40 that feeds the chiller. Running just the Iwaki (which is horribly choked down by the chiller's internal heat exchange coil) slows the flow through my sump down to about 4 times total turnover, with the Mag 7 running also, I'm getting the total system turnover up to about 8 times.

The main reason to run both pumps simultaneously is to move more water through the system, which kicks up more stuff and , (hopefully), puts it in the water column where the skimmer can get to it. I have a new return dry fitted up to replace the single return from the Mag 7. I want to be able to blow the gap between the rear glass and the cuttingboard clean on both sides, and prevent detritus from building up there.

And speaking of detritus...I removed the chaetomorphia algae today...the amount of funk that came flying out when I disturbed it was NASTY.....ewwwwww.....
While attempting to rescue as many chaeto dwelling critters as possible, I saw something kinda cool...a micro brittle star fell onto the platygyra brain, and was eaten.

I used a label maker to put today's date on the case of one of the airpumps...this way I know how long the batteries have been in it. I plan on replacing the batteries on daylight saving time in the fall...same as the smoke detectors in the house.

Thats the extent of the positives... two of the last three frags from the purple tipped acro are showing RTN...

I have one frag of the coral left from when I first mounted it on te left side of the tank...it fell over and broke off a small tip, which I epoxied to the rockwork on the other side of the tank. Hopefully, that one survives. Otherwise its a total loss.

I moved the acro crab to the blue tipped table...didnt realize it was too large to fit between the branches of that one. It moved when the lights went out to the brown table it originally came in on. That acro now has two crabs in it. They dont exactly interact...but they dont fight either. Its kinda like the odd couple there...or maybe those two grumpy old guys in the balcony from The Muppet Show.

Nick
 
Hey Nick - just a thought on the clam dips - if you put them into a bowl or container full of SW so they open after handling, maybe you could run FW in as a fast drip/slow stream and let the cup overflow into a bucket or something? I was thinking they might stay open that way & expose the protozoan to the hypo.
 
Thats an interesting thought Mcbeck...hafta keep that in mind. Right now neither of them are showing any more signs of PM for the moment, but I'm honestly expecting it to return. Barry from Clams Direct is pretty hopeful he has the issue all but solved...more info will be coming later, hopfeully before the weekend.
Here are the pics as promised...

I had to move the Teardrop Crocea because the RBTA moved over and attached to it one day prior to the split, and I was planning on dipping the clams again.

Both clams and assorted frags...



Blue Crocea, Blue polyped acro, Stylophora, (coloring up nicely since being moved up in the tank), Brown table acro with two crabs, and the chicken foot in the background. The Chicken foot has been turning a neat irridescent green at the bottom of the tank, so I thought I'd move it up higher in the tank and see what happens.



The formerly blue tipped table, the purple acro, and the brown table acro.



Here are both anemones....this is a homemade rock I got from Darrin at one of the club meetings. I'm honestly thinking of using more when I eventually upgrade....



Here is the daughter, its about 1/3 the size of the mother. These pics BTW, dont do justice to any of the colors of the corals, anemones, clams, or fish....gets close to the right color of the rocks though......man I need that D-Rebel!!



Mother RBTA...



Finally pics of the RTN'ing purple tipped acro...

Here is what it loked like when I got it....



Here it is now....Only 1/8th of a branch tip on the left is still alive...cyano is growing on the branches on the right.



One of the last frags...bad pic sorry...tyou can see the RTN'ing tissue on the left.....



Finally, the one chance I have left at re-growing this coral....the small one of the left. Oddly enough, this image is close to the true colors of the corals....



Nick
 
IO...its all I've ever used. This is the same bucket that I used to start the tank up with.

Nick
 
How often and how many gallons are you doing of water changes?
Click to expand...

This is only the 2nd one I've done since setting the tank up. Both have been about 18-20 gallons a piece. The first water change happened after the first RTN incident, by about 2 weeks... and this one happened after the 2nd RTn incident...so I know its not the salt causing the RTN issues. I dunno what is causing it...but I'm certain its not the salt.

Nanook,
Thanks for the kind words...coming from someone who lives so close to Griss' tank, that means alot to me. BTW,
Whatever happened to that huge 5x5x2 cube you had, ( the one with the IO bucket sitting in it to show the scale of it)?
Just curious...and hopeful that theres another smoking cool St Louis reef to drool over.

Nick
 
The tank and the thread are great. Already I want to upgrade. I am at Clayton pets a lot love that store over others in the area.
 
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