Bojangles 200g reef

[NaH2O]

Oh my, I'm so sorry! Hang in there.....let us know how everything goes!

 

[Sascha D]

Hello all!

Sorry I havent posted in quite awhile. When I had the flood everything just went crazy! After everything was somewhat fixed I went on vacaation for 5 weeks to come back and have my tank covered in this red film of some sort. The guy at Indoor Reef said it was a kind of bacteria but I forget what he said. I did about 30g of water changes vacuuming the sand over the coarse of about 4 weeks and now its almost back to normal, but I did lose alot of my cleanup crew =-(

I'll be posting updated pics in the next couple of days after I add my new ViaAqua 4900 circulation pump and aquascape the left side. Apparently my QuietOnes 4000 went out so I sent it back to get a replacement.

 

[Electrokate]

Good luck with the recovery. The red slime is cyanobacteria, if you put cyano in the search function on this site you will see a lot of us get it. Usually comes with cycle and probably what happened is the power outage killed off a chunk of your biofilter, so the tank is having to redo the cycle. Water changes and siphoning it out with a strong dose of patience should do it. I am facing the same thing. When I am crabby I take it out on the slime. "Take this you slimey menace!" I think as I siphon it out... "I've got you now irritating filmy devilish secretion!" Yeah. I am a little nuts.
I don't know how you would gravel vac it out of that whole tank. I do know it will grow on soft coral and if that happens I wipe it off because it leaves a damaged area underneath, it doesn't harm my polyps though. I have left them covered for up to a week and then siphon it out and they open right up like nothing happened. Don't be tempted to use chemicals to get rid of it. Been there done that, it's worse than the slime.

Good luck, I totally know where you are coming from and hope you get back on track soon. And attack that slime with a vengence when you feel the need . Commuter traffic got you down? Take it out on the slime.
Kate

 

[Sascha D]

had some time so I decided to post some updates.

I've been having a battle with the cyanobacteria so I havent done much with the tank. Everything is growing very nicely despite the cyano though.

Last month I added 6 green chromis and a scooter blenny. Unfortunately the female maroon clown killed the male so I never got to have a pair One good thing I did do was about 3 days ago I traded one of my larger toadstool leather frags for some pom xenia. I'm so happy I've been trying to get some for awhile!!

 

[Sascha D]

Heres an update on some of the corals.

before and after photos Yay

 

[Sascha D]

More before and afters

This one is awesome

 

[Sascha D]

Another before and after

also a picture of my new mushrooms. That one was a single polyp that split into two equal mushrooms.

 

[Sascha D]

Lastly heres an update for some of the rest

sorry I tried to take a picture of the frogspawn but I just cant get the pixels under 100 =-(

I've got 2 small frags of the toadstool leather, I'm about to frag my devil's hand and I think I'm going to trade out the candycane (fiji) if I cant find a good place for him.

 

[NaH2O]

Great to see an update!

How are your water parameters? What have you tried for the cyano?

 

[spongebob lover]

ohh that candy cane is gorgeous !! .

 

[Sascha D]

Great to see an update!

How are your water parameters? What have you tried for the cyano?

As far as the cyano I havent tried much but its been effective.
April 4th is when I started to get it
April 6-May 1st it took over my tank while I was on vacaation
May 2nd I took a turkey baster to the live rock trying to get it all off
May 3rd I did a 10g water change using natural sw from the seattle aquarium
May 9th I did another 10g wc using natural saltwater
May 15th I did 5g wc using natural saltwater
May 25th I got a new circullation pump to replace the one that broke
May 30th I moved the circullation pump and reaquascaped the left side of the tank so I could get the most out of the 1380gph of the new Via Aqua 4900. I put all the rock in the middle so to speak,not touching the glass on any side so that water could move around the tank without restriction.
June 1st I did a 10g wc using natural saltwater

Current water parameters:

Ph: 8.2
Ammonia: 0
Salinity: 1.024-1.025
Nitrites: 0
Nitrates: appx 10
Temp: 82.1 @ 9am

One nitrate test says 180 and one says about 10. I never get a good test when it comes to nitrates and everytime I take it to Indoor Reef they tell me its 0. I'll take a sample of water in today when I get my new glasses.

 

[Sascha D]

ohh that candy cane is gorgeous !! .

Thanks! That coral is becomming one of my favorites. I had it in the sand but the new polyps forming were touching the ground so I used some epoxy putty and put it on its own little flat rock. Hopefully since it is now higher I'll get more of a round growth instead of horizontal.

The frogspawn is what people tend to stare at for a long time they dont see the other cool stuff. The frogspawn is about the size of a mini basketball you win at the faire

 

[Detri]

Great shot! Love the Candycane

 

[spongebob lover]

Thanks! That coral is becomming one of my favorites. I had it in the sand but the new polyps forming were touching the ground so I used some epoxy putty and put it on its own little flat rock. Hopefully since it is now higher I'll get more of a round growth instead of horizontal.

Well may be when it gets bigger, i'll be more than happy to take a little piece .

 

[Sascha D]

WOW I dont even know where to start. This last week has been crazy. First the ballast went out in BOTH of my Sattelite PC lamps so I had to send those back under warranty with the new bulbs I ordered for them. I also sent back the ViaAqua pumps and exchanged them for SEIO Super Flow Pump M1100 http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/Prod_Display.cfm?pcatid=12074&inm=1&N=2004+22788+2032

As everyone knows I still havent fixed my sump from when the power went out so.... I started a project :evil:

I started with the sump, removing all the baffles and adding new ones and took it a step further to suit my needs. I added a shelf for a pre-filter to silence the waterfall in my room and also a coral frag shelf. The baffles I made out of this mesh material used to protect plants in your garden and pvp pipe framing. Before I knew it I had taken my whole tank down and removed 98% of the sand bed and set it back up!

 

[Sascha D]

Doing the sump took about 2 days because I had to let the stuff dry. The tank however took about 5 hours to settle enough so I could see into the tank to put the rocks back in.

I really dont like my aquascape!!! I spent like 3 hours doing it and I still done like it...but I hardly ever do at first and I'll end up putting my hands in there over the next month rearranging parts of it I'm sure.

 

[Sascha D]

Does anyone know how to reduce the KB of a picture to show it? Lets say I have a picture thats 101.5 KB bytes. The site wont take it and Im not sure how to reduce it. Heres what I've tried...

IF you crop it, it adds KB
IF you reduce or add canvas size it adds kb
IF you reduce or add image size it adds kb
IF you sharpen or unsharpen it adds kb
IF you reduce noise in the photo 100% it lowers kb but very slightly

I use photoshop elements only for the lighting fix and correcting color or else havent done anything with it except trying to lower image quality to post on the web.

 

[Krish]

Looking good man! That tank cleared up really nicely!! Glad to see the way things are looking

Does anyone know how to reduce the KB of a picture to show it? Lets say I have a picture thats 101.5 KB bytes. The site wont take it and Im not sure how to reduce it. Heres what I've tried...

I just use microsoft paint and go to "image" on top, select "stretch/skew", and then change the stretch and skew percentages. You'll have to mess with it a bit to get the hang, but less is more so if you put 20% in both fields it will shrink your picture a lot more than if you put 80% in both fields. HTH

 

[Sascha D]

Looking good man! That tank cleared up really nicely!! Glad to see the way things are looking

Thanks! It was hella murky at 1am when I finished the aquascape but it was fully clear by the time I woke up at 7am this morning. I left just enough sand in the tank to cover the bottom and I think it looks way better. I might end up selling this tank and buying another one when I change houses, which will have aragonite and no more of this GARF grunge pita bs.

Trash got picked up this morning so I just threw out the sand last night as I was taking it out of the tank.

 

[Electrokate]

What program are you using to try and reduce the size of your photos? With photoshop I do "save as" instead of save. It asks for the new name (which I don't change but add the letters "SM" for small next to it) and then the next screen says "Image options". Here I take the slider bar down til at the bottom it says 94 K or less (RF seems to allow less than 94 K for some reason even though it says 100K is ok.) The quality going down makes the picture blurry so lately I have been using "Sharpen more" which is under the filter drop down menu under the sharpen option, this makes it really cruddy but under the edit dropdown it will next say "Fade sharpen more" so I choose that and use the slider to ramp back the sharpening to where it is just barely annoying. After that reducing the quality will blur the edges of the sharpening just right. I hope. With my vision I often can't tell if things are in focus! If you are not using photoshop or your version doesn't have the fade option under edit then I don't know for sure, but it seems like almost all the photo editing software is modeled after photoshop so there should be some similar way to do it. I will be switcing to a shareware program soon and may eat my words on all programs being virtually the same. Photoshop is too expensive!

You sound like me on that tank redo thing. I have a terrible habit of starting on "one little water change" and ending up draining and moving the tank or some other radical thing. But hey the results speak for itself, right? Gotta have the the composition of the rocks satisfying because not only do the fish need their caves but if we are going to vitually bankrupt ourselves for this hobby then damnit the tank better at least look good!
Kate