DisturbedReefer said:
Hey Trevor! Are you still alive? Any new updates? Haven't heard from you in some time now, did you get moved? If not, need help? Let me know, you just kind of dropped off into the abyss.
jlehigh said:
Glad you bumped this Todd I had missed some of the latest posts..
Trevor I really like that rock work. Give us an update, and if you are moved I'd like to take a look at the tank in person, if not I can help move ya too.
Reporting live from the abyss….. Hey! There’s no deep water coral here! What the @&^#! :lol:
I’d like to say how great the tanks’ doing but that’s not the case. The great algae battle rages, but let’s start at the beginning, shall we?
Around the third week of July, the goby came up missing. No carcass, no dried fishies on the ground, no spike in Nitrates, Nitrites, or Ammonia. Just gone. Boom. Nada. Nothing. Well, O.K…
I moved the tank on July 27th with the help of my brother. The move took a lot longer than expected, but otherwise went well. I had made up what I thought would have been plenty of water before hand… And ended up with just enough. All the livestock made it through unscathed except Todd’s Stylophora/Seriatopora which was inadvertently fragged. I just wished that I could have found the frag.
Around the middle of August, I finally got a hold of a Red Sea Purple Tang, Zebrasoma xanthurum, which was just a bit bigger than what I wanted for my little 55 gallon, but the algae was starting up and the angelfish needed help. And yup, you guessed it, no quarantine. And the next day the tang was covered in white spots. Nuts. Three weeks later the angel was dead. Humm. Faster than I would have thought for Ick/Marine Velvet, but I’ll go with it. And then suddenly all the spots on the tang were gone. The wrasse, now the only other fish in the tank, never got infected. There has been no sign of Ick/Marine Velvet on either of the fish. So, while I’ve got ya’ all here, what do you think? Set-up a quarantine tank, treat the two fishes for about thirty days, and let the tank sit? Or does this sound like something else other than Ick/Velvet? I’ll post this question in another forum as a separate post as well.
And about that time all hell broke loose.
Not the dreaded cyano, but hair algae up the yin-yang. You can see it all over the place in the pictures, and it’s started to kill tissue on the brain. I’ve got several avenues of attack going. First, the temp in the tank was pushing 90 plus, so I’ve increased the air circulation both on the sump and in the hood. That with Mother Nature’s help, we’re holding a steady 80 during the day, 78 at night. Second, there are no fish stores with RO, or RO/DI water for sale anywhere around, so I was using tap water as the land lord squashed the RO/DI unit in the house. I’ve finally got an RO filter that hooks up to the faucet, so I can eliminate that as a source. I’ve also got a 300 micron filter sock off of the overflow to help export nutrients there. (I should mention that I’m not feeding the tank, nothing at all. The tang’s fat and happy, with lots of grazing to do. And the wrasse is as happy as ever.) Within the next month, I hope to start dosing kalkwasser in the hopes of locking the pH down and giving an advantage to the coralline. I’m also going to get more ‘turbo’ snails. That and I’m going to start running carbon, I think. There’s no yellowing of the water, as I’m still doing five gallon water changes weekly, but I’m hoping that it might improve the health corals.
And that’s where se stand. Here are some pictures, and I’ll try and do better in keeping up…
