Merc + Brad's new 50g

[luisse25]

Grrr... got a little surprise this evening. We were getting ready to glue a few of our corals into place that had been acclimating in the new tank.

This is the underside of our Green Spongode Montipora.

Close up of one of the Monti Eating Nudis.

Of course we are leaving to go camping first thing in the morning for two days. We scrubbed our Monties and placed them back in the old tank for now.

Any tips on what works best for eradicating these guys? Potassium Permanganate, Luglos, Praziquantel???

i read that dipping it in a freshwater with lugols and fwe will do the work...
do wrasses eat them nudis?leopard wrasse?

 

[braddo]

WHat setting do you run your vortech at?

I run it on ReefCrest mode I would guess at about 75% - 80% power, any higher and I start kicking up too much sand and blowing small frags sitting in the sand around.

 

[braddo]

i read that dipping it in a freshwater with lugols and fwe will do the work...
do wrasses eat them nudis?leopard wrasse?

I am not sure about the wrasses, I've done some reading but haven't found anything that specifically says they can used for Nudi control. When we talked to Dang he mentioned he keeps a wrasse in his tank and it seems to do a good job at keeping pests at bay.

So we are now looking into getting a leopard wrasse or fairy wrasse.

 

[braddo]

Scratch that, apparently Mercedes went out and bought a Red Headed Fairy Wrasse and a Carpenter's Flasher Wrasse and forgot to tell me.

 

[mercedes]

the red headed fairy is named fruit loop. we named the carpenter flasher wrasse punk rock. very happy little guys. they love to swim/play in the vortech's current.

i'm a little worried about coral chemical warfare so i just posted a bunch of our softies for sale.

also, got our shipment of chaeto + ulva in from reefcleaners. the chaeto came w/ a hitchhiking/freebie nassarius. hoping the macro will keep nitrates at bay. our nitrates aren't too bad right now (@20), but i thought might as well get the macro started just in case so nitrates aren't ever a problem for this tank.

 

[mercedes]

apparently we suck at keeping fish...

we lost the yellow tang + punk rock (carpenter flasher wrasse) w/ the recent heat wave. the fans + frozen water bottles weren't enough. brad installed an AC unit so we don't lose any more livestock.

 

[luisse25]

oh sorry for the lostyeah thats what we did too we installed an ac because chillers are a bit expensive and with the ac livestock and us will benefit from the cold..
with the ac installed corals will be happy and both of you will be happy too

 

[small alien]

How did you do the over-flow? Did you work from a diagram or some plans? I'd like to do that same thing to a 50 I'm looking to set up. Thanks.

 

[OCDreefer]

Braddo turned me onto a place called Tap Plastics (Bellevue by 520 & 405).. Just measure out what you want and they will cut it to size, they even cut the teeth out for me. Super easy. If you need any help I live close to you, just ask.

 

[G&NSalty425]

Tap Plastics is the best Nice tank you guys set up looking good

 

[braddo]

How did you do the over-flow? Did you work from a diagram or some plans? I'd like to do that same thing to a 50 I'm looking to set up. Thanks.

No, I didn't work from any plans or diagrams, I just took some measurements and went for it. If you have more specific questions on how to get started shoot me a PM and I will help you out. I spewed as much of my trial and error information to OCDReefer as could when he was setting his up.

Let me know how if you need anything and good luck.

 

[braddo]

Tap Plastics is the best Nice tank you guys set up looking good

Thanks G&NSalty425
I just noticed we haven't posted any updated pics in about two months. I will try to take some new pictures next week to update the thread. The tank still isn't muck to look at right now though. Mostly little SPS frags waiting to fill in the tank.

 

[small alien]

Thanks! I appreciate the offers of help. Let's see more pictures of this tank.

 

[mercedes]

picked up a female ruby head wrasse so fruit loop now has a gf + a mccosker's flasher wrasse. the male + female ruby wrasses are bff. the mccosker wrasse is super skittish + went into hiding as soon as i put him in the tank. hopefully, he warms up to his new enviro. i'll try to get pictures up soon.

 

[mercedes]

lots of ups + downs since our last post. here's a recent FTS taken today for kicks:

more photos here: http://mini-reef.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-montis-pre-vsv-shots.html

our water quality is decent, but we haven't fully recovered from the tank over heating over the summer. we've experienced a slight brown-out so we're going the vsv route. we also picked up a bunch of new brightwell supplements we thought we'd give a try.

hopefully, we'll see an marked improvement in color + overall health in the near future.

got a pair of pipefish + a pair of mandarins. we lost both pipefish very recently. one refused to eat, the other was nice + fat, but no match for our little purple lobster. the mandarins are doing well. they do this weird thing where they stay clear of each other during the day, but sleep next to each other at night. the shrimp is good as well + we still have both ruby headed wrasses + oscar, our mccosker wrasse.

lastly, i finally got around to fragging all the zoos off of zoo island. the zoos didn't grow over the rock like a mat. instead they weaved through the crevices, making for hoursssssSSsSsSs of work in extracting them from their island. we'd like to keep a few for the zoo island re-do, but will be sure to post the extras up for grabs. gotta pay it forward!

 

[slim_jim989]

Looking good on the tank, are you adding any copepods to the mix or any trigger pods, I know they have live ones at barrier reef.( love that store) cause those mandarins will plow thru some pods, especially when u have a pair of them.

 

[mercedes]

Looking good on the tank, are you adding any copepods to the mix or any trigger pods, I know they have live ones at barrier reef.( love that store) cause those mandarins will plow thru some pods, especially when u have a pair of them.

thanks slim! the male eats mysid + brine from our tongs, which is awesome, but the girl is currently banished to the 'fuge (more copepods in there) until she picks up some weight. she hasn't learned to eat non-'pods yet.

 

[slim_jim989]

That is pretty cool u got him to eat anything besides copepods that's a hard one to do.

 

[jaysauce]

How are these brightwell products working out for you?

lots of ups + downs since our last post. here's a recent FTS taken today for kicks:

more photos here: http://mini-reef.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-montis-pre-vsv-shots.html

our water quality is decent, but we haven't fully recovered from the tank over heating over the summer. we've experienced a slight brown-out so we're going the vsv route. we also picked up a bunch of new brightwell supplements we thought we'd give a try.

hopefully, we'll see an marked improvement in color + overall health in the near future.

got a pair of pipefish + a pair of mandarins. we lost both pipefish very recently. one refused to eat, the other was nice + fat, but no match for our little purple lobster. the mandarins are doing well. they do this weird thing where they stay clear of each other during the day, but sleep next to each other at night. the shrimp is good as well + we still have both ruby headed wrasses + oscar, our mccosker wrasse.

lastly, i finally got around to fragging all the zoos off of zoo island. the zoos didn't grow over the rock like a mat. instead they weaved through the crevices, making for hoursssssSSsSsSs of work in extracting them from their island. we'd like to keep a few for the zoo island re-do, but will be sure to post the extras up for grabs. gotta pay it forward!

 

[braddo]

How are these brightwell products working out for you?

Hard to say, although I wanted to wait at least a month between each new supplement addition to study the effect each supplement had on the corals impatience got the better of us.

We started by just supplementing MB7 for a few weeks before beginning our Vodka dosing regimen. Mercedes seemed to think that the MB7 had a noticeable effect improving the clarity of our water. It’s one of the claimed benefits of MB7 but to me the results were too subjective. Also early on in the vodka dosing ramp up we struggled a bit with Cyano bacteria even though we were dosing very low amounts of vodka. My primary reason behind using MB7 was to prevent a Cyano outbreak with the hope that MB7 would establish ‘good’ bacteria in the tank. In the end the only thing I can say for sure about MB7 is that it smells HORRIBLE! :S

KoralColor was the second supplement we began dosing. Not long after dosing KoralColor we noticed a significant improvement in the coloration of several of our corals. Most notably were the green and orange SPS corals. However due to other changes in tank parameters I cannot say for sure that the color improvement was due to KoralColor. Before dosing KoralColor our tank was just recovering from brown out issues I believe were related to temperature problems we experienced over the summer, our halides had been slowly ramped up to allow a longer photoperiod and we were now experimenting with vodka dosing.

VitaMarin-C and CoralAmino; we began dosing these two supplements a few weeks after the introduction of KoralColor. With these supplements I think it would be hard to observe the effects even in a controlled environment which ours is clearly not. Both are supposed to aid in the health and recovery of coral tissue. I don’t notice any increased growth rate or coral tissue healing over damaged spots any faster. One anecdotal result we experienced was a massive hair algae outbreak for a few weeks shortly after we began dosing these two supplements. While trying to investigate what could have caused the algae outbreak we noticed that we were dosing VitaMarin daily when according to the instructions we should have only been dosing twice a week. Could an overdose of a Vitamin C supplement cause an algae outbreak? I’m not sure but the way the algae basically exploded in our tank one day and then slowly subsided over the next few weeks leads me to believe it was something we did drastically changed our water quality. The only changes I could find were the addition of CoralAmino and the overdosing of VitaMarin. I stopped dosing these two supplements as soon as the algae problem occurred.

In summary I would call all our results while using these products to be inconclusive.