I’m a Daddy!
Outside of the fact that the tank will be running on autopilot for a while, this has nothing to do with reefing! My wonderful wife gave birth to a beautiful little boy on Christmas day. I’m on cloud nine!
New Layout, Feeding A Little Extra
I switched up the order of the pages on this blog. If you are a returning visitor, what do you think of it? I wanted to give people a quick overview of our system before they went straight into these routine update blog posts.
I have started feeding some Oyster Feast and Arctipods in addition to the nightly feeding of Rod’s food. I’m feeding the Oyster Feast during lights out – either right before bed, or first thing in the morning – to target the SPS and encourage their polyp extension. So far I’ve fed 2 of the past 3 nights, I believe. I’ve also added a few ml’s of Arctipods, much more sporadically. No set schedule on that. The fish seem to love it though!
As far as the dosing system is concerned, I am not quite sure how I will set this up. The fridge I was looking at using has an interior space the size of a 6-pack of cans. This will barely fit the dosing pump and bottle of food – and I’m not sure the bottle of food will be lower than the dosing pump. I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do for this.
Test post from mobile…
Just checking to see how this app works. To keep it on subject here’s an update on the new frags:
Pearl berry suffered some damage on a few tips but most of the coral looks good. Hopefully I’ll see some growth – new tips or a base – fairly soon.
The baby’s breath is starting to lighten in color. Very slowly, I’m wondering how intense the lighting should be for it?
The bonsai looks about the same although polyps are out a bit more visibly. There was one section of the coral that had no flesh where it had recently been fragged; that’s starting to show some new polyp growth. Hopefully the deep purple will come in eventually.
Starting to question whether the red planet & pink lemonade frags were mixed up when I bought them – either by me or the seller. I need to see how they color up but I think I had them swapped… and now they’re epoxied so… the color scheme I originally planned for the tank might be revised!
Finally Back to the Reef!
The nursery is done! Well, painting of the nursery is at least done. We still have filing cabinets and a bookcase to sort out and make way for nursery furniture. But the most labor-intensive aspects of the nursery are now done. Unruly’s party last week went well and we had a great weekend with her parents. The tank wasn’t looking perfect, but I at least got the algae off the walls. Still have a fair amount of coralline on there to deal with, but the inhabitants were at least visible! Now I should finally have time to dedicate to doing some maintenance!
I thought the anemone shrimp may have died, a few weeks back. It was nowhere to be seen near the anemone’s. Over dinner one night unruly noticed a molt floating around the tank – good sign! Still, no shrimp to be seen near the anemones… turns out, that’s because the shrimp is now in the frogspawn on the other side of the tank! I’ll have to get a photo of it. When it’s out and about on the top of the coral, it’s pretty cool looking.
Other than that, not a lot happening in the tank. Nutrient levels must have spiked a bit when I ran skimmerless a few weeks ago, because caulerpa suddenly took off in the tank. I need to deal with that – at some point this week I would like to do a 10-gallon water change, replace the GFO and carbon, and probably do some manual removal of the algae with tweezers. I think the GFO has been in the filter for close to 6 weeks now? Way too long.
Paint + Skimmer = Volcano
Painting the office this week as the conversion to nursery begins. Yesterday consisted of priming the walls and the first coat of green (turns out it was the wrong color, but that’s a different story). Taking a break from painting, I heard a distinct waterfall-sound coming from inside the stand. Low and behold, the skimmer was going nuts, and my collection jug was overflowing back into the sump (second time that overflow port has come in really really handy!!!). Easy solution – I shut off the skimmer for the time being.
What was really surprising to me was that I had specifically chosen “eco friendly” paints with low odor and no VOC’s. So much for Harmony. After seeing the skimmer react the way it did, I erred on the side of caution and kept my wife out of the nursery. Regardless of what the can of paint said.
I tried turning the skimmer back on a few hours later, immediately after feeding, and it foamed up a storm. I’ll try again tonight – but tomorrow I’m planning on painting again. Maybe I’ll leave the skimmer off all week and just do a water change every couple days. I’m certainly overdue, having gone 2 weeks without a partial water change.
Big Update
It’s been a while since I updated the blog! I hope I can remember what’s happened in the past week. Let’s see…
I chickened out on feeding that much food 3 times a day. I saw increased algae growth on the tank walls. I will likely need to do something different to add that much food to the tank. I want to continue knocking back the algae in the tank (slow but steady progress, I believe), and then I can consider increased feeding possibly in conjunction with carbon dosing (VSV). That will take some time I think.
I did not do a water change over the weekend, so I’m still running the same media in my reactors (carbon and phosphate). I need to change them out tonight, I think the filter pads on the reactors are clogged. Two nights ago I stirred up a bunch of detritus that had settled in the sump, and then repeated last night. My flow through the reactors last night went to almost zero in the span of a few minutes. I didn’t feel anything stuck in the impeller of the MJ900 pump I’m using, so I’m assuming it’s the filter pads… either way I need to change the media.
The chaeto in the sump seems to be growing well. I also have 2 other types of algae. A red branching bubble algae, and a type of sea grass. Both seem very easy to control so far, so I’m happy. The chaeto is doing great under the CFL lamp hanging over my sump. In fact, it grew so much it clogged the intake of the MJ1200 I was using for sump flow (and hence I had detritus build-up). I’ll need to keep an eye on that.
I have been seeing larger pods in the sump. There are still some flatworms, but they’re definitely not the red planaria and they are not experiencing a population explosion. Not going to worry about them for now, but I think I eventually will treat the tank. Aptasia is still a single stalk in the same place on the sump wall. Not regretting leaving that in yet.
Which brings me to the display tank. I may have finally killed off the one aptasia I had in the display. I had this photo of the monster posted on the hitch hikers page of our website.
Aptasia
The head was about the size of a silver dollar and I could never kill it with kalk paste, hot water, vinegar. It would react too quickly and pull back into the rock. Normally it never exposed more than just its head. Well, the other night at light’s out it was really extended. At least an inch and a half of body was sticking out the rock work. I thought – this is my chance!! I don’t know what I planned to do, maybe try to pull it from the rock, but I grabbed a pair of locking forceps and squeezed down as close to the rock as I could. It immediately tried to retract itself, but wound up ripping itself in half! I don’t know what kind of regenerative powers these things have, but I’m hoping it dealt iself a deathblow. Fingers crossed.
I noticed a sponge on the move. Pretty cool to see. It had been on a piece of rock along the back wall for quite some time – months and months – and several weeks ago started to travel. I was really surprised to see that. It extended thin strings and seemed to slowly pull itself along the rock. We’re talking fractions of an inch a day. Until recently. It happened to have been a few inches away from the new torch coral I put in the tank, which had a white sponge on part of its skeleton. Seemingly overnight, the other sponge suddenly moved at least 2 inches – right on top of the white sponge. It’s been planted there for a solid week now. I assume there’s some level of sponge-warfare going on. It doesn’t seem to bother the coral at all, so I’ll let it be.
Have been adding 2 rounded tablespoons of kalk powder to my top-off water, which is still hovering at about 5 gallons per 3 days. Measured the tank calcium levels the other night (quick test, didn’t do alk at the same time) and it was at 400. I think the parameters are pretty good, the corraline algae is taking off. A bit too quickly in my opinion, I can’t keep up with it on the tank walls. I need to buy a scraper, I think.
I may also need to buy new lamps and new RODI filters. Looking back at my records, the RODI filters are from 2007 and the Iwasaki lamps are a year old. I have never read anything definitive on the life of the Iwasaki 175W lamps, so I should plan on replacing them soon. If I had some fun toys I could take spectral analysis plots and PAR readings and track how the bulb degenerates over time. But I don’t have those toys, so I need to guess. On the other hand, I DO have the TDS meter I need to measure the output of the RO membrane and DI bed. I have the solid gut feeling all of the RODI filters need to be replaced – including the original RO membrane – but that’s an easy thing to test.
On the fish-front, Alvy has been eating well, swallowing larger pieces of food and fighting for position during the feeding frenzy’s. The dwarf angels are fat and seemingly happy. The pajama cardinals have been breeding regularly, but I haven’t done much about it. The only thing I did was turn the return pump off two nights ago when I expected the male to spit, so all the larvae would stay in the tank as fish and coral food. It seems to have been successful. The next morning his mouth was empty, but there were no larvae to see. I figure, if I’m not able to raise them, they might as well feed the tank inhabitants instead of the skimmer.
OK, I think that’s my big update. I’m sure there are some little things here and there that I missed, and probably something bigger that I really intended on blogging about. But that’s what I get for waiting a whole week before posting an update on the system.
