Water Change
Did a 5-gallon water change tonight. I also cleaned the skimmer collection cup, changed the phosban reactor media, and plucked some macro algae from the display tank. No sign of the sea hare this past week, I have no idea if it died or if it’s simply eating where we can’t see it…
The baby’s breath blue acro has seen better days, I think. I noticed some very slow tissue necropsis starting at its base pretty much as soon as I added it to the tank. I let it go for a short while, but when it accelerated I clipped the top off the frag and glued it onto a plug. I don’t think, a few days later, I caught it in time. I’ll know in another week I suppose, not much else I can do for the coral. Guess this was a lesson learned on buying a frag in really bad shape.
Some Supplies on the Way, and a Cleaning Station?
Premium Aquatics is having a Thanksgiving Sale, so I took advantage of the lower prices and free shipping to purchase a few supplies that have been on my list for a while. Ordered some new test kits (going to try Elos, had been using Salifert), a maxijet mod to use in the sump, a second aqualifter that I can use for maintenance purposes, two algae scrapers, and some miscellaneous fittings and odds and ends.
The glass anemone shrimp has definitely taken the frogspawn as its new home. Every evening it’s out and about cruising the dozens of heads. Pretty entertaining to watch it bob along, and duck for cover as the Vortech pump ramps up speed. Last night we noticed something new – the shrimp was on top of the frogspawn, and the male flameback angel was trying to get a cleaning! The fish was hovering sideways in front of the shrimp, arching itself to present its body to the shrimp. I really couldn’t tell if it was successful… the shrimp was using its pincers on the fish as it backed away, but it looked more like the shrimp was trying to convince the fish to leave it alone than it did a cleaning. Now I have a little research to do and see if the shrimp is a “cleaner” in the wild!
Reinforcements Have Arrived
Live Aquaria had dwarf sea hares in stock last week and I decided to take a chance on one. Why? Their natural food source includes caulerpa! Nothing else in the tank will touch the three types we’ve been battling, so I want to see what this little guy can do.
In order to meet their minimum order size and get the free shipping, I also purchased some cleanup crew, including a second Mexican turbo snail, two new emerald crabs, a handful of scarlet hermit crabs, and some cerith and astrea snails.
They arrived today and I acclimated them as soon as I got home. Only lost one of the hermit crabs during shipping, I’m sure to a battle over shells with another crab. A few of these guys started eating as soon as they were in the tank. I put the turbo snail on one of the closed loop nozzles and it had it spotless clean within hours (I wanted the turbo that’s been in the tank for the past 5 months to pay attention, it’s been slacking!). One of the emeralds immediately starting pulling off and eating caulerpa racemosa! Unbelievable. The sea hare acclimated quickly and nestled into a comfortable spot in the live rock. It’s about the size of the pad of my thumb.
Did a quick water change after acclimating the new arrivals.
I’ve been noticing a significant decrease in the amount of nuisance algae in the tank lately, which I attribute to the existing clean up crew, regular refreshing of the GFO, and the new RODI filters. I am hoping these latest additions will be the final nail in the coffin!
Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back
I spent yesterday trying to fix problems with the moonlights and level cut-out controls. I rewired the moonlight LED’s, tested them on the power supply and they fired up perfectly. Then I got to work on the level controls… no luck. The low voltage latching relays were working correctly but weren’t pulling in the 110VAC relays. I guess the power supply doesn’t have enough amperage to pull both relays in together…? I need to do more investigation on this. In my frustration I ripped all the relays out, only leaving in the one for the top-off water. I wired in the moonlights and called it a night, or so I thought. The power supply started blinking, and was pulsing the 12VDC output. Maybe I overloaded it? No idea. I unwired the moonlights and officially called it a night. Two steps forward, two steps back. Nothing more is working than was before, and I now have slightly more work to do to get it working correctly again.
Busy Evening
Got my hands pretty wet tonight. Started by pulling algae out of the display tank – halimeda and caulerpa. Man these things are horrible to deal with. So prolific and nothing in my tank eats them. And they don’t seem to be getting out-competed by my fuge or GFO. Manual removal seems to be the only solution.
I then scraped some coralline off the tank walls and back wall with an old credit card. Still a lot more to go on one wall and the back but I made a big dent. After posting this I’m going to spend some time on the walls with the magnavore cleaner.
Finally, did a little fragging and rearranging! A raspberry millepora got pretty damaged during the kalk incident earlier this year. It was only a single branch that hadn’t even had time to grow a base when the tank got nuked. It’s been recovering well, regrowing tissue on its main branch over what had been burnt off, and has been putting out a nice base. There was a porton of the branch that was still damaged and was growing some hair algae; I decided that the coral had recovered well enough that this was a good time to cut that piece off. After doing so I decided to chop the whole branch off the base (it really looked odd with one single fat 2″ branch rising out). I then glued the branch on a new frag plug. I think the original piece will heal over, and then start sending up branches, while this new piece begins to encrust its plug.
Then turned my attention to the red planet and pink lemonade frags. I had already glued these in place but I had accidentally swapped their positions in the tank. So I broke their plugs free, repositioned then, and re-epoxied them down. The red planet was a really good sized frag so I decided to take a chance – I clipped off one of it’s three branches, laid it on its side on the frag plug and glued it down. I had read this kind of mounting can encourage a coral to grow a big base faster… Time will tell!!
Quick Maintenance – Cleaned Skimmer Neck
Noticed this morning that the skimmer wasn’t doing much skimming. The foam was only rising halfway up the neck and the popping bubbles were resulting in pretty clear skimmate – but not even much of that. I noticed two things – the return pump hose looked a little loose on the pump discharge (which could have resulted in lower flow through the skimmer) and the skimmer neck had some crud built up in it already. I did a quick 3-minute maintenance and cleaned the skimmer neck, and pushed the pump hose all the way on. That may have done the trick… won’t know till I get home tonight.
Oh, and since I’m posting, I missed the Rod’s food feeding last night but I did feed the tank some Oyster Feast and Arctipods 45 minutes after lights out. Don’t know how much of the Arctipods went to fish versus LPS versus the skimmer/fuge…
