Fixed Oceans Motions Valve
My OM Squirt stopped rotating a few weeks ago. [how many equipment failures is this so far this year?? Actinics, return pump, OM valve... is that the tally?] After cleaning and all the basic troubleshooting I finally broke down emailed Paul for advice. His thoughts were a broken tooth in the motor. Made sense to me so I ordered a new motor through him last Thurs. It came in today and was a quick replacement. I have my alternating flow back!!
Maintenance, Resilient Monti
Plucked some algae again tonight and followed it up with a 5gallon water change. I also changed the GFO. Every night I’ve been blowing detritus out of the rockwork and manually removing macro algae, mostly some type of turf algae. Is it making a difference? I think so but unruly says she can’t tell a difference so… I’ll say it’s still too early to make a definitive answer. I keep repeating the reefing mantra – nothing good happens fast.
My tropicana twister Monti had fallen on tough times. Right when it was taking off it got stung by a trumpet coral and receded pretty far. I moved it away from the sweeper tentacles, but didn’t secure it well. The frag fell off the rock and smack dab in the middle of a plate coral. Great… I couldn’t find it for a while and wrote it off as a loss. Fast forward a couple months to two nights ago and I stumbled upon the frag while cleaning up the sand bed. I think, and am pretty sure, that there is still some living tissue on the frag! I placed it in a safer location in the rockwork and am hoping to see some recovery growth!
Quick update – algae attack!
The “new” anemone is doing just fine. I’ll have to get a photo, the tank now has a string of 4 RTBA’s in a row along a ridge in the rockwork.
I’m going on an algae assault. Running GFO for the first time in… a while. Blowing detritus out of the rockwork with a powerhead every day, if not twice a day. Cleaned the skimmer neck the other day to get a better, wetter skim. And I’ve been manually removing a lot of algae. Caulerpa, “turf” algae, hair algae, and the red cotton algae. Thought I had the red cotton under control but it’s grown thick clumps in the branches of a hammer coral. Some time this week I’m going to replace the primary DI filter. The TDS meter is still reading 0, but I’ve read that they can have a wide margin of error.
Anemone Split
The original red bubble tip anemone split again. I think it split last night, and this time I can see where it’s healing. In the past they’ve stayed a bit more hidden during the healing process.
So now we’re up to 4 RBTA’s. This is the second time the original split. Well, it’s hard to say which of the 4 is the “original” at this point!
Cleaning and Experimenting
Last night I went to town on the tank walls, scraped about 80% of the coralline algae off. There’s a general rule in projects that it takes 10% of the effort to get 90% of the work done, and 90% of the effort to get that last 10% done. That’s certainly true in scraping coralline algae. The areas I have left to scrape are hard to reach with thick stubborn coralline. It’s a daunting task. I also pulled some algae out of the tank. A little caulerpa, a lot of red cotton algae. I thought I had that stuff beaten, but the green hammer branches were packed with it. It’s a downward spiral once the stuff takes hold – it’s so effective at trapping food and detritus that it grows exponentially (at least it feels exponential to someone trying to eradicate it!). I may need to try carbon dosing again – at the very least get the GFO reactor back online.
While working I accidentally broke a tip off the blue prostrata. I decided to try an experiment – I clipped a small branch off one of the green prostrata frags and glued both to a frag disc. I’m curious to see if they can coexist. It will take weeks before they encrust the distance between them, but that will also help ensure that both are healthy before they come into contact. This will be a good experiment, since I was intending on placing the green prostrata immediately next to the blue one.
Tonight I need to make more 2-part. Both supplements are pretty much empty.
