10 days away from 6 months! Whoo hoo. Need to find light replacements. Red Sea uses 34 inch. Harder to find.
Not too many mistakes and those I made didn't cost me livestock. Lost only a few in this time. A ywg who disappeared in my tank. He might be in the cavern with the pistol shrimp I've also not seen. I can hope. Lost my clove coral to too much gha. The latest ywg didn't make it. I think he had something wrong from the lfs as I never saw him eating. He wasted away in my refugium display tank. Bummed. I want one of those. Also lost one damsel within days of bringing it home. The new 3 damsels are fine from the beginning. Lost a sea cuc that crawled under rocks and died within days. 2 acros are pretty much gone. Too high nitrate. It climbed super high after I got them. Will wait to try them again.
All fish thriving, all coral thriving. Colts came back and are awesome, Duncan heads are fat and wavy and have a new head growing nicely, torch has a ton of new tentacles and is stretching even taller, Gonipora extended and happy, elegance wavy, sun corals really starting to grow out tentacles. Got the feeding down. I wait until lights off and they are open. GSP getting longer and nice and wavy, favia? Not sure. never see any polyps or tentacles, xenia now on my rocks... And polyps nice, even spreading onto rock. Zoas on the same frag might not have survived the algae. I keep pulling to see if they are there
Tang, sand sifting goby, scooter blenny, chromis (2), clowns (2), tri color blenny, barnacle blennies (2) are happy. Barnacles hide very well. The 3 anthias doing really well. Cut feeding to twice a day plus they "wake up" when I do the sun coral and get some extra. Really love them as they are all over the tank and in the water column. Constant motion and movement.
Display refugium is now home to my emerald crab-the huge one. put some of my macro in suction cup containers (for showers) . Need to put them in peroxide bath to kill the algae. Then I'll put them back in. If the crab eats them, I'll start over and rehome the crab if the lfs will take it back. Right now there is an overabundance of algae
Will be getting tanks plumbed soon I hope. Have someone who will give me a quote. Handyman who also has or had SW tanks and has done some builds. Excited for that. Have 3 damsels in that tank and except maybe trying a goby-shrimp pair, no other fish. Just cuc.
I'm sad that I'm done with fish, at least until tank is more mature. So many more I wanted
. I think I can add a couple more barnacle blennies as they are so tiny they can't add too much to the system but are cute. Eventually, will add a mandarin or a ruby scooter. I have a canister filter on the refugium that I'll keep to add to the filtering and cleaning of tanks and help with the bio load. When the tanks are plumbed and copepods go in, I'll remove everything except bio media and rubble rock. No floss. Maybe just purigen and carbon--unless those kill copepods. Maybe half a tray of filter floss so some go thru and some can breed there? I figure the canister will be a good breeding area.
parameters getting better. Switched to Red Sea pro salt. 1 Water change so will see if it helps. Cost more, but so does mg/ca/alk, esp. the amts of mg I was dosing. Switching to RS ABC but was holding off until numbers got into more normal range (to be able to use less and save money on that stuff ) Today's numbers:
Mg: 1480 No dosing
CA: 400 dosed. Trying to get up to 420-440
Alk: 14.1 Not sure if the test kit is right. Not very happy with this brand.
NO3: down to 20
Still have too much algae--green hair. Partly bio load and heavier feeding due to anthias and sun coral. cut anthias down to twice a day from 3 times when I first got them to be sure they were getting enough food. Sun coral was also starved and responding nicely to daily feeding.
Using nopox daily, vibrant weekly, and started biodigest/bioptim which is every 15 days. Just did a chemi clean treatment to both tanks. Have tons of flow but still get cyano
longer post than I planned. But very happy and excited still. Love to just put my feet up on my desk and watch my tank. Better than TV even if it means less work gets done.
