Wow it's been almost a year since we updated. Life happens sometimes, but we did still manage to buy corals and do a water change at least once a month. The real neglect came over the summer months.
For some reason we had taken the thermometer out around the spring time and never put it back in. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two was being too lazy to put the portable ac unit for the summer in the room that the tank is kept in. The house has central air but the bedroom the tank is in gets the worst air circulation. Well first the sps started to look bad and die off around June, but the main culprit was our flame angel who decided to turn on us. One day we just sat there watching for an hour or so and he would just go to town pecking them. Which was particularly upsetting because we had just gotten the sps corals to finally take off and grow like crazy. Catching him proved unsuccessful and we gave up. We also probably didn't do a water change for a good 3 months. Fast forward to two weeks ago and we are doomed. One day the skunk shrimp, flame angel, and almost all our coral was dead or dying suddenly. The water felt really warm so I stuck the thermometer in.....90 degrees. Yikes!
I checked the heater which was still set at around 78, but the air temp of the room had to be about 80 degrees. I also heard a little voice in my head reminding me that rsm 250s are notorious for creating lots of heat. So off went the lights, opened the hood all the way, opened all the windows in the room, did a 25% water change, and waited. Thankfully the unusually warm nj september decided to normalize that day, and after about 24 hours it the water temp went down to 82ish. The ac unit was being lent out to another family member and won't be back until hopefully next week, but by then it starts to get cold here anyway. Last summer it never went over 80 with the ac unit in, so I don't really see a need for a chiller since it was mainly human error/laziness.
Survivors List:
- All the zoas pulled through
- Both clowns
- Royal Gamma
- the black and blue fish which I can never remember the name of
- cabbage coral
- Duncans
- Hairy mushroom
- Trumpets
- Clavularia
- the green star looking polyp thing that took over the one rock
- and the jury is out for now on the pink Goniopora
Loses:
- All our sps
- Hammer coral which had at least 25 heads on it now
- Frogspawn
- All blastos
- And anything else not mentioned in survivors list either died already or because of the heat
On a positive note we now don't have to worry about the flame angel. The rock work has also been bugging me, but we couldn't move anything because there were too many happy corals that would be majorly disturbed. So in the coming weeks we will probably be putting a lot of work into the tank.
Oh and the asterinas decided to multiply like rabbits in the past week and were not affected at all unfortunately.