Lovely ! Great growth !!!
Thanks!!
Here are a couple of pics during a water change. Corals are out of the water for anywhere from 10-15mins. The very top of the monti cap on the very left is usually out of the water for an hour and on occasion for more then an hour. I fill the tank enough to get the pumps running again and the water movement makes enough little waves to keep the top most corals wet, not submerged. Then over the next two hours I slowly fill the tank. Been doing this since ~April and the corals that end up out of the water aren't showing damage (including one acro frag which I thought I would end up loosing).
Do you see that nice green one in the center, it never shows up on my photos very well cnfzd: Look at my FTS in post above, the green coral just blends into the rockwork.
I always fill the tank up slowly, always have.
I guess that really wasn't a good explanation. You already know that there are some things that just end up working well for some folks and not for others. One of those things I found over and over again is changing the water.
Early on I had a fish only marine tank and they were hardy, so length of water changes weren't an issue. After maintaining tanks full of urchins, I learned that during water changes, replacing water had to be done fairly slowly b/c they were sensitive to more than the standard temp/salinity/pH parameters. A fast water change (i.e. replenishing the water in ~15mins) would end up with some die off of urchins over the following 24-48 hrs after the water change. So, I learned to add a little less then a gallon every half hour to fill back up the tank, depending on the size of the system it can take a day to do. When I had my fish and mobile invert 40g tank, I ended up loosing two shrimp after I hurried two respective water changes (only a correlation here, based on observations, can't scientifically prove this) so I went back to what I know works well for me, slowly filling the tanks.
Now I have to start to take into the equation the corals that are out of the water and how long they would be. Corals create a mucus to protect them out of the water, but they can only tolerate being out of the water for a short amount of time, so I want to make sure that they at least can stay moist if they are gonna be out of the water for any length of time.
WOW Fancy Wayne! ^^^^^^
Congrats on TOTM Oxy!
Thank you !!! Now I understand why you are doing it in that way. I never had a sea urchin tank. Kind of never though on something like that. One day, if you have pictures of the sea urchin tank, it will be nice to see some.