High Tide Aquatics

Peter's Garage Tank

Red Dragons should not be your barometer on whether or not you can keep acros. They are notoriously fickle to very subtle changes in light, flow, and alk; more so than any acro I have ever kept. I have been through three of them and have given up on them.
Completely agree. My Acros are fine, by have given up on red dragons after 3 attempts. The longest period was 4 months and then RTNd over night. The shortest was 24h.
 
My last was over 6 months. Mini-colony. Came home 1 day to a dragon skeleton.

Was happy as a clam when I left, polyps were out the night before, nice color, no signs of stress. Then poof!


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the acclimation of the Acros is the hardest part. If you have a tank that has alk 10 and then you put it in your tank with a alk of 7


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Now that we have so many SPS corals, it looks like we are going to have to step up our game:eek:. We now have better lighting and added a wavemaker pump. Ran to the LFS and picked up a mag. test kit, bottle of mag., and a bottle of strontion (strontium). Still need to find a strontium test kit.
I have also started cutting back on the tank feeding a bit, and working on the timing of all of the lights. Currently running actinics for 16 hours, daylight is 9 hours (running in the middle of the blue time) and the sump is lit for 14 hours. Still waiting on the Mars led for the chaeto chamber.
Cheers! Mark & Peter
 
Even though we've been putting a lot of corals into our tank, there's also been a lot of corals that have left our tank. All in all I would say the number is about the same. The main difference is that we've gone to more SPS corals in our tank. The main changes that we've made in the feeding is to slow down the pod production a bit so that we don't get as much pod poo into our display tanks and we cut the phyto dose in half. But we also started adding RedSea Energy. I am just a little concerned that after we doubled our lighting we could get an explosion in algae growth. Our tank still eats good! The one issue I am having though is that it seems there's a little bubbles of air on frag plugs and algae and rocks and spots where possibly a coral is dying. Didn't start till I put the new wave maker pump in though
 
Is there pump pumping air into it?


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As the cryptic tank overflows into the DT there are air bubbles in the water stream. Wasnt a problem til I put the bigger pump on that side of the tank and it started pulling the stream coming out and grinding the air. Moved the wavemaker to the other side of the tank and I think all will be okay. Now the bubbles float to the surface and dissipate.
 
Get a tang or two to control your algae problem. I put yellow tang in my frag tank and all gha are mostly gone now


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Get a tang or two to control your algae problem. I put yellow tang in my frag tank and all gha are mostly gone now


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I don't have an algae problem. I am happy to report that the display tank has NO gha (I am just trying to keep it that way)
 
Looked at the tank and everything was good, came back about 2 hours later and the Red Dragon was going all RTN. The encrusting on half of the frag plug was white. Damn!! Pulled it out and made a cut on the stem about 3/8" up from the white. Tossed the RTN and old frag plug and re-glued the dragon onto a new plug. Fingers crossed.
 
Ok, got the ATO all hooked up, ran to the lfs and grabbed my first small bottle of Kalk. Did a 5 gallon water change and tested parameters:
KH - 8
Mag. - 1370
Calcium - 400
PH - 8.4
Salinity - 35
Mixed the first 5 gallons at only 1/2 tsp. per gallon, let it sit for 2 hours to settle and we are dosing. I will have to keep a close eye on the PH and will adjust strength accordingly. Did I miss anything?
 
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