High Tide Aquatics

NanoCrazed's Lazy Tank(s) Journal

Shroom Tank
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Ugh. I moved my maroon pair from my biocube to stop them from throwing sand on the meats.

After a few days, they decided to throw sand on my shrooms. So i moved my shrooms further. Then they went nuts. Lost 1/2 my collection overnight. Had so many shrooms in there, i can't even remember what i lost! @#%$!!!
 
ELOS 70 / Shroom
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Last night was a big night. Final day if QT for some new tangs i picked up. 6 small tangs...

2 Clowns
1 orange shoulder
1 tomini
1 unicorn
1 line spot (?)

I was going to add to my frag tank with the other tangs but decided to keep then in the ELOS 70 for now. Makes easier for my to catch and rehome later. I might add one to my AquaJapan system...

Likely, I'll be doing the fish / tank shuffle soon and redistribute...fun times
 
Watching to see what “unforeseen”havoc they wreak...
unicorn get sooooo big. You need at least one real tank so you can keep it!
Hopefully not too much yet. The current tank is BTAs only...and lots of gha. These are pretty small so will be awhile.

Will probably give me a good excuse to upgrade down the line... i doooo have that 150G sitting around still. Heh.

Had i though it through, I would have had the foundation to my office put on slab or reinforced to support a custom wrap around tank. That would have been amazing... sigh
 
Shroom to sps frag
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Welp, since i lost the majority of my shroom collection thanks to some ingrate maroons, i found my motivation to start the conversion from shroom dedictaed to sps dominant I had to planned.

Dug through all the carnage and retrieved all the now empty frags i mentioned in my other post... (grrr.)

20210214_182509.jpg


I installed the dual gyres as well.

Next up will be to clean up the sump and install and dial in the skimmer. It'll be awhile before I can fully have sps in here i think. Tank was dirty for shrooms... so will be awhile to get params dialed in to accept sps successfully...
 
Shroom to sps frag
===

Welp, since i lost the majority of my shroom collection thanks to some ingrate maroons, i found my motivation to start the conversion from shroom dedictaed to sps dominant I had to planned.

Dug through all the carnage and retrieved all the now empty frags i mentioned in my other post... (grrr.)

View attachment 24011

I installed the dual gyres as well.

Next up will be to clean up the sump and install and dial in the skimmer. It'll be awhile before I can fully have sps in here i think. Tank was dirty for shrooms... so will be awhile to get params dialed in to accept sps successfully...
No way to connect it to the other sps system?
 
I coooooould connect them but i would be asking for an accident waiting to happen.

The frag is on kitty-cornerish to the main tank. With a sliding door between.

Plus, separate systems gives me an isolated backup for all my pieces
 
Frag tank
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Finally managed to shuffle all the fish around. For the bastard maroons, they got rewarded for poor behavior. I moved them into my CSB tank (WB20), which had a pair of wyoming whites that I moved to the meat coral tank (Biocube 29). The wyomings have not shown any inclination to kick up sand so figured would be safe with the meats. But soon as they kick sand, then it's shuffle time again!

While I was at it, I did a few more shuffling between fish across my other tanks as well...

With that done, I threw in some egg crate and 1.25" pvc post. Unfortunately, one of the sheets didn't fit properly as I decided to leave the two large chunks of LR in the tank. Thankfully, managed to squeeze that second sheet in by pivoting 90 degrees...

The skimmer will go in tomorrow along with the Trident \ DOS \ Apex hook up. I plan on running the system with hydrogen peroxide for a week or two before putting the first set of test sps frags in. I noticed some dino / cyano signs so figured better safe than sorry. I'll grab a sample of examine under a scope tomorrow to be sure though...
 
AquaJapan85
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Been having issues over the last few weeks where saw telltale signs of stress on corals. I first noticed some receding / burned tips on my merulina colony that have weathered through every tank mishap. But since it's a trooper, I decided to do nothing and keep watch. Eventually over last two weeks, I saw more signs of trouble -- some pieces had tip erosion, some bleached, some brown, a few stn / rtn and many very happy with PE.

My params are pretty decent:
Alk 8.8 -9.0
Calc 480-500
Mg 1370
Nitrates 10 -15
Phos 0.08 (confirmed with Hanna LR and ULR)
Potassium tested low but could be user error : 280 (my ICP was 380 from awhile back).

So looking back 2 weeks ago, here's what I did out of my normal routine:
  1. Over dosed Kent Marine Coral-vite by 2X my normal amount... pour extra accidentally
  2. Dosed KNO3 in hopes of killing 2 birds with 1 stone to get both potassium and nitrates up
  3. Dose a few drops of Lugol's
  4. Swapped out my vectra to a Varios 8
  5. Threw in a 1000W ceramic heater from a Chinese no-name brand ( i know, i know...questionable but most heaters are made in China anyway, right? :). )
  6. Restarted full circulation to a 5G plumbed frag... this one gave me trouble before when I had running so turned it off and only allow trickle from return to slowly refresh water
Nothing on this list screams problematic except maybe the heater... but I cycled the heater in my SW mix station for weeks and none of the other tanks I used the SW on had issues.

So, tested for voltage leak. Nil.
Retested everything manually to confirm Trident. seems fine except a bit off in calibration.
Thinking maybe I OD on patssium, grabbed a Salifert potassium kit... to confirm I am probably way low. so likely not this.

My new theory is that my dottyback is kicking up old sand and getting hydrogen sulfide into the tank. Was seeing the erosion and necrosis on the merulina started around at the sand interface where the dottyback has been excavating for last few weeks... Also noticed bubbles popping up now and then...

In any case, I fought the urge to change the tank until after I got an ICP sample. So at least, I know where I started from. Was up until 4AM changing water -- 20% - 25% or so, put in a felt sock (normally run without mechanical filtration), threw cuprisorb into the sock as well (in a mesh of course), installed chemical absorbing polyfill and adjusted my skimmer to skim slightly wetter...(normally dry skim).

So far tank is looking better -- maybe just psychosomatic.

I also pulled all my chalices, the merulina, and a caddy colony I have been hosting on behalf of another reefer into QT with antibiotics to try to resurrect and stem any further tissue loss.

I'll probably comb the equipmet to look for busted seals to magnets etc just in case...though really inclined to wait for ICP to confirm if metal is leaching. until then, just gonna keep running cuprisorb.

on the brighter side, I did clean the glass of the 5G add-on... mostly euphyllia filled. So that's a silver lining....

20210223_035301.jpg
 
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