got ethical husbandry?

70 Gal Keith Grandt tank

Time for a quick, less than awesome, update on my tank. I've been having a bit of a rough time with it for a little while - and its pretty much entirely my fault. Chemistry levels were out of wack for a couple of months (I think they're finally decent and stable, at least for the past month or so). I switched from halides to LED's and made some mistakes there as well. Also trying to manage some bryopisis using Kent's Tech M. Here's an FTS, and you can see the bleached out birdsnest colonies on the left, and I even managed to kill some big chunks of plating montipora. Zoas (except the growout) are mostly doing pretty well, euphyllia are OK, but not as full as they probably should be, and the RBTA's all look pretty nice.
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I was messing around in there the other day and wondering why my female clown was acting so much more aggressive than usual, and then I saw one of the males picking at something on the base of the big grape hammer top right...
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Too bad I'm not setup to try my hand at raising these right now, but does explain the attitude. And the bite marks on some of the other fish. Kind of cool, both males and the female all hang out together, was worried they would evict one of the males. Now I just need to quit messing with things and let stuff hopefully recover.
 
Sounds like both of our tanks are similar in parameters :) Everything bleached out and RBTAs are doing great. I think you are one up on me though; your zoas are holding up. I think my fish ate all of the colorful ones and left me the brown ones.
 
Sounds like both of our tanks are similar in parameters :) Everything bleached out and RBTAs are doing great. I think you are one up on me though; your zoas are holding up. I think my fish ate all of the colorful ones and left me the brown ones.
The colorful ones are the tasty ones.
 
Been meaning to make an update for a while - and I'm finally getting to it!

The last post I made about my tank was this... Fortunately, things have improved since then. Bringing the tank back online took soooo much time, I was really starting to wonder if it would be worth it. Now that it's back, and the fish look healthy and the corals are growing, I'm glad I did.

Tank.jpg


I bought some large, dry pukani rock from BRS during their Black Friday sale, and after bleaching and muriatic acid bathing it, let cure for about a month. I tried to setup the 'scape (or lack there-of) to to make the best use of the Kessil AP700 fixture above it. The tall piece of rock, in the front left corner is only there because a RBTA moved onto it and won't let go. Grrr... I have 3 fish - a pygmy angle, royal gramma, and tomini tang. The tang, gorgonians, softies and some zoa covered rocks came from a fellow club member who unfortunately had to take down their tank, but it worked out very well for me, and everything seems to be doing pretty well.
CandyCane.jpg

Green candycane from @sjbro, hiding behind a branching duncan.

Chalice.jpg

RedTable.jpg

Mummy eye chalice and red table acro from @bee505. The color on the acro is not accurate, it's not that washed out. The chalice frag - which is awesome - had 2 eyes, but appears to be growing quite a few more. Looking forward to what it will look like in another couple of weeks.

Gorgonian.jpg

Closeup of one of the photosynthetic gorgonians. Usually, it's all bushy and brown hiding the nice blue-purple base.

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2 RBTA's, on the left from @jonmos75, the the other was my original one, which was at one point was completely bleached. The first pic in this thread shows these same 2 'nems about a year and a half ago.

My clown trio has gone into full time breeding mode, so they've been exiled to a 20 gal because they are just too aggressive to share the tank with anyone else, including my hand. My next plan is to plumb a display refugium into this system. I have a 30g long Nuvo Black that's waiting to be drilled, sitting on it's stand right next to the main tank. I just need to figure out how I'm going add the plumbing to my sump. I have some ideas, but will make a post with questions and pics. Then the clowns can come out of the 20 and live in that.
 
The tank looks great and I'm happy to see it is getting good use! It is a 75G, by the way! lol.

I see you're selling those halides, that was such a cool set up and a steal of a price for what you're asking. I think I paid like $350 just for the Manta bracket!
 
Hey Mark! Are you thinking of getting back in the game :) ?

The tank is doing ok, been through some ups and downs, even though it's not looking its best right now, it seems healthy, I'm definitely enjoying it.

If you're looking to set something up, and are missing those halides, let me know! I'm running an AP700 in an Aquatic Life T5 fixture over the tank, and could not be happier with the color and coverage.
 
Hey Mark! Are you thinking of getting back in the game :) ?

The tank is doing ok, been through some ups and downs, even though it's not looking its best right now, it seems healthy, I'm definitely enjoying it.

If you're looking to set something up, and are missing those halides, let me know! I'm running an AP700 in an Aquatic Life T5 fixture over the tank, and could not be happier with the color and coverage.

Yep! Once I get the OK from the landlord, I'm placing an order. I just purchased a Giesemann Spectra on eBay, I can't get away from halides! This time though, I'll be running a SE so I can use the Radium bulb :)
 
It's been far too long since I've updated this. I did try a few times over the past couple of months, but for some reason, the site would not let me.

I'll start with a couple of basic updates. A little over a month ago, the tank looked like this. I was pretty happy with it, except, too many damn anemones. But, all but one of them were on one, large rock.
Tank OG.jpg


So, as an experiment, I took that rock out. It's been doing pretty well in a 20gal on my table.
Tank Nems.jpg


I rearranged a few things, and here's what it looks like now.
Tank Now.jpg


For the most part, everything seems to be doing pretty well.
Now to see if I'm able to post this update - if so, I'll add some coral close pics soon.
 
Love the rics- do you feed them?
Not really, but they do end up with a bit from general feeding. The rock that's mostly covered with the orange ones came from @wpeterson from a while back.

You need another clam
Ha! 2 of the 3 came from you - one was a weird deresa (had scutes - still does) from a while back and then the maxima from last time. I love 'em.
 
Dammit! This is not the sort of update I want to make...

A year or so ago, I added some berghia nudibranchs to help out with an aiptasia problem, which they did a good job with (but not perfect).

I just saw these:
Nudi's.jpg

For a couple of minutes, I thought "hey, finally, some small berghias". Then I realized where they were, cruising around the edge of the mystic sunset monti. They were difficult to get a good pic of, but pretty sure they're monti eating nudibranchs :mad:

Meanwhile, on the other side of my tank is a nice big forest fire digitata, which I'm now thinking is going to be short lived
Forest Fire.jpg


The internet tells me these things are difficult to get rid of. Would love to hear people's experiences with dealing with these.
 
The internet tells me these things are difficult to get rid of. Would love to hear people's experiences with dealing with these.

Oh, no! I noticed MENs in a tank in the summer of 2018. My monti frags were nearly all dead before I saw them bc they seem to be nocturnal and I had never seen the tank at night. I removed a frag so I could photograph the MEN, dipped the others in Bayer, then used one as bait to lure any more nudis out. However, since my Monti frags were mostly dead already, I decided to just go monti-free for awhile. I placed one frag in there about a week ago actually, that had been in QT since Oct. strangely, I had a thick green encrusting-plating monti in that tank that was never affected.
BAR members had offered links on experimental treatment such as: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/purge-for-montipora-eating-nudis.447789/

I would do a search for more recent info. Also, know that a Bayer dip does not kill eggs.
 
I had them once decades ago, I remember making nightly visits with a red light to manually suck each one off, did that for weeks. Don't remember if that was in any way successful (they probably lay hundreds of eggs) or if all my monti's just died.
 
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