Jestersix

My "Lazy Reefer" tank

Bah, I suppose I'm out of excuses... still have a few things to glue up, etc, but here's the idea:

Most of my fishy friends:
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Side A:
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Side B:
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End:
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I LOVE your mixed reef :) Makes me want to go that route again. Thanks for posting!!!
 
Just a little photo update before I take off on this summer's road trip. The tank has been running fairly smoothly, I've done preeeeeettty well on sticking the no-new-creatures rule for the display. I added a few mushrooms that I "couldn't live without" but I've been having a good time watching things grow.

February and today:
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In February this acro was jusssst starting to regrow over its half-dead skeleton:
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The "capropora" from the eponymous dbtc thread is doing well. Seems it's really not a fan of high light, but any bits that get occasional shade are bent on world domination:
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Adam says hello:
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Sps that aren't dead (yet):
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SPS are still growing. Some stylos need to be trimmed back asap (this is the first time in my reefing career I've been able to grow them at all, basically), and here's the latest from the green "barometer:"
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I'm also cautiously optimistic for the latest batch of birdsnest frags, they're growing steadily and have shown few or no signs of recession for ~1.5 months. Too early to get excited, but I was nuking them inside of 2 weeks.

The big announcement: I finally caved. 7 months of allllmost no additions, and that's all I could take. Didn't quite make it to the end of the year.

Something(s?) ate most of my zoa garden. I'm sure the flamebacks snagged a polyp or two here and there, but the clowns won't let them near the area for the most part. My money's on the tang and/or the asterina stars for this kind of devastation. It eventually wound up being too severe to ignore, so I rescued the last few fancy polyps and sumped them. Found quite a few big fat asterinas on the undersides of the plugs when I pried them off the rockwork.

So a big empty space has to be filled with something, right? A little help from coralmorphologic and the zoa garden will hopefully become the ricordea garden:
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It's been a rough year for the tank. Much of it my fault, but it's time to come clean and pull it back together.

Towards the beginning of the year, I added a few new fish for the first time in over a year. (Yeah you know where this is going...) They reintroduced ich into the tank and I lost about half my fish. Oddly enough, the tang was the least-affected fish, but I managed to save a few of the sick ones with the help of Dave/Houser. Even with the use of some extreme measures, I lost my favorite. RIP Heisenberg :(

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The instant the fish madness settled down, something that had been a minor problem off and on, became a major problem. My softies/anemones were being eaten at a very steady pace. I'd lost some enthusiasm for the tank when the fish died, and between that and a family crisis, I couldn't put my full attention into the problem. Most of my shrooms, the purple sebae anemone, all my maxi-minis, all eaten by *mystery creature*. It's not a water quality thing, since the shrooms in the sump are doing great.

My SPS have been doing reasonably well, but it's really the combination of sticks + squishies that keep me in this game, so a tank without softies isn't really an option. I'm done crying in my beer and it's time to figure this thing out.

I'll be pulling the tank completely apart (will fire up another thread looking to borrow a livestock bin), inspecting all the crevices in the rock, interceptoring everything, etc etc in order to figure out what's going on. If nothing obvious shows up during the teardown, I'll separate the fish from the corals for awhile and add them back in one at a time until I find the culprit.
 
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