Recently in General - Aquarium Category

I have not posted any pictures of my reef aquarium in a long time, so here goes:

I have removed some mushrooms, the leather coral and some zoanthids from this tank, and placed them in the 480g. They were originally purchased with the big tank in mind. I had some bad chemical warfare with all those softies and stonies mixed - never again. I'd rather have a bit barren looking tank (like above) but no warfare between the different species, than an overcrowded war zone.

Now to get rid of that damn Bryopsis...

Seems I like consolidating things... I have just merged my reef blog with my main blog - I just hate all these billions of small sites floating around.

I'd much rather have one place where I can blog about everything and people can filter based on the categories they are interested in.

Hope this works better for everyone.

I have two brilliant little books on Marine Invertebrates and Marine Fish - one by Shimek, the other by Scott W. Michael. Now usually advise is something you take with a grain of salt since in the reef hobby, the only two certainties are

"The faster you go the worse things will get"

and

"Nothing else is certain"

However, those two books have never been wrong. So many times I thought I needed my cup of salt, but today I realised I need to start listen to what is written in there.

For starters, my beautiful sun coral was healthy for many months in direct lighting - something the book suggested is not good not due to intolerance, but due to competition with algae. I ignored this.

As you can see on the right, the coral was very healthy when I just acquired it. However that proved to be naive since after about 3 months the macro algae started getting a hold on it.

A recent picture shows the result of neglect... I had the coral directly under bright lighting the whole time, and even though I have barely detectable Phosphate and Nitrate levels, once the macro algae gets a hold it does not let go.

For now I have attached it sideways to a piece of LR so hopefully there will be less direct light, hence hoping to starve the algae.

There are many other similar incidents. Below follows a couple:

1. Purple Tangs are extremely aggressive and it is NOT a good idea to keep similarly shaped tangs in a smallish (< 300g) tank.
2. Green Brittle Stars are the most ferocious invert predators out there. But they are also incredibly cool.
3. Ribbon eels are incredibly difficult to get to feed.
4. Blue Linka Starfish are also difficult to keep.

I have been playing a bit with my microscope and under 4x, 10x and 40x objectives I managed to capture these pictures of various macro algae. Try to identify them... (PS Go to my reef gallery for the answers)

Algae A

Algae B

Algae C

Algae D

Algae E

Algae F

Algae G

My new bamboo shark died yesterday night. So too did my hawk fish that I sucked up when I siphoned my tank for the hypo treatment. This is very depressing. The whole reason I ordered the bigger tank was for the shark. To help keep the nitrates down. I guess we learn the hard way. Just because your aquarium is 6 months+ old does not mean you can add fish more quickly.

Check out my new Reef Aquarium Galleries. I will be regularly updating these galleries so be sure to visit regularly. Comment here if you have any opinions/suggestions. To access the galleries, you can always use the link at the top right of this blog.

For the first time since I got my Ribbon Eel about 2 months ago, he ate a big piece of prawn... It took a couple of minutes of persuasion, but I knew he was hungry in the way he poked the lance fish I tried to feed him with initially.

I just hope he continues to eat...

As was mentioned in the previous post, I recently upgraded my lighting. I currently have 8 x 54W T5 lights. To illustrate the difference it would make, I took a couple of photos.

First some background. The tank has glass top covers to prevent splashing of water, reduce evaporation and help keep the fish in the water. Obviously with time these glass covers get lots of salt residue on them. This reduces the amount of light reaching the water column. I never cleaned mine since I never thought about its effect on the lighting.

The 4 x 54W T5 I originally had in there consisted of 2 fittings of 2 T5’s with individual reflectors. Due to space restrictions I had to add a 4 x 54W T5 fitting - with one common reflector.

Here is a picture before I did anything:

Then I cleaned out the top glass panes:

Then I moved the two fittings to the front and back to make room for the quad:

Then I added the quad fitting, but turned off the original two fittings - so only the quad is on:

Then all 8 tubes on:

It is obvious the lighting has been increased dramatically. Oh by the way - the camera was on manual exposure so as to measure the relative effect of the lighting increase.

It is 1 month now since the move and a couple of things had happened. Firstly, I lost a couple of live stock during the immediate days following the move, as well as a couple of weeks later (I doubt it was due to the move).

I lost my Frogfish, my Leaffish and one Chromis. The Leaffish was in bad shape before the move - I think it got some kind of bacterial infection since it looked like it was molting but looking like that for 3 weeks - and refusing to eat the whole time.

The Frogfish - yeah well, I think the stress was maybe a bit too much.

And the Chromis just disappeared without a trace...

A couple of weeks later I had my Ocellaris Clownfish disappear, followed by my Purple Firefish. I think something must have either caught them or scared them to death, since they were in perfect health the day before. I caught my Purple Tang becoming belligerent towards all my other fish, so I decided it was time to move the aggressor to it’s own clan - the Aggressive FOWLR tank.

To help combat the flatworm outbreak I encountered in my FOWLR tank, I added a couple of wrasses - a Yellow Wrasse, a Coris and a Dragon Wrasse. It seems like they are keeping the population down but they do not eat the brown flatworms - only the yellow ones.

I also got a snowflake eel for the aggressive tank. I added lots of macro algae (seaweed) to that tank to make it look more colourful.

I tried my hand at a Pulsing Xenia - it looked fine for two days then melted away overnight. I have no idea why it would have died but I know I will not try another one soon.

Since I am battling high nitrates in the FOWLR tank (probably due to the lack of LR - I only have 15kg in a 400l tank), I took a ball of cheato from my main tank and placed it in the sump of the FOWLR tank, and added 2 x 24W T5 lights. Hopefully this will also help seed the pod population.

The CO2 bottle I used to have got deprecated in favour of a new Tunze CO2 system with solenoid. At least now I am automated again.

I have fixed all the wiring in the fish room so everything is easily accessible. It took some time but it is done. Oh yeah - I also upgraded my lighting in my main tank - I added a 4 x 54W Quad T5 fitting, so I now have 8 x 54W T5 lights in there. This is to help the clams out as well as the Acropora I purchased.

Moving a 120l QT, 400l FOWLR and 550l Reef tank is no easy job. Especially if the new place is upstairs... And not just up the stairs, the stairs is in an L-shape. Which means the tank is too long to fit around the corner. Try lifting a 10mm braced glass tank over a 1.3m high railing...

Then to move 1100+ litres of water.... 80kg of live rock. And all of this whilst trying to keep the fish and corals alive.

Well, it is done. I will post pics soon.