Tank Log: Month 23 |
General Observations
It has been about 3 months since the last update. Overall the
tank is doing OK. There were a few glitches as noted below, but nothing
major other than letting my calcium level get completely out of whack.
Current water parameters:
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Alkalinity - 2.6meq/l - Readjusted up to 3.2meq/l |
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Calcium - 280ppm - Readusted back up to 450ppm |
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pH - 7.8 Night to 8.10 during the day (too low, need to boost up) |
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Temp - 77.0 to 79.0F |
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Salinity - 1.025 |
Interesting recent pictures
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A nice shot of the Hippo Tang. Seems to be a very hard fish to photograph for some reason. This is one of the better pictures I have gotten. |
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A nice shot of the male Mandarinfish with its fins extended. |
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This picture shows the large hammer coral attaching the adjacent blue A. millipora |
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Picture of a bristleworm. Finally got around to fishing one out to bet a clear shot of it. This is a small one of about 1 1/2". I do have one in the tank that is a good 12" or more which I see occasionally. I am a fan of bristleworms and leave them be. |
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A picture of a copopod (Pod). One of the good critters to have in the tank. This one is perhaps 4mm long in the body and was fished out of the sump for his picture to be taken. |
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Picture of a red flatworm, one of the nuisance variety. |
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Acrontia filaments: This coral frag is close to the glass. It is attacking the nearby tank wall with its acrontia filaments. These are the stinging features common on SPS corals which are only visible when they are used to attacked an adjacent coral. In this case, the glass of the tank survived the assault. |
New Additions
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A very nice specimen of a green moon coral, probably a Favia of some type. It is approximately 6" across with very large polyps. It is positioned about half way up in the left center of the tank. |
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This shows it's positioning within the tank. |
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The all time worse picture ever. This shows a new specimen of a Galaxea coral on the left side of the picture. It's positioning within the tank makes it impossible to get a clear shot due to the angle through the acrylic of the tank. It is positioned to the left of the new green moon coral above. It is notable for it's potent sting and I have placed in on some of the encroaching polyps in an effort to help keep them at bay. |
Deaths/Specimen Problems
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Lost one of my oldest specimens. This is a blue T. maxima that I had for about 5 years. He was a present from my wife when I restarted in the hobby after a short absence. He started life as a 1" specimen in a 29 gallon tank lit by a mercury vapor porch light of all things. At the time of his death, his shell was about 5" long. |
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This is him near the end. He has been overgrown by polyps for about the last year so I do not think that was the cause of his demise, but it may have been a factor. I attempted to remove them at one point, but it was impossible to do without risking damaging the clam. |
Tank problems and opportunities for improvement.
There has been a patch of Bryopsis algae which has colonized the A. tenuis coral in the center of the tank. Progression is noted below.
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This picture was taken 3 months ago. Started out as a small patch in the center of the coral. |
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This picture was taken about a month ago. The growth continued fairly unchecked. I did prune it back a couple of times hoping it would eventually die out, but it did not appear to be cooperating. I had also added Marc Weiss Phosphate and Silicate remover to the sump (2 containers worth) in the hope that severe phosphate depletion would help to knock it out. I had previously had good luck with using this product on another type of problem algae back when the tank was first setup back on Month 4. |
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I finally just took out the center of the coral that had been overun by the algae. This picture was taken several weeks later and it appears that the algae has been defeated. |
Red flatworms continue to be a bit of an eyesore, but have not really reached a level to cause problems.
The only major hiccup over this time is I got lazy with the calcium reactor and did not take notice of how low the media was getting. Since I don't check my water parameters very often, I did not notice my levels dropping. When I finally got around to checking things calcium was under 300 which is WAY too low. Alkalinity had dropped, but not to the point of being a big concern. I completely cleaned and refilled the reactor which takes close to 15lbs of media. To get the calcium back up to around 450ppm, I use Kent Turbo Calcium in dry form. I added 1 to 3 tsp of this to each gallon of makeup water. Over the course of about a week, the calcium level was increased to about 480ppm and I stopped adding it. After several weeks with just the reactor running and a little Kalk dripped in to keep pH up, the calcium level has stabilized at about 450ppm which is just about ideal. Alkalinity is around 3.2meq/l which is also OK, though on the low side of where I like to keep it. This is the first time I have used Kent Turbo Calcium and it worked very well for what I needed to do here which was to raise the calcium by a lot over a reasonably short period of time. It is potent stuff and a little goes a long way. It would be easy to over supplement a small tank if trying to use this product for normal calcium maintenance and I would not recommend it for that purpose without very frequent monitoring of water parameters.
Maintenance
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I finally had to hack back the large salmon colored millipora on the right side of the tank. Cleaning the acrylic was becoming difficult and I had war wounds every time I tried to clean it. I essentially pruned about 3" off the side next to the glass of the tank. I uses a large pair of stainless steel shears to wedge in between the coral branches and twisted it to break branches free. |
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This shows a side shot of the same coral before I pruned it and illustrates how wide it is spreading out. |
Other than the scramble to deal with the calcium drop, I am doing normal maintenance at this time. 16 gallon water change every other week lately. I did start to drip a gallon or two of Kalk each evening to boost the pH level again. Without it, it starts to drop below 7.8 at night which I try to avoid. I have replaced the incandescent lamp over the sump with another Lights of America 65W compact fluorescent from Home Depot.
