I'm going to be doing some major chopping and pruning soon. What's the standard procedure for selling frags? Let them heal on the plug first, or sell as fresh cuts?

Well, I have been so busy since half way through the summer there's a few moments I have wished I didn't have a giant baby built in to the wall of my house that needs attention whether I have time to give it or not. Thankfully, the tank is mature enough that things inside it happen in slow motion and it largely runs itself, but I'll be honest the only reason my fish have been getting fed every (well, most) days is that I live with 3 other people who can pick up the slack for me when I'm gone for 17 hours a day.

Moral of the story, grad school sucks sometimes.

The tank has been chugging along however. The only real issue I've been dealing with is a slow and creeping eutrophication. It started many months ago with a persistent but low grade dino bloom, and since august has developed in to a creeping cyano issue. I'm pretty sure I know the reason, which is four fold:

1. I've gone from changing the GFO from once every 2 weeks to once every 6
2. I've gone from doing 50 gallon water changes once every week to once every 6 weeks
3. I've got too many fish that have all grown up so I have to feed a tremendous amount each day. My longhorn cowfish can eat half a clam and 3 full cubes of frozen food a day with room left over for pellets and whatever he finds in the sand if I let him. And he still follows me around the dining room all day begging for more.
4. I'm pretty sure my sand is becoming a nutrient sink/source. The cyano problems are worst on the sand and worst around the base of rocks and in the corners where water is either drawn via the vortechs, or eddies form at the rock sand interface.

A few days ago I spent 2 whole days working on it, removed the top layers of sand where the cyano was the worst, then did a major flush of the sand in two corners (I didn't want to do it in the whole tank at once). The amount of garbage that came out of it was staggering, and in the places where I did it the cyano has not grown back, whereas the last time I vacuumed the top layer it was back in less than 12 hours. When the water cleared my skimmer cup was half full with grey/white snot. I'm going to do that to the rest of the sand over the course of a week or two when I get home from the trip I'm on right now. It might not be as good as vacuuming the sand, but it's much faster, it removes fewer macro organisms that I want to keep, doesn't require me to remove any water (I do water changes in the sump), and by using a large turkey baster to fluidize it I can agitate more sand faster than I think i could with a sand vacuum.

Anyway, enough talk. Time for a picture dump. My phone was cooperating with me the other day and the white balance seemed to be as good as it's ever been. The sensor still blows out on the blues, so it's still not true to eye, but these are the best I've caught in a while.

Dining room side:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psab9183c2.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps290676de.jpg
The tall green guy has grown straight up directly in to toe flow of an MP60 and it's starting to mess up it's growth pattern. I'm going to have to chop it completely down soon.

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psbcecd53a.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps4a001f8f.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psbd0f540c.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps09eb23fb.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps973b226a.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0b70f8f4.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps14ad6eb9.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psbf6e4a7f.jpg
That hydnophora has been busy digesting everything around it. Two out of three of it's neighbouring montiporas (including the ugly brown one) hitchhiked in to my tank on the rock though so I'm not really that sad about it. It did digest half of a birdnest frag on the other side of it though, which upset me greatly, but the frag got big enough for an acropora/stylophora crab to move in to it a few months ago and the hydnophora seems to have stopped attacking it. I think the crab must clip any mesenterial filaments that land on it.

Office side:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2b3a3f73.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps745c3e47.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps5919e466.jpg
The flow in the tank has been causing some other growth pattern issues. Namely, the fact that the vortech's are stuck in those awful corners, there's a really strong uni-directional back draft around the edges of overflow boxes. Also, on this side the outlet from my return pipes seems to hit right at the overflow box then go straight down. It's combining to make that stag horn grow all weird, it even had a branch grow straight down. If anyone has any suggestions for how to remedy this I'm all ears. Are there better return pipe nozzles that aren't so uni-directional? I recently got a WXM module for my Apex, so I've been considering have half my vortech's shut off periodically throughout the day. What does everyone think?
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...pscd5cff88.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps5e81c334.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps3aabb3fe.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps377337b0.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps5d128968.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps146326a7.jpg
Love this fish. My roommate named him 'Nightrider'
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps588748b5.jpg
Look at the growth pattern! Grrrrrr.

And finally, some of my favourite fish:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps5c684df9.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psaf6bb48e.jpg
Seriously how cool is this guy?

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps3c148f92.jpg
These guys seem to be buddies. They sleep together, and spend most of the day together

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psa236f0c1.jpg
Hey! Hey! Hey! Food? Do you have food? Are you going to feed me? When will you feed me? Is it time for feeding time?

wow nice tank, finally someone with a Cowfish love those fish had one for about 6 years , I'm on the lookout for a nice little one to raise again .

looks incredible and growing in quite nicely too!

Giving me some seems to make sense ;)

Charles

I call shenanigans ! Didn't nobody tell you that you can't have this nice a tank with LEDs?? Clearly you missed that memo.

Also, looking sweet Adam!

Awesome tank. I love that cowfish. I wanna get me one now.

So that cowfish does not hurt your corals? just curious cause i'm liking that fish:lol: obviously he doesn't

dude that tank is growing crazy well done

Problems aside, it's lookin' great Adam

He's hands down everyone's favourite fish. They definitely need big tanks though, this guy has more than doubled in size since March and now that I've seen full grown ones in person I'm worried even my tank isn't big enough.


Thanks! It's been a big year for them. Apparently ignoring them was just what they needed lol

haha, I'm going to have to have some sort of a frag sale soon. The ones on my rack are about to start plating on to the rack itself.


Right?! I can't believe how many hours I wasted worrying about them not being up to the task. They've got shortcomings for sure, and perhaps I could get better colours with T5s, but they've done their job so far. I'll definitely stick with them in the future.

Make sure you've got a big tank! Also they're slow as all h*ll so if you've got really aggressive feeders you'll need to give them special attention, and I would also argue that they absolutely require some sort of 'feed' mode with greatly reduced flow or they can't catch anything to eat. When I feed I turn my vortech's to feed mode and turn off the return pump for 5 minutes to make sure he can actually catch something. My tank has quite a bit of flow which ferdinand struggled with when I first got him, so if you get a small one you might want to consider reducing the flow until it's big enough to handle it. Also I've heard that cleaner wrasses can harass them to the point of chronic stress. They're not fast enough to get away and the cleaners apparently obsess over their white spots.

Nope, not even a little. It took a tiny nibble out of the tip of my gorgonian the first day I got it, but he's ignored it since. He's figured out that mysis and pacifica plankton chunks get caught in the polyps of my more extravagant SPS colonies like the hydnophora, so he 'hunts' off of the corals, but as far as I can tell he's never actually taken a bite of the coral tissue, he just plucks off food that's gotten stuck. He also ignores my one tridacnid clam, but he LOOOOOOVES frozen clam on the half shell, which I feed mostly for the copperband's benefit a few times a weeks. From a feeding point of view, one of his natural behaviours is a little annoying but it doesn't seem to hurt anything. If you look at the full tank shots, you can see there's quite a few craters in the sand. Those are all from him. In the wild they hunt by blowing jets of water in to the muck on the bottom to expose the inverts that they eat. He never used to do it, but then one day it was like he figured out how and in the space of 2 days he completely resurfaced the sand bed. I rarely have crystal clear water now because he does it often enough that there's always something floating in the water. here's a video of him doing it:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0d082e20.jpg

Thanks! I see it often enough that I don't realize how much it's changed. I just looked at photos from the beginning of the year and it was practically a desert back then!

Thanks man. I'll eventually figure out how fix them, but man are they annoying to my eyes!

Wow, 12 months in 4 pictures:

Oct. 30, 2012
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps46bc7b95.jpg

Oct. 21, 2013
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2b3a3f73.jpg

Oct. 30, 2012
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps8d784f81.jpg

Oct. 21, 2013
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psab9183c2.jpg

It's been a big year!

I like your tank who did the cabnetry?

The finishing carpenter that did my house built it, they're called Epic Woodwork. They did brilliant work, not just on the tank (which was awfully challenging), but on the whole house.

Was just touching up my photos in iPhoto. It looks like my photo skills still suck massive monster monkey balls. The images I previously posted are waaaaaaaay to cold.

Here's a better example of what it would look like to your eye if you were standing in front.

Kien, I'm gonna get you to bring your camera with you when you come over, cuz my skills are weak sauce.

Also, I'm trying these hosted on dropbox. Photobucket seems to torpedo the quality.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...k/IMG_5912.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...k/IMG_5917.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...k/IMG_5919.JPG

I took a tutorial on correcting white balance in Photoshop and decided to try and apply it to some of my tank pictures. These are top downs I took today, not perfectly accurate to real world, but 100 times better than what my iPhone gets with the native camera app.

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...pscb05019c.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps750a6502.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0b5d089e.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psf4b81d7d.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2d0d13fb.jpg

You can see the problem I'm having with my radions in a few of these. White diodes burnt out all over the place. I'm trying to sort it out with Ecotech.

WOW, that's looking awesome Adam. Everything looks great!

Thanks! A couple of those colonies turned out really janky in terms of colours because the phone sensor blue washes everything, so on the phone, reds barely even register, while anything that's blue becomes indecipherable from the background. I tried a new correction in Photoshop that involves specifically setting the black value, the white value, and the grey value manually using a kind of long and annoying process, but it requires there being something that is truly 'white' in the image that isn't blown out or a reflection, and since my sand has turned mostly grey/purple it was hard to find true white anywhere in the tank that's not crazy blown out on a phone camera.

Anyway it's a heck of a lot better than the original photos, but those are the only ones I could get 'right' enough to think worth posting lol.

Wow! Looks awesome, especially for just a year. And to think you did it all without T5s :)

Wicked looking tank! Nice work!

haha! I'm so tempted though... What with all that green grass on the other side...

Thanks!

Tank is looking great, and very nice coral pics indeed!

After seeing your tank, I want to switch to LEDs! Who doesn't want a tank that looks like yours.

My prediction: Keener is going to buy LEDs before the end of this year!

:thumb:

This is one of the few tanks, I've seen in person that shows off how well multiple Radions can grow and color things when used correctly.:biggrin: If my corals grew as fast as yours I would be paying off my tank in frags!

Wow..

I already have my LEDs on order!

Those look quite true to real life. Real life bring pretty damn sweet. Meanwhile my crap mitras has browned all your frags quite a bit. Time for radions or t5 looks like lol.

aaaaaan since it's gratuitous top down photo day... here's what my fish have to deal with at night. Royal Blue makes my eyes go fuzzy. It explodes my camera sensor

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2c76fd2a.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psb086b880.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps7f6ef52d.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps267956e1.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps75fafb52.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...pse3bb9695.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps73b0c189.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psa16de1fa.jpg

Thanks man. There's an art to photographing them and I am no artist that's for sure.

Coming from you that means a lot, I have been aspiring to have a tank like yours for years. And are you serious? What did you get?

Hahaha! After my first frag sale I'm now only net minus... oh god I don't even want to think about it. The major drawback to multiple radions - no bulk discounts and the number of things that can go wrong with them is multiplied directly by the number of fixtures. If Ecotech comes back to me and says I need to pay to replace the entire light puck on each fixture that has one or more white diode malfunctioning out I don't know what I'm going to do.

:) :) :) thanks man.

Nah give it time! It's only been a couple of weeks. I keep hearing that the Mitras is amaze balls. They also have diodes down in the low 400 nm range that is just plain absent from my tank, and I think the whites are a slightly different spectrum, so it's entirely possible this is just those frags getting a suntan for the first time. Each one of my corals went through a tantrum after going in to my tank lasting anywhere from a month, up to a year in the case of my wild colonies from Walt Smith (I think you got frags from a couple of those). They're going to need to adjust for sure. If I were ever to go temporarily insane and replace all of my lights at once I would have a hard time discounting the Mitras, though I've been sooooo tempted by the ATI hybrid. Anyway, I need to stop trying to talk you out of spending money on aquarium equipment lol.

Nice pics. Beautiful corals

I ordered a couple of 60" strips of reefbrites to supplement my halides and T5s. :-)

I'm not sure why you would want to change out your LEDs when they appear to be doing so well for you. My tank is OK, but yours is WOW. It has that awesome LED Rave look that mine does not have.

The sad part about LEDs is that the coral's 'best angle' is always top down, and since I need to climb up on a ladder just to get my hand in the water, it's not an angle I really get to see that often.

I will also say that any notion I had of moving away from these lights has been firmly put to bed. As I mentioned I've been having issues with the white diodes on 5 of my 8 units, and was having a mild heart attack over it as my units are well out of warranty. Ecotech thinks its a problem with the way I installed my TIR lenses and they're taking care of the whole thing as a warranty issue. Consider me a fanboy for life.

My roommates are going to Hawaii for Christmas, so Brandon bought a water proof camera. I got to play with it tonight. eek.

While it's MUCH better than an iPhone camera, it still has the same issues with blue washing and white balance due to the LEDs, but I don't care, I just took some awesome photos.

I have neither the time nor patience tonight to try and colour correct them, so here they are as seen from the sensor. I was playing around with the light mode while I was taking them, so these first few were with all channels at 0 except white, which was at 100%:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2733fa8d.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps58ebe538.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps427633b5.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps622f1d13.jpg

And these were with the blues on varying levels along with the white, as well as a couple different white balance/exposure settings on the camera. I could spend 2 hours correcting them all, but you get the point.

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psaab098d9.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psb85cc594.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0dafaa47.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps4a0bb6cb.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psc3e841d9.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps9f633034.jpg

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psd90eee6f.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps66af5236.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps4d35c9a6.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps5b3a316b.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps87488880.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps508bf25a.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps92ec6e2b.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps3a769e94.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps01254006.jpg
That last one has gone from brown, to white, to blue, to white, to now a the slightest hint of rose. Adapting to LEDs is a journey for some corals. I'm hoping it gets pinker as time goes on.

and finally:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psa56bf63c.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...pse0c7598e.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psace1dc46.jpg