Jeez I totally missed that Lance but thanks for the compliments!
So whats new? Well, I chemi-cleaned the tank. Took a few days to get the skimmer back online but all is good now and the tank looks pretty damned good actually. All the cyano is gone and some of the fugly brown crap that was hanging out on the rocks is gone as well. Of course now I can see the wafer algae more clearly and well, there is considerably more than I had previously thought. I shouldn't be surprised though, really.
My ultralith regime has totally fallen by the wayside. I'm not even sure when the last time I changed the rocks out (end of August I think), guess I should do that and get back on the wagon. Some corals are coloring up but a lot of them still have a ways to go to get to their former glory.
Requisite photos to hold your attentions:
I did some reading on RC about majano eradication. Someone posted about using a 4N solution of sodium hydroxide (NaOH). Man, it certainly does the job. I did a test on a couple baddies with the powerheads off and it works like a charm. However it does create a lot of precipitate which is kind of scary/nerve wracking. The precipitate is supposed to be harmless but it takes a couple of seconds to form and in that time if you are injecting too quickly the solution can land on various other corals and do them in. So far casualties have been 3 majanos (yay!), 1 orange mushroom (sort of yay!) and half a ricordea (oops!). It also burns the crap out of brown wafer algae as you can see in this photo, its the greenish spot to the upper left of the ricordea (which is slightly melty)
And here is what it did to the mushroom:
I'm not overly sad about the potential loss of this mushroom. I've never been able to grow mushrooms so I was totally unfazed when I put these ones in the tank, "whatever, I'll have like two pretty mushrooms on a rock forever". Yeah, right, somewhere in the last few months I've lost the ability to not grow mushrooms and I have about 20 in various spots in the tank, and they're effing huge, like tennis ball size. Yes I will be keeping their populations in check from now on if this one croaks
Oh right, I have a before and after photo of "potential" majano eradication:
Yes it also eradicates coralline as you can see. I just did a couple on that rock as the precipitate was starting to scare me. After seeing the amount of precipitate and how much my fish seemed to be interested in it (or what I was doing, either way, they were stirring it up and freaking me out) I took a good hard look at just how many majanos are in the tank. The majority of them seem to be clustered on rocks that were removable or were originally a "plug" which is basically a large rock (it the ones those colonies from the LFS come on) so I just took the coral out, removed it from the plug and epoxied it down back in the tank and turfed the plug. Some of the other smaller rocks will be easily removed from the tank where I can go to town on them with the NaOH but I'd say there are still about 20-30 majanos in the tank that will have to be carefully injected. I have my work cut out for me.
In other news, my pink "irridescent" pocillipora (left side of the tank in the back forty, not the damicornis, the one above/behind it) spawned a number of months ago (I think August as Marie pointed out some little patches of it on my wavebox) and I'm not sure if it has spawned since or if it just took that long for the single polyps to turn into something my eyes could see but I have pink pocilliporas everywhere! You can see the one to the right of my lokani in this photo:
Thats about how big they are, I've counted over 25 of them so far. It going to be a serious pain in the arse if they all turn into small colonies, but luckily you can nuke them with NaOH too. Yes, I went on a bit of a killing spree today nuking this and that
And now, if you've made it through this entire post, you are rewarded with a few more crappy slightly-out-of-focus photos
FTS Oct 11
Forgot to add that the bulb on the left decided it only wanted to work for about 10 minutes this morning and then promptly died. I replaced it with an old bulb that is well over a year old so it looks a little less white on that side. Its not really overly noticeable but I know its there and its frigging annoying. I totally need to win the lottery and get some new bulbs (or alternatively save some money). Good thing I never throw anything out or it would be pretty dim on that side