Thought I'd throw out an update.
Aug 30 2011 Front
Back:
The little clams didn't make it. I never really expected them to but you never know sometimes. One croaked at the end of may and the other made it to the beginning of july. I also lost 2 other clams somewhere in between and am now down to a single 4" blue maxima. Not sure what is going on there but very frustrating. The blue maxima is not looking so great either, gaping a bit and a shrivelled mantle near the incurrent siphon. I looked tonight and it is looking marginally better with one side of the mantle looking fairly normal. I'm hoping it pulls itself out of whatever funk its been in for the past number of weeks.
At some point the dosing line for magnesium got clogged and the line popped off at the doser. The doser continued on its merry way and dosed the controller for my Tunze 6100. According to teh internets, it was stuck on feed mode as it would pulse for a second when first turned on, then nothing. Brad (Aquattro) kindly supplied me with a new controller (THANK YOU BRAD!!!
) and everything is hunky dory once again. The 6100 was down for at least couple of weeks. Shows how much time I spend with the tank that 1. I didn't notice and 2. it took me 2 weeks to try cleaning it and then farting around with various parts to figure out what was going on
Not sure if that has anything to do with the maxima clam issues/self fix or if its just coincidence.
I have an acro that is currently less than 1" from the surface of the water. This is a personal triumph for me as I've never been able to grow them big. That being said the acro isn't exactly located at the bottom of the tank, its fairly high up but I can't wait to see that neat surface growth effect they get
Unfortunately this acro is also being smothered by my stupid orange digitata. The digitata is so gorgeous and I've never come across one so vibrant but the bloody thing just overtakes everything. Its more interested in growing horizontally than vertically and its starting to mow down several other corals. So I'm going to try to get in there one of these days and get it out of there. Hopefully I don't damage anything or mess up the rockwork because frankly I don't have time for that BS.
Ok more photos!
Anyways thats about all thats new. Frankly I'm surprised that the tank is doing as well as it has been with about zero interest/time spent on my part. I do waterchanges when I can, which is usually bi-weekly now, fill up the dosing stuff when I notice they're empty and feed the tank daily (ie. dump food in). I've often thought that at this point, I'm kind of losing interest in the tank, I've accomplished what I set out to do which was be successful at keeping SPS and I've done it. Finally. After almost 8 years of algaes, algaes, more algaes, evil bugs/nudibranches, lights breaking, pumps failing, heaters failing etc.
Then I think "get a grip, its summer. what will you fill your time with in the fall/winter?"
And with that said, I'm off to feed the tank