The pico tank lives again!
I couldn't sell it for anywhere close to what I think it's worth, and yesterday I as at Eli's picking some stuff up and he had this wickedly cool, 1 inch long mantis shrimp sitting in a plastic dish that had hitchhiked in on some of his rock. I thought to myself "wow, I've always wanted one of those but never had a tank for one". Then it dawned on me that I did in fact have a tank appropriate for a tiny mantis shrimp, complete and ready to go, requiring zero dollars to set up, sitting in my garage.
Lo and behold, it's back up.
Water quality for the next little bit is going to be tricky as I threw out the the old rock structure (wouldn't have reused it uncured anyway, too much dead stuff on it) so I made a new rock structure out of some of the last of my unused marco rock from when I first set up the big tank. I moved some of the corals that had previously been in the pico that were doing terribly in the big tank because the lights are too bright/white back over and hopefully lots of nitrifying bacteria with them, but I think I'm going to be doing lots of water changes and dosing with Prime for the next couple of weeks.
I'm thinking instead of doing full water changes on the pico for the next couple of weeks, I might just exchange it's water for the water in the big tank. The big tank could process even toxic levels of ammonia in a 4 gallon pico without so much as registering its presence on a test, and I've got the big tank back to low nutrient status so hopefully that won't encourage algae. I got rid of the bin that I stored ready made salt water for the pico when I shut it down, and I think having to do completely separate and dedicated pico water changes was one of the reasons why I fell so far behind on maintenance that I shut it down, so going forward, so long as the big tank stays in this low nutrient state and I keep running carbon to deal with organics that build up between water changes, I might just divert some of the discard water from my big tank water changes and use that for my pico water changes. It will mean that certain trace elements like strontium will likely be depleted in the pico, but I'm only growing a few LPS specimens in it now.
Enough talk, pics!
He's too small to tell if he's a spearer or a smasher. In sunlight he's got some really beautiful pink and green to his tail fins and face area, but unfortunately under the light of my Kessil a150 he washes out to a dark brown/black He's dug a tunnel (which makes me think he's a spearer, as I've read smashers usually carve a burrow right out of rock) with a primary opening front and centre of the tank
It's going to take a while before the corals that are in here recover from being in the big tank. The brains are bleached to within an inch of their life (thought this pic makes them look better than they are) and that tiny blast frag was so deep in a shaded overhang it's actually been shrinking.
I'm going to keep it simple with the corals this time and hopefully let the 4 that are in there just get really big. I might transplant a single polyp of one of my zoanthid colonies for good measure.