120gal mixed predatory reef tank

[Sebae again]

Awesome colour and shot of the open brain coral.

[whatcaneyedo]

I haven't posted anything here in over a month so here are some updates on the world within my tank. Shortly after my FTOTM release the yellow coris wrasse disappeared. I suspect my eel may have eaten it but I'm not sure. I had had it for over two years and it was 3" long... There was no trace of it inside or outside of the tank so maybe I'll never know.



It seems like every month comes with a new problem/challenge and I think I may have solved this one. My beautiful blue and pink chalice has recently been showing some recession while the other chalice frag I have under identical conditions continues to grow very well. They are both in my frag tank which does not contain any fish, crabs, shrimp or anything else that could pick on them... or at least that is what I thought until I found a crab molt the other day. So I did some exploring and found a little gorilla crab hiding under a large coral that was very close to where I kept this chalice. The crab has since been removed to a fish bowl in my sump so hopefully that solves the mystery.

Before


After


Red circled crab in exile


Some good news... This coral continues to grow at an exponential rate. Here are two pictures taken one year apart.

May 2009


May 2010


I did a little system tweaking this month too and added this solenoid to my fresh water reservoir. I bought the valve on ebay from valvesforprojects and wired it to a 12VDC adapter from an old internet router that doesn't work anymore. It is on a timer to turn the flow on for an hour each day. This way my RO/DI filter doesn't have to turn on and off 40+ times a day whenever the Tunze top-off system replenishes some evaporated water.

[silentcivilian]

Thank you for that wonderful photo. I read this whole thread start to finish, and I love those two fish, and one day want to start a tank dedicated to this style of fish. I currently read about them all the time and just love everything about them.

Also, love your setup, looks wonderful and everything looks so clean and thought out.

[whatcaneyedo]

I've spend a considerable amount of time inside of the tank staging my rockwork and planning for how my coral will grow in but that is about as thought out as it gets. The rest of my system is the result of endless fiddling and bandaid solutions... which works. But I'm not overly proud of it.

Over the last month I tried out a Prodibio Biokit http://www.prodibio.fr/index.php?fil...eau_id=2&id=14 complements of Progressive Reef. I didn't follow the instructions to the word because I have a fairly large system and would have used some of the vials up entirely the very first time I dosed. So instead I just used a row each week for simplicity's sake.

Before dosing I already had undetectable levels of nitrate and phosphate (according to elos kits), good color and growth and I do plenty of trace element replenishing through weekly water changes so I didn't expect to see any improvements. However I was surprised when nearly all of the cyanobacteria in my sandbed cleared up almost immediately. Maybe this was a direct result of supplementing or maybe it was just its time to go as it has typically done so in cycles before. Aside from the cyano I noticed a slight improvement in one acro that had recently recovered after bleaching a bit earlier last winter. But thats about all.



I've made two other system changes this month as well. I'm curious to try out some solid organic carbon dosing so I've switched out the maxijet pump on my phosban reactors for this mag 3.5. When the pellets arrive I'll swap out the GFO for them in one and continue to run carbon in the other. I also traded out the mag 9.5 for a mag 12 for the frag tanks return because I figured it could benefit from a little more flow. Ironically I don't really like mag pumps, but to a certain limit I can get them for free so I tend to use a lot of them.



This month I also had a lot of clam spawning... which put me a bit on edge but everything seems to have gone fine. I was able to photograph the derasa pushing out some white fluid for an hour but I didn't capture the maxima clams doing it. The derasa begun doing it just before lights out a few weeks ago and the maxima clams followed about a week later at around the same time. All are still alive and looking healthy today. I attribute these spawning events to the Neptune controller's seasonal temperature and lighting variations my tank follows.

[Greenmaster]

That looks so cool I want an eel now

[Doug]

Beautiful pics. Man those caps are nice.

[whatcaneyedo]

Its been a few weeks since I ran out of the probio kit stuff and it seems like some of my cyano is returning a bit. But that is the only noticeable difference that I can see.

This time I'm experimenting with some Vertex Pro-Bio Pellets. My hopes is that I'll be able to use them in place of GFO which I've been running steady for about two years now to keep the phosphate levels in my tank undetectable. The GFO from BRS has been great and I've been able to bring the phosphate down to 0 from .75 and keep it there by changing out 1 cup each month. But this solid organic carbon system appears to be much less expensive and a little less maintenance so I've been wanting to give it a try. At this time both phosphate and nitrate in my system are undetectable so I'm curious to see if the phosphate starts to creep back up or not and whether or not anything looks visually different in the tank over time.

I was able to get about 300ml of pellets to completely fit and liquidize in a TLF Reactor powered with a Mag 3 pump. My net system water volume is probably a little over 200gal so according to their directions I should minimally have 400ml of pellets running. But most of my system is empty water space and contains just 6 fish so we'll see.

EDIT: I removed the sponges and replaced them with some of that craft store plastic mesh. By doing so I was able to fit some more pellets in and now I'm pretty close to 400ml.