Shrimpchips's 100g (Live!)

[Nebthet]

Your set up is coming along very nicely.

Can't wait to see more pix. Sucks you lost a lot of your sps in the switch over though.

[shrimpchips]

Thanks Sarah! Yeah, it's a shame that I lost all those wonderful SPS (enough to fill a 2g bucket completely).

But I've started to rebuild - this weekend I got a frag of cali tort, Coral Master's Selago, GARF bonsai, ORA Bird of Paradise, and two other sweet frags. Next week I'll be trading some frags for an Oregon tort and green palau nepthea (I'm super excited for this one....). Hopefully a friend of mine can make a frag of ORA Hawkins that he got from me a while ago.

Things are a growing. I can't wait for the next few weeks to see the growth things will get.

[Nebthet]

I Can imagine.. I have been making frags of the PT Digi and green digi I bought off of you over a year ago, and the green bottlebrush is really growing like crazy now.

If you want frags of those in the future again, let me know and I will try to arrange something to get them to you.. (Greyhound pulled the bus stop outta belleville, so no cheap trips up to Toronto for me any more ....)

[shrimpchips]

It’s been a bit, so a little update is due!

The three fish I had in QT are in the big tank now - purple tang, bimaculatus hogfish and another little sixline wrasse. Everyone's doing great, and everyone in the tank is used to each other now and settled in nicely.

Unfortunately the sixline I wanted to pair with this one jumped out a few weeks ago I now have netting over the tank to prevent further jumpers.

I finally got my act together last week and started to glue various frags and colonies I had scattered along the front of the tank to the rock. Used 4 tubes of superglue and most of a tube of epoxy getting everything onto the rock – made my skimmer go nuts for 3 days, but now the sandbed is looking a lot less cluttered, and it’s starting to look like a tank with a future

As for placement, I want to eventually have a nice mixture of growth forms and colours, so I’m trying not to place similar corals together too much, and keep colours and growth forms in mind when things get bigger.

Also, I was at Sea U Marine a week or so ago, and I really liked how Ken has a big A. hoeksmai in the middle of the tank, so I’ve placed my hoek in the middle of the tank – hopefully it grows into the centerpiece I’m envisioning for it!

This weekend I finally got around to hooking up my Profilux doser again. I mixed up 9 liters each of Ca, Alk and Mg (Cl and SO4), and added the trace elements from Fauna Marin. Hopefully the solutions last 3 months or more.

Parameter test after a few hours of dosing (and a lot of pump testing) was Ca 440, Alk 5. I’d like to get the Alk to about 7. Today after a day it was Ca 400 ppm, Alk 6 dKh and Mg.....750ppm!! No wonder stuff has stopped growing, and the monti caps look so pale! So now the next few days will be spent slowly bringing Mg back up to around 1200 ppm.

Also, last week I spotted tiny (~4mm) snails in the tank that didn’t look like collonista snails commonly found in reef tanks. They looked like tiny trochus sp. Snails, but I assumed that they had hitch hiked in on something, so didn’t think much of it. That was until yesterday when I spotted three of them on the opposite side of the tank. Going back, now I see them everywhere! Here’s a shot of two little guys – they’re both less than 5mm in diameter:





Next up for the tank:
- Set up Profilux again (I accidentally flashed the OS, so I have to reload it. Right now it’s just running off of timers and powerbars )
- Mount Monti caps and digi, move ricordea rock, clear up clutter in left side of tank.
- Stain and put on door panels
- Figure out a clear acrylic solution to hold netting in place
- Get a black acrylic cover made for my overflow
- New fish?? Dunno – QT is currently sitting empty and ready!
- Keep collecting SPS!!

Also, after talking to Ken for a while about it, I may give a go with Zeovit – I really like the colours Ken (Sea U Marine) gets, and his program which deviates from the traditional zeovit regime. Or I might not, but either way, it’ll probably be a while before I try it if I do decide to do so.

And as required with any update, here’s a FTS:

[lastlight]

That's going to look really nice as it matures. The little overhang is a nice touch too.

Any reason your targets for alk and mg are lower than usual?

[Nebthet]

Very nice looking indeed... things are coming together very well.

[shrimpchips]

Update:


I can't white balance to save my life. Oh well.

Here's two more shots of corals that are doing pretty well:




What's awesome about those two is that the picture is waaaay duller than they are in real life

Not much has gone on in the last few months besides some basic maintenance here and there, and some rearranging of colonies. A few weeks ago it got real hot and my tank got up to 84F, so I lost one or two colonies, but everything is really bounching back now.

I'm hoping to pick up some awesome frags from a friend of mine this weekend, and I have a little Potter's angelfish in QT right now - hopefully I can find another one or two to pair them and then put them into the main tank all at the same time. Aside from that, when the SPS get really thick, I'd love to put in a small school of smaller anthias or cardinalfish as the last "group" of fish in there.

Hopefully more pictures to come!

[reefermadness]

Nice......that setosa is killer. Super bright.

[fishytime]

agreed.....that setosa is killer!.....I have one the same color......hope it grows up as nice as yours

[shrimpchips]

Originally Posted by reefermadness

Nice......that setosa is killer. Super bright.

Originally Posted by fishytime

agreed.....that setosa is killer!.....I have one the same color......hope it grows up as nice as yours

Thanks guys - it's definitely one of my favourite corals. Too bad it's a relatively slow grower!

Fishytime, give it low flow and it'll be gnarly - it doesn't appreciate high flow.