Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[asylumdown]

I'm going to be doing some major chopping and pruning soon. What's the standard procedure for selling frags? Let them heal on the plug first, or sell as fresh cuts?

[asylumdown]

Well, I have been so busy since half way through the summer there's a few moments I have wished I didn't have a giant baby built in to the wall of my house that needs attention whether I have time to give it or not. Thankfully, the tank is mature enough that things inside it happen in slow motion and it largely runs itself, but I'll be honest the only reason my fish have been getting fed every (well, most) days is that I live with 3 other people who can pick up the slack for me when I'm gone for 17 hours a day.

Moral of the story, grad school sucks sometimes.

The tank has been chugging along however. The only real issue I've been dealing with is a slow and creeping eutrophication. It started many months ago with a persistent but low grade dino bloom, and since august has developed in to a creeping cyano issue. I'm pretty sure I know the reason, which is four fold:

1. I've gone from changing the GFO from once every 2 weeks to once every 6
2. I've gone from doing 50 gallon water changes once every week to once every 6 weeks
3. I've got too many fish that have all grown up so I have to feed a tremendous amount each day. My longhorn cowfish can eat half a clam and 3 full cubes of frozen food a day with room left over for pellets and whatever he finds in the sand if I let him. And he still follows me around the dining room all day begging for more.
4. I'm pretty sure my sand is becoming a nutrient sink/source. The cyano problems are worst on the sand and worst around the base of rocks and in the corners where water is either drawn via the vortechs, or eddies form at the rock sand interface.

A few days ago I spent 2 whole days working on it, removed the top layers of sand where the cyano was the worst, then did a major flush of the sand in two corners (I didn't want to do it in the whole tank at once). The amount of garbage that came out of it was staggering, and in the places where I did it the cyano has not grown back, whereas the last time I vacuumed the top layer it was back in less than 12 hours. When the water cleared my skimmer cup was half full with grey/white snot. I'm going to do that to the rest of the sand over the course of a week or two when I get home from the trip I'm on right now. It might not be as good as vacuuming the sand, but it's much faster, it removes fewer macro organisms that I want to keep, doesn't require me to remove any water (I do water changes in the sump), and by using a large turkey baster to fluidize it I can agitate more sand faster than I think i could with a sand vacuum.

Anyway, enough talk. Time for a picture dump. My phone was cooperating with me the other day and the white balance seemed to be as good as it's ever been. The sensor still blows out on the blues, so it's still not true to eye, but these are the best I've caught in a while.

Dining room side:


The tall green guy has grown straight up directly in to toe flow of an MP60 and it's starting to mess up it's growth pattern. I'm going to have to chop it completely down soon.









That hydnophora has been busy digesting everything around it. Two out of three of it's neighbouring montiporas (including the ugly brown one) hitchhiked in to my tank on the rock though so I'm not really that sad about it. It did digest half of a birdnest frag on the other side of it though, which upset me greatly, but the frag got big enough for an acropora/stylophora crab to move in to it a few months ago and the hydnophora seems to have stopped attacking it. I think the crab must clip any mesenterial filaments that land on it.

[asylumdown]

Office side:




The flow in the tank has been causing some other growth pattern issues. Namely, the fact that the vortech's are stuck in those awful corners, there's a really strong uni-directional back draft around the edges of overflow boxes. Also, on this side the outlet from my return pipes seems to hit right at the overflow box then go straight down. It's combining to make that stag horn grow all weird, it even had a branch grow straight down. If anyone has any suggestions for how to remedy this I'm all ears. Are there better return pipe nozzles that aren't so uni-directional? I recently got a WXM module for my Apex, so I've been considering have half my vortech's shut off periodically throughout the day. What does everyone think?






Love this fish. My roommate named him 'Nightrider'

Look at the growth pattern! Grrrrrr.

[asylumdown]

And finally, some of my favourite fish:


Seriously how cool is this guy?


These guys seem to be buddies. They sleep together, and spend most of the day together


Hey! Hey! Hey! Food? Do you have food? Are you going to feed me? When will you feed me? Is it time for feeding time?

[Skimmer Juice]

wow nice tank, finally someone with a Cowfish love those fish had one for about 6 years , I'm on the lookout for a nice little one to raise again .

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by stinky

wow nice tank, finally someone with a Cowfish love those fish had one for about 6 years , I'm on the lookout for a nice little one to raise again .

He's hands down everyone's favourite fish. They definitely need big tanks though, this guy has more than doubled in size since March and now that I've seen full grown ones in person I'm worried even my tank isn't big enough.

Originally Posted by lastlight

looks incredible and growing in quite nicely too!

Thanks! It's been a big year for them. Apparently ignoring them was just what they needed lol

Originally Posted by SoloSK71

Giving me some seems to make sense

Charles

haha, I'm going to have to have some sort of a frag sale soon. The ones on my rack are about to start plating on to the rack itself.

Originally Posted by kien

I call shenanigans ! Didn't nobody tell you that you can't have this nice a tank with LEDs?? Clearly you missed that memo.

Also, looking sweet Adam!

Right?! I can't believe how many hours I wasted worrying about them not being up to the task. They've got shortcomings for sure, and perhaps I could get better colours with T5s, but they've done their job so far. I'll definitely stick with them in the future.

Originally Posted by Madreefer

Awesome tank. I love that cowfish. I wanna get me one now.

Make sure you've got a big tank! Also they're slow as all h*ll so if you've got really aggressive feeders you'll need to give them special attention, and I would also argue that they absolutely require some sort of 'feed' mode with greatly reduced flow or they can't catch anything to eat. When I feed I turn my vortech's to feed mode and turn off the return pump for 5 minutes to make sure he can actually catch something. My tank has quite a bit of flow which ferdinand struggled with when I first got him, so if you get a small one you might want to consider reducing the flow until it's big enough to handle it. Also I've heard that cleaner wrasses can harass them to the point of chronic stress. They're not fast enough to get away and the cleaners apparently obsess over their white spots.

Originally Posted by Trocar70

So that cowfish does not hurt your corals? just curious cause i'm liking that fish obviously he doesn't

Nope, not even a little. It took a tiny nibble out of the tip of my gorgonian the first day I got it, but he's ignored it since. He's figured out that mysis and pacifica plankton chunks get caught in the polyps of my more extravagant SPS colonies like the hydnophora, so he 'hunts' off of the corals, but as far as I can tell he's never actually taken a bite of the coral tissue, he just plucks off food that's gotten stuck. He also ignores my one tridacnid clam, but he LOOOOOOVES frozen clam on the half shell, which I feed mostly for the copperband's benefit a few times a weeks. From a feeding point of view, one of his natural behaviours is a little annoying but it doesn't seem to hurt anything. If you look at the full tank shots, you can see there's quite a few craters in the sand. Those are all from him. In the wild they hunt by blowing jets of water in to the muck on the bottom to expose the inverts that they eat. He never used to do it, but then one day it was like he figured out how and in the space of 2 days he completely resurfaced the sand bed. I rarely have crystal clear water now because he does it often enough that there's always something floating in the water. here's a video of him doing it:

Originally Posted by Skimmer King

dude that tank is growing crazy well done

Thanks! I see it often enough that I don't realize how much it's changed. I just looked at photos from the beginning of the year and it was practically a desert back then!

Originally Posted by gregzz4

Problems aside, it's lookin' great Adam

Thanks man. I'll eventually figure out how fix them, but man are they annoying to my eyes!

[asylumdown]

Wow, 12 months in 4 pictures:

Oct. 30, 2012


Oct. 21, 2013


Oct. 30, 2012


Oct. 21, 2013


It's been a big year!

[lastlight]

looks incredible and growing in quite nicely too!

[SoloSK71]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I'm going to be doing some major chopping and pruning soon. What's the standard procedure for selling frags? Let them heal on the plug first, or sell as fresh cuts?

Giving me some seems to make sense

Charles

[kien]

I call shenanigans ! Didn't nobody tell you that you can't have this nice a tank with LEDs?? Clearly you missed that memo.

Also, looking sweet Adam!