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Frag tank maintenance?


Jimbo662

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I've got all my corals in a frag tank until after I get moved and the new tank set up...probably about a month and a half away.

Water is 7 1/2" deep. AI prime is 11" above water. Most corals seem to be doing ok. Trach/scoly's, blasto's and rhodactis seem to still be unhappy. All with slightly gaping mouths. Blasto's seem to only be about 3/4 inflated and the rhodactis are less than half their normal size. I've been trying to slowly adjust the light in case that's the issue. There's two pieces of rock and a few snails. I've been doing 5g water changes about every other day.

Since there are no fish in the tank is there anything else I should look at doing other than the water changes?

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Have you done water tests? I wouldn't be too surprised if your alk, nitrate, phosphate, or ammonia level is out of norm. If there's an ability to add some more cycled live rock to it, I would do that as well.

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Frequent water changes with fresh salt water should keep your parameters close to whatever the salt mix says. There will be some usage, but not much considering most of what you have is LPS or soft. Scolys, Blastos and Acans are known to shrink when they're hungry and inflate after feeding. Your tank doesn't have any fish and the nitrates and phosphates are probably pretty close to zero, which will result in faded colors and gaping mouths. It would be worth a shot dosing a liquid food like Sponge Power or Coral Snow. I don't have any of those, but I have some Coral Frenzy that you can try out if you want. It's not good for dosing, but you can target feed some corals and see if they improve.

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I've got some Cobalt Coral food that I used this morning before the lights came on. Everything is looking a little better this morning. All but one blasto looks normal and the one looks better right now than it did yesterday. The green trach is nice and puffed up but the other is still looking a little irritated...it's the one that get irritated pretty easily. Maybe with the reduction in intensity of the lights that has helped. I'm going to start feeding the snails a tiny bit each day and see how that works out.

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I wonder if it may help if I used some of the QT tank water when doing water changes. I do water changes on the QT tank about every 3 days. I could use maybe a gallon of it for the frag tank to introduce some nutrients.

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I get home today and everything except the trach is looking normal again. The scoly (or whatever it is) is inflated the most I think I've every seen it. I moved the trach to side of the tank and slightly tilted the light away from it to see if maybe it's getting too much light. I'm still going to experiment with the water changes to see what it does.

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I'm wondering if I should put fish in the tank instead and continue with the water changes I'd been doing. Jake had some nice looking clowns yesterday. :-) I've got 4 weeks before the move and hopefully only 5 before the new tank is up and running.

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