Meteorflower

Nice meeting you! Harrison loves that T5 light. By the way, is the tank still available? I tried to shoot you a PM but your message box is full.

I'd also be interested in this.

PM'd

PM'd on the sand

It's awesome!

Exterminate! Exterminate!

Ahem.

Yes, I'd kill it, and quick. They spread like wildfire and are difficult to control if you let'em get a head start. They'll also sting your good corals. Nip it in the bud with some Aiptasia-X.

Are these fixtures, or retro kits?

So, the tank has been cycling for about a month now. It was still showing some nitrite last week, so we're continuing with the slow and steady cycle. Over the weekend I added a Two Little Fishies phosphate reactor (my first ever!), and I'm pretty excited about it. Hopefully it will help me keep my nuisance algae in check this time around. My tank went though a magnificent diatom bloom about two weeks ago, and surprisingly enough, my turbos went after it! Must have been some other good detritus-y stuff under the diatoms on my scuzzy old rocks. Here's a pic of the first turbo snail's progress after one hour:

I've never seen rock so clean!

I'm all about my cleanup crew this time around. I have about 10-12 turbos in there right now, along with two trochus and roughly a dozen Ceriths, and I'm wanting to add more turbos. The diatom bloom is getting under control, but the next algae wave is starting to appear - green hair algae Or at least I assume it's GHA and not bryopsis since the turbos are eating it... fingers crossed!

I'm also working on building an arch of rock to connect the two islands I have going, and am testing my calcium and kH obsessively to try and make things perfect for coralline algae to take off... instead of all the other kinds I have going at the moment.

All I have right now is a tank full of scuzzy rocks and happy snails... but I'm loving it. Yesterday I noticed my pod population is really taking off, and spent twenty minutes staring at the glass. This hobby can be great sometimes!

Oh, if only my tank weren't still cycling! That purple bonsai is a beauty.

You can try adding some aquarium salt, but without any symptoms aside from lethargy, it will be difficult to diagnose what the problem is. It could be bacterial, parasitic or viral (probably one of the first two, and if it's viral then there's pretty much nothing that can be done). Salt can help in the first two cases because it alters the osmotic pressure and makes life harder on bacteria and pathogens. Can't hurt.

Thanks for the Biofuel!

Generally speaking, the picasso (humuhumu) triggers are a little nicer (though it varies a lot by individuals). They also tend to top out at 9", and their growth slows down a lot after they hit 6". Might be a nice trigger for your tank.

Yes, it's hypnotic. It's like a lava lamp...

I was lucky enough to spend several weeks on the Great Barrier Reef two years ago (for school), and it was seeing the water motion on the reefs that convinced me I HAD to have a Tunze wavebox. It's amazing how even drab brown leather corals look so beautiful in the back-and-forth rhythm that a wavebox mimics.

That being said, my tank has no canopy right now, so the sound of the water sloshing back and forth gets pretty loud at night. That's why I decided to use the light sensor (btw, a very nice touch, Tunze!) and hooked it under my bedside lamp. That way, the wavebox turns off at night when I turn the lights out.

At that point, my flow comes mainly from a pair of big Koralias that are aimed at each other from across the tank (to make turbulence), and my return lines.

I'm no expert on flow, but it has been enough to let me grow SPS well, and the softer corals look amazing under a wavebox.

Ha, I love the name! Badass!

Also, this puppy is now making a tremendous amount of noise... like a loud sucking sound! I'm wondering if putting a stronger pump on it might help.

Gorgeous colonies! Your friend has a nice tank.

I'm interested in the Coralvue ballast..

Mine never jumped in three years, but agreed, better safe than sorry. Any scared fish might take a leap even if they aren't normally jumpers.

So now I'd like to pose a question to you guys:

Pretty much all of the rock I'm using was live rock up until a few months ago, when I broke my tank down and dried it all out to store it. I'm pretty sure that it's chock-full of dead and decaying organic material as a result, which sounds like the perfect recipe for a disastrous algae bloom. This is something I'd really like to avoid, as that was a contributing factor to my tearing the tank down in the first place. So my question is, what would be the best way to cycle this tank and encourage coralline algae growth while simultaneously doing all I can to thwart nuisance algae growth? My plan so far is to do a decent part of the cycling without light. I might go so far as to wrap the tank in black plastic for a month or two. Bruce told me that coralline algae actually grows very well in the dark... but I've never tested this theory. Thoughts?

Also, I'm thinking of using a bottled bacterial product to seed denitrifying bacteria since my rock is pretty much dead. Would this help in deterring algae, or hinder it? I don't want to feed the tank at all if I can avoid it since I'm worried that anything I add will encourage algae growth. For now I've been adding small amounts (1 cap each) of Microbacter 7 and the liquid carbon source it's paired with, but I'm not sure if this is a good idea or a bad idea.

I feel like I have a lot of contradicting desires at work here (want to encourage coralline but discourage nuisance algae; seed with bacteria but don't want to feed...). What do you guys think? Either way I'm planning a long slow cycle of at least a few months.

Update time!

The rockwork has been more or less set. I don't really plan on making any changes save adding a few more pieces of live rock to seed the tank once the rough part of the cycle is over. My rockwork is pretty simple; two asymmetrical islands with a slanted channel running between them. I'm hoping I can get a few rose BTAs to settle there . I used a drill to add some frag holes, with varying levels of success, before filling the tank with RO, adding the salt and tossing in a couple of powerheads. Now the cycling has begun!

I was sure mine was dead, then he turned up two weeks ago. Keep hope alive!

I've been taking this for granted for years, and now it's occurred to me that it might be fixable. I've had air bubbles coming out of the inputs to my tank for over a year now. Before I tore it down, it happened with both of the inputs, and now that I've resurrected it, it's only happening on one side.

Is there anything I can do to stop air from getting into the plumbing somehow? It's driving me nuts! Both of the returns are hooked up to their own Mag 3 pump (2 pumps total), and have flexible tubing leading up to the standard overflow kits that came with the Oceanic tank (I think they might be All-Glass Megaflows). Up in the display tank I have angled both outputs so that they're submerged, so I know it's not air being mixed in by bubbles from the return flow hitting the surface.

Is there anything that can be done to fix this? Has anyone ever had this issue before?

I'd second that you should look around your tank. I'm not sure eggcrate is enough to keep a firefish in, especially if it got a lucky jump. I had one jump through the slit of a closed biocube lid that was no more than a quarter inch wide, and if I hadn't actually watched him do it, I would never have believed it.

Also, he may just be intimidated by the new clowns. Firefish can hide for days. My current red one hid for two weeks without me ever seeing him when I had to move him into a 35 gallon with my pygmy angel and royal gramma.

Reef tank black ops