Timfish

Still trying to figure out how I feel about having my name attached to this project. A technique I've seen with researchers, aquaculture facilities and fish wholesalers is to "soft plumb" tanks for easy drainage and removal. The tanks are set up on a rack with a trough or a drip pan on the back end or underneath. A supply line runs above them and each location for a tank has a valve that feeds the tank from above but is not attached to the tank. The tank may be a molded polycarbonate that has a spillway molded in or valve and stand pipe feeding to a trough or drian pan to channel water to a central filter. This type of setup lets each tank be very quickly removed for cleaning or research or replaced with a clean, sterile tank if needed since there's no plumbing or equipment to disconnect or remove. For your project is seems something similar would work. You have room to set a tray your sump which would help with temperature and access (keep your four boys from messing with them ). The tray could be a tubberware container or something custom to hold your jars. You could tap off your manifold with airline tubing and valve to each jar. Then have a very slow drip you could turn off during the larval stage. Since they are mildly photo phobic you could paint the tray black or have it made with black plastic so the babies tend to stay at the bottom (although you probably won't mind some escaping into your system. ) (I can't believe I'm worrying about running out of aiptasia before you figure out how to raise them. I'm going to have to schedule some extra sessions with my therapist, can you give me your card number or your address to send the bill to please! )

Sex and violence, better than Friday night TV. . . . So what did you do with the adults in the end? Would you suggest keeping the eggs, juveniles, and adults separate? Did you separate eggs from the adults at all? How long do you think it took to see any juveniles? How did you handle water changes when the eggs started hatching? . . . I was adding the adults to a tank I have an aiptasia problem in. It was probably 6 - 8 weeks after I was getting eggs that I saw baby Berghia. But considering the size of the individual egg and the size when they are noticable that was probably a pretty good growth rate. I made no effort to separate the eggs and adults and didn't do anything special for the water changes outside of trying to avoid any noticeble eggs or nudibranchs. The reason I suspect predation is I added a big rock with aiptaisa instead of individual specimens and after that I would see 'pods scurying around and asterinas but even though there were eggs I never again saw baby Berghia. Cannibalism is just a guess, it would explain why I never saw more than the initial group of half a dozen or so babies.

I'm really glad to see you document your efforts so well. My experience raising them was interesting and I wish I had taken more time to follow them. The adults when they reach the 1" - 1 1/2" size are quite beautiful. I got 4 to try to breed and lost two pretty quick. The other two initially had lots of eggs but I didn't see many juveniles. I did finally get about half a dozen tiny ones maybe 3/16" or 1/4" show up and was able to raise them up to adult size. About that time I started to add rocks with aiptasia to the tank and after that I never saw any more small ones even though there were plenty of eggs. I did notice after a couple months I had a lot of 'pods and asterinas wer clearly reproducing also. My suspicion is the 'pods and/or asterinas were eating the eggs or babies and maybe there was cannibalism between the older and younger specimens.

There certainly were bad metaphors used but the main concern expressed by the article is worrisome. Hopefully additional research will indeed show it's reversible. The loss of large herbivores and urchins that control folacious algae and create clean areas for coral larva to settle are still the primary the primary causes for thier decline. Additional concerns are the problem of loss of speciation through hybridization. More and more "fused" Staghorn is showing up which is a cross with Acropora palmeta and A. cervicornis. This hybrid is also absent from the fossil record so is unique to current anthropogenic and climate conditions.

Kudos!

Were the pictures from a couple weeks ago and this last week taken at the same time? Even without clicking on the pictures there's noticable growth with some of your montis but your toadstools have expanded quite a bit in the second set.

Do you have a link for the ones you use? Anyone have any ups recommendations? Kim and I have been evaluating several different brands and the Penn Plax B11 battery operated air pump performs very well and is very inexpensive. It always turns on when power is lost and runs days on just a couple "D" cell batteries. Several others we looked at either didn't last very long on batteries or wouldn't consistently turn on when power was lost. While an UPS is ideal for saving equipment in brownouts and for surge protection my experience is they will only run equipment a few hours. I would definitely use a battery operated air pump along with an UPS

Nope. Not ever. Never ever. Honest!

AWESOME MEETING DAN!!!! Can't believe how much coral you gave away!

Sadly I have to report the Yellow Tang is dead! And sadder yet, not from natural causes. A family member who was visiting my client decided since everyone would be gone for the weekend it would be best to turn off the AC. Also lost was a several Montipora and Seratopora. Acros survived along with zoas, Xenia and other soft corals.

Some of you know Stephen Keen, aka Hydro. He has a Garibaldi Damsel in his system that's eating majano anemones!!!! I know! Like #$Y(&*#)@# !!!! For those of you unfamiliar with Garibaldi's they are are not normally a good choice for reef systems. They are found off the coast of California so prefer waters in the 50's and 60's and are the largest damsel reaching 15" TL. Hydro's has grown from standard LFS damsel size to over 4" in two years and seems to have acclimated well to 80 degree water. So far he's not having a problem with it eating any other corals or bothering any of his other fish although it has still to reach adult size. If anybody has any more info or tries one please post on this thread or PM me so we can get collect more info, hopefully it's not just an aberation.

25-30gal We started do weekly water changes in January to remediate the red hair algae problem. Actually our main reason was to get Kim's tank looking better by the monthly meeting in February which was supposed to be at her house but was rescheduled to Ty's. It would have taken longer but we could have taken a more leasurely approch like we did with Mike's tank with his green hair algae problem, http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/34556-hair-algae-a-case-study/?hl=%2Bhair+%2Balgae%2C+%2Bcase+%2Bstudy I think it's important to point out Kim had a good selection of herbaviores but they were not keeping up. Using water changes and manual removal we have been able to shift the equilibrium in her system so the various nuisance algae are on the wane and her herbavores are able to keep up. This is the same thing that happened with Mikes tank. If Kim want's to back off to 15 - 25% a month now I don't think she's going to see a recurrence of the probelm. With Mike's tank we're now doing roughly 15%-18% every 4 - 6 weeks and his corals and anemones are continuing to grow and thrive.

25-30gal We started do weekly water changes in January to remediate the red hair algae problem. Actually our main reason was to get Kim's tank looking better by the monthly meeting in February which was supposed to be at her house but was rescheduled to Ty's. It would have taken longer but we could have taken a more leasurely approch like we did with Mike's tank with his green hair algae problem, http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/34556-hair-algae-a-case-study/?hl=%2Bhair+%2Balgae%2C+%2Bcase+%2Bstudy I think it's important to point out Kim had a good selection of herbaviores but they were not keeping up. Using water changes and manual removal we have been able to shift the equilibrium in her system so the various nuisance algae are on the wane and her herbavores are able to keep up. This is the same thing that happened with Mikes tank. If Kim want's to back off to 15 - 25% a month now I don't think she's going to see a recurrence of the probelm. With Mike's tank we're now doing roughly 15%-18% every 4 - 6 weeks and his corals and anemones are continuing to grow and thrive.

Kim, we discussed aragamight very briefly but I'm afraid I didn't go into a lot of detail and Ty brings up an important subject. It's essentail aquarists understand the chemistry involved in our reefs and Randy Holmes-Farley does an excellent job of explaining some of it. But it's important to look at the whole picture, to pay attention to what is happening in our tanks, to keep abreast of the science and what is being accomplished by others. I certainly do not question the basic equations Dr. Holmes -Farley talks about. What gave me pause when I first read it many years ago was Tropicorum (the oldest coral farm in the US) had been using Aragamight quite successfully as their sole supplement for several years before his article. Quoting Richard Perrin "We have long believed that the CaribSea product, called Aragamight, is really good and have been adding it to our tanks regularly for some time. We get it from CaribSea in 100-pound bags and add it daily. The advantage is not just the jump in calcium that one would expect, it is a multipurpose additive that has a lot of other components besides calcium."1 A second observation is an apparent assumption the pH in an aquarium is homogeneous and Aragamight would not dissolve. I know from many years experience even though I may test acceptable pH levels in the open water column in my tanks there are certainly micro environments that will be dissolving calcium, this should be obvious to anyone who has grown any stoney corals for any length of time. Any close look at the base of a coral skeleton that has died from lack of light as the colony grows will see dissolution of the skeleton (See the attached photo for closeups of a Birdsnest skeleton dissolving). Since that article was posted there has been some fascinating science supporting the direct ingestion of fine calcium particles by corals. Something not discussed much 12 - 15 years ago but is fairly commonly accepted now is an important source of food for corals is fish poop (earliest reference I can remember is Borneman's 2001 book on aquarium coral husbandry). Research2 done 5 years ago shows a significant percentage of fish poop is calcium and magnesium carbonate crystals. Besides phosphate and nitrogen, corals are also benefiting by direct ingestion of particulate calcium and magnesium carbonate. (This raises some curious questions about the role of bioeroders in our systems providing calcium. ) 1) Coral, June/July 2005, pg 11 & 12 2) http://www.pnas.org/content/108/10/3865

Either combination will work but your corals and their colors you are wanting to have predominate should be researched. Birdsnest is one I've found to have quite a range of color based on intensity varying from brown (75 PAR) to purple (400-500 PAR), pictures are in this post http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/24054-the-difference-a-12-inch-makes/?hl=%2Btwo+%2Bbirdsnest The amount of blue light is a factor, lots of blue, violet and uv will shift oranges and reds to green. Some corals are able to make just a few colors, Green Slimer only varies between brown (100 PAR) to bright green (200 PAR and above) M. setosa is going to be variations of orangish red (the pink colors are partially bleached colonies) so lighting is not going to be as much a factor.

Oh my goodness! How can I keep anything alive with 5 mg/l PO4 and no NO3!? I have to agree with Victoly though, with corals sucking up ammonia straight from the water as well as uric acid and amino acids, both organic forms of nitrogen, and even sucking up nitrates if they have to it's impossible to test what's really happening with the nitrogen cycle in our tanks. And considering phosphate is the limiting factor of a corals ability to use nitrate as a food for it's zooxanthellea and when corals have low internal phosphate they become very sensitive to light and bleach easily I'm curious how robust the corals will be and how the tanks are going to look over time dosing nitrates but keeping PO4 low. I would think it as important to track how much and how often corals are being fed along with water parameters to see how food is helping to compensate for low PO4 levels.

I'd say it's one of those "half dozen of one or 6 of the other" decisions. How patient are you? What happens to the frag if it finally separates when your not there? Is it possible for it to land on something causing problems?

First, i would suggest testing your new saltwater before you add it to see what the ammonia level is. I would also suggest testing frequently but not do daily water changes. Ammonia is an important food (nitrogen) source for many organisms and I would find it very unusual you still have an ammonia probelm. I think you may need to look differently at what is happening with your cycle. Also, fish do not like it but an ammonia level of .25 won't kill most of the fish we keep. As far as ich, low salinity is probably the easiet way to treat fish in you quarantine tank (do not do this in display tanks). I prefer UV sterilizors but it isimportant to get the right size and install it correctly to maximise the kill rate (search my username and the term UV sterilizor to read more on this). Keep in mind there are different strains of ich, some more virulent than others, and the cysts have the potential of surviving up to 10 or 11 weeks and still release larval parasites so care must be taken to prevent reinfection.

And he's 21 and a half, at least.

Thanks Victoly, Here's a here's a new link to the paper, looks like the one I posted a couple years ago has been taken down. http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2002/243/m243p001.pdf This is what caught my eye reading the abstract "Different coral species had distinct bacterial communities, even when physically adjacent, while bacterial communities from the same coral species separated by time (~1 yr) or space (3000 km) were similar."

Here's a good video describing the holobiont:

Metronadiozole will work better and is cheaper but neither is always effective. If you've gotten it in your display tank you'll need either a big UV sterilizer or remove all your fish for 3 months. See my posts in these threads: http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/22901-desjardini-tangs-got-ich/?hl=sterilizer#entry165187 http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/20270-uv-sterilizer/?hl=sterilizer#entry142577 http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/19629-uv-sterilizer/?hl=sterilizer#entry138708

Here's an update. And for those wondering here's the water parameters form the last time I checked March 17th: PH 7.8 Alkalinity 6 dKH Calcium 360 mg/l Specific Gravity 1.027 Magnesium 1340 mg/l Phosphate (PO4) 1.0 mg/l Nitrate <.25 mg/l

Juviniles of the different Percula and Ocellaris varieties can be paired usualy without problems. Keeping different species together is not recommended. Short term it can be done as juviniles but as they mature problems are most likely to develop. Only experienced aquarists that are willing to commit to maintiaining them in large tanks for the 20 to 30 years they live should be attempting pairs or trios of different species together.

I would just toss the skimmer.