Timfish

Sometime last year there was a thread about BTA's and how often they split and it was observed some clone lines seem to stay smaller and split more often so maybe your right!

Good question! I learned a long time ago to be very cautious about saying something can't happen. BTA's can split into three and once I have seen a big difference in size between clones if that helps any.

For some reason when I save the post some blank spaces are being added to the link. If you do a cut and past in a search bar you should be able to link to them. I'm looking into what I need to do to prevent this.

Actually there's a huge amopunt of research that's being done on this subject. The dozen or so articles Dana Riddle has done on fluorescing and chromo proteins and published on AdvancedAquarist.com over the years and the excellent reference lists he includes there are are an excellent place to start. Here are several others I've stumbled across: http://www.deepseanews.com/2010/09/color-me-stressed Increased fluorescence associated with bleaching www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20952612 Green fluorescent protein regulation during photoacclimation www.nature.com/srep/2013/130312/srep01421/full/srep01421.html Effects of cold stress and heat stress on coral fluorescence on reef-building corals

I would add I prefer to get my corals locally from systems I know the history of for several years. Best way to match the lighting, flow and water parameters.

If his ambient CO2 is too high (house is too well sealed), more gas exchange is not necessarily a good thing. My understanding is it's much harder to get CO2 out of the water than to get O2 into the water so additional gas exchange should help even if the CO2 level inside is higher than outside. CO2 and O2 also are not mutally exclusive and both might be high. I would try what Planedon suggested first, if there's no difference in pH then additional aeration is probably not going to help much but it won't hurt either. If the pH goes up outside additional surface agitaion would be what I would try next.

If it was doing well for a couple of months that would tell me it was happy with the flow and lighting where it was at. I would focus on a water quality issue and run GAC and do water changes as well as monitor the pH, alk and calcium. Now that it's been moved and it dies did it die because it didn't adjust to the new flow, the new light or whatever was wrong with it after it was doing well?

Here's a link that describes the life cycle: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fa164 I am definitely in the camp in favor of UV sterilizers. There are certainly different strains with differing degrees of virulence and I have seen ich spontaineuosly disappear (in a well stock reef system corals will be actively capturing the larva) so the medicated foods or garlic might work. Regarding the argument UV's kill beneficial organisms while I am certain this does happen most of the critical beneficial organisms are attached to the substrate and will not be affected. It is interesting to note that Feldman looked at how a UV sterilizer affected the microbial population on ONE tank and found it did not alter the microbial population while skimming had a significant effect1 He did not specify the wattage of the sterilizer, flow rate or how it was hooked up. I know of a couple of multitank setups with ich where a sterilzer did keep one tank clean while the other(s) had a parasite problem. Here's is a what one member noted when he had an outbreak: "Another member and I both had an ich outbreak about 2 months ago, I had UV and he didn't. Both outbreaks were caused by stress in the tank, in his case some fish were fighting...in mine I had added some new fish. I had 100% success and the other member lost several very nice fish...clown trigger, blue face angelfish, and a I believe the other was a tang. Both of us were feeding garlic and vitamins, it was the UV that made all the difference."2 The major problem I've seen with UV sterilizors is they are often set up so they have an insufficiant kill rate to take care of ich and this is usually because they've been set up with too high a flow rate through the sterilizer to give the larval enough UV to kill them in a single pass or set up where there are multiple routes the water takes so only a percentage of the water cycled through the tank never goes through the sterilizer leaving ich larval alive. If you use a UV find out from the manufacturer what the flow rate is to get a "single pass 100% kill" and use a turnover rate of one turnover every 1-4 hours with a small pump to pump straight from the main tank to the UV then back to the main tank. I prefer to have a pump in the tank is that's where the larval are hatching out and I've had better performance than putting a UV on the return line although that will work. If all you are adding to your tank is a clown then you might try metronidiazole or Kick-Ich. If yo are adding a lot more fish I would strongly urge you to get a sterilizer. An Ultalife sterilizer and maxijet pump will cost about $180. A 120 gallon tank could easily have fish many times that and it seems to me cheap insurance if setup properly. While I have Lifeguard QL series UVs and like them I've had two of their rectangular Aquastep and both leaked. 1 http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2011/3/aafeature 2 http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/16585-uv-sterilizer-help/?hl=sterilizer#entry115845

Here's a good paper on it's lifecycle: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fa164

Like above if you're corals ook good it's something that does not need to be fixed today or tomorrow and a gradual aproach is best. As well, you want to verify your test kit and source for the phosphate. A point I would like to make here is while phosphates and nitrates can certainly cause algae problems it is not a given. It is an association and not a direct correlation. I have been very surprised to see acros, montis and other corals quite happy with phosphate levels much higher than what you have. Conversely I have seen nuscence algae problems in tanks that have acceptable levels of nitrate and phosphate so the picture is much more complicated that a simple direct correlation would suggest. If you have high phophates it certainly does need to be rectified but I would let the corals apperance and behaviour dictate how aggressive I was with my treatment.

Thank You! Like Grog I stopped testing for nitrates because for several years with multiple tanks and consistant maintenace using API's test kit my nitrates always was undetectable so it would have certainly been less than 5 ppm. The few times I've checked since I stopped testing regularly it's still been undetectable with APIs test kit. I would consider monitoring pH, Alk and calcium far more critical and would not put much emphasis on nitrate. As far as reccommending something I'll go with Delbeeck and Sprungs suggestion and point out they do not put much emphasis on exact numbers.

Hey Patrick, that's an interesting fact. Could you find some scientific documents supporting the statement? I'd love to read up on it. Here's one: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/986496?uid=3739656&uid=2133&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102053270343 Like I said ealier I do not test for nitrates but a common reason I have suspect people so often are advised to keep nitrates low is typically with measurable ammounts, as in 20, 40 or higher ppm or mg/l, is indicative of an aquarist that is not doing thier maintenace(but not necessarilly so). Corals and fish can tolerate surprisingly high levels of nitrates. One down side though is high nitrates can cause accelerated coral growth making for a weaker skeleton1 While Delbeek and Sprung point out the DISSOLVED nitrate (NO3-N) levels of natural seawater off Waikiki Aquarium measure 8 ppb (.008 mg/l) they reccomend for reef aquaria nitrate levels should be less than 1 ppm nitrate-nitrogen "ideally but need not be maintained so low"1. Keep in mind if you are using a test kit that is measuring nitrate ion and not nitrate-nitrogen your reading is about 4.4x higher. Phosphates and nitrogen (as ammonium and/or nitrites and/or nitrates) is essential and are limiting nutrients for plants and algae which includes the symbiotic dinoflagellates corals use. Too low and the plant or algae dies. This may not neccesarily kill the coral as they are capable of living without their symbionts. The mistake should not be made that reef systems in the wild are low nutrient systems, here's an interesting quote by Charles Delbeek "When I see the colors of some of these low nutrient tanks I can't help but be reminded of bleached coral reefs . . . Our crystal clear aquaria do not come close to the nutrient loads that swirl around natural reefs"2. This was echoed by Dr. Gerald Heslinga, ipsf.com, in a conversation with Subsea I overheard at NextWave 2011 in Dallas. 1 Delbeek and Sprung "The Reef Aquarium" Vol III pg 175 & 176 2 Coral Nov/Dec 2010 pg 127

I FEEL SO BETRAYED!

Well, since I never test for nitrate I can't add much to this discussion except that we should be looking at ppb not ppm when considering levels too low. And this is probabIy going off topic even more but I would point out brown is a healthy color for corals indicating a good simbiotic dinoflagellate population. Another intersting point to consider is some corals are using simbiotic cyanobacteria fo fix nitrogen gas as nitrates for their simbiotic diniflagellates

I've been maintaining reef systems with tap, RO and RO/DI and haven't noticed a difference but most of my tanks I use RO. I also don't mix salt until immediately before a water change just using my hand to quickly stir it in. Typically I usually do about a 5% - 10%. One system that gets tap also gets about 15 gallons first to replace evaporation then a 10% water change and even in winter the temperature of tap water is no low enough to cause the tank tekperature to drop to low. I always use buckets and prefer to mix up salt in 3 gallon buckets however I have quite a mix of 5 and 6 gallon buckets I use. As far as temperature I only worry about that in the winter with my tanks I use RO as the barrels are in unheated areas. Even doing a 20% water change if the new water is 10 degress colder than the tank water it will only drop the tank temp about 2 degrees. If the aquarium is at 78 - 82 a couple of degrees is not enough to bother the corals in my experience.

Last time I made a suggestion on moving a tank I ended up moving a 750 gallon tank so I'm not saying anything! (Actually for that size tank what they said.)

You might try finding out what LEDs or spectrum the Kessil has and compare it to your current lighting. My suspicion is your lighting has less blue but that's just a guess.

Three 4' BML fixutres with an Apex controller. The four foots are going to throw a lot of light off to the side so that's what I would use on a 5' tank but BML makes a 5' fixture also. Another consideration is to use 2' fixtures going front to back like Mike Frames setup or diagonally like Photodude's setup here: http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/27146-my-new-bml-led-lighting/

And why should I argue?! Here's a video so you can get an idea of the distrortion you'll see, it's going to be pretty much the same wether you go with glass or acrylic:

Inderect should not be a problem. How much algae you get on the glass is going to depend on the duration and intensity. The issues with direct sunlight is with small tanks it "might" contibute to heat problems and it "might" be to too intense a light source for some corals.

Seems to me the two joints would be a lot less obvious than on a rectangular glass tank. Personally I would try to get the sides and build it in place. Seems like that would be much easier and cheaper than shipping and trying to move it onto the stand. The bottom should be pretty easy to do with wedge shaped trapizoidal pieces, if there's two or three layers with the joints overlapped that would be pretty srtong and more resiliant than a single layer with butt joints. I think it would look better with some kind of wood trim around the top but it would not take much to hide the ross bracing. A lip would also greatly reduce the spalshing and drips that occur on rimless tanks.

Well obviously we need to build one to see just what needs to be done to propogate a wave all the way around it!

It's possible to do something close to this size out of glass. Aquavim.com does half cylinders with a diameter of 72" and full cylinders with a diameter of 32". Combining the two you would get a torus with about 19" or 20" between the inside and outside walls. You would have two joints on the outside walls but the glass would be a lot eaiser to clean.

I know PIJAC was very active when the collection of Yellow Tangs in Hawaii was being threatened. Their website is a good place to keep up with pending legislation at the federal, state and local levels that affect those of us keeping pets of any kind.

Great minds think alike! I've wanted to do something like that on a larger scale for sharks. In theory since you have two circles the stress should be evenly spread so bracing isn't needed per say. Do yo have a room big enough for it? That's a tank that almost needs a room specifically designed around it.