Timfish

Cool! Most likely your right it is a cowry. Can you get a picture with it's mantle retracted? Some cowrys are not good tankmates.

I bet their agent could have held out for more! Looking good!

In my experiences scrubbing algae off rock has maybe a minimal risk of spreading. I like any of the short spined urchins available as well as the big lipped blennies that scrape rocks for food and sallylightfoot crabs work also

My tanks stay between 4.5 dKH and 12 dKH. Small changes like 7 - 8 may happen without bothering anything but larger changes usually will upset somebody.

Here I'm thinking how nice it would be if my cats would stick to a certain time instead of randomly waking me up in the middle of the night to be fed!

I've got two examples of corals adjusting to light schedules but I've never seen anything that would indicate a lunar cycle or seasonal adjustments. As far as I know though the only behavior in the wild that occurs with either a lunar or seasonal cycle is mass breeding which is still modified by solar cycles. One curious example I had of a coral following the sun was a bubble coral which received about an hour of direst sunlight right at sunrise would close at sunset irregardless of the time of year or at what time the 400 watt MH lights turned off even though the room it was situated in did not get any sunlight past about 1 o'clock. The other instance I have of corals adjusting to lighting schedules are the yellow stone polyps in my tank. I occasionally catch them breeding, see this post: http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/12279-polyp-porn/?hl=%2Bpolyp+%2Bporn and with one exception it's aout 3-4 hours before the lights turn on and if the lighting schedule is changed they adjust accordingly.

Like I said, "patience" Zebra eels are so cool! I got one a little over 3'. You could do something with aragonite but it would probably end up being pretty heavy. I don't know if you've ever worked with fiberglass before but that seems like the lightest way to go to make something big enough for your eel. Maybe spray foam mixed with gravel but this is just a guess.

(Kim didn't mention she has videos in the Video section on the home page and her build thread.) I've used acrylic rod form local plastics supply places, 1/2" CPVC and PEX (x-linked polyetheline) from home improvement stores and schedule 80 1/4" grey PVC you can get online. PEX is very flexable and cannot be glued like CPVC or PVC. The grey schd 80 is the most rigid and you can get grey 1/4" PVC from FlexPVC.com, one of our sponsers.

Home improvement stores usually carry street markers in the "signs" area that are a fiberglass rod with a round reflector on one end. The reflector is easy to cut off and the rod can be glued with epoxys (be sure to rough up the section being glued with sandpaper).

For your eel if you have a soft piece of limestone and are patient and careful you can use a hole saw and make pretty elaborate and surprising large holes. But be aware some limestone has large amount of quartz or calcite which is very hard and time consuming to drill.

Looking at the link Elizy posted I have seen it a few times. I get rid of it by syphoning it off weekly and after 2-3 months months it disappears on it's own. (Actually I run the water through a 7" 50 micron polyfilter sock set in a bucket and return most of the water to the tank.) I have not had a problem with so called "SPS" with it. I would worry you may have been to aggressive with your GFO and dropped the phosphates too low. While I have no problem with much higher phosphates than is typically reccomended by many "Gurus" and am pefectly happy with phosphate levels in the .1 to 1.0 ppm range I do advise people not to let phosphates drop below .05. Sprung reccomends discontinuing water changes, letting it run it's course and boosting alkalinity, "Algae, A Problem Solver Guide" pg 69.

Keep in mind not everything will be happy in your tank and it can, on occasion, take a long time for a new frag to acclimate to your tank before it starts to show good growth and expansion.

Sorry to read about your loss. For what it's worth my experience phosphates at your levels shouldn't have any adverse effects on your animals (personally I wouldn't bother to try lowering them). Every species you have listed I've seen happy with much higher levels. Like Ty said water changes and carbon are your friends.

Can you use a piece of 1/2 CPVC attached to a syphon hose and scrap them off with the end of the CPVC? I've scraped lots of zoas and palys off when they were encroaching on other corals with just a credit card and the only palys I've had problems with are the blue/green Texas trash version but if I can syphon off all that slime they produce so much the better even if it's a variety that's not toxic.

Gently touch the end of the stretched piece to see if you can feel if there's a skeleton. One of the asexual reproductive modes some corals use is to literally drop off pieces of themselves to float away and start new colonies.

It can be fairly easy, the cannon above with 4 LED stars I used epoxy to glue the stars and buckpucs to the heat sink instead of drilling holes and screwing the components to the heat sink. Once all the components are laid out assembly can probably be done in about 20 minutes. I need to try it out but epoxy putty probably would work just fine as well.

Getting a couple of other people who have done DIY fixtures and doing a meeting so people can see some of the options they have is an excellent idea!

What you'll need to do is get some PAR or lux readings and then find corals that will show decent color with your light field. In the case of your fixture you can assume that with two fixtures side by side the PAR or lux readings where the two overlap will be close to double of what the reading is with one fixture. This link here has some pdf files that might help you understand LEDs a little better: http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/23988-my-led-pdfs/?hl=cannon%C2'> Depending on the species and/or variant some corals will do OK under lower light levels than others and as you get to know your corals species better there are some fluorescing proteins that will only be expressed under lower light levels while others will only be expressed under high light levels. This picture of a bicolor birdsnest colony kinda gives you the idea of what some corals may show under varing light fields but keep in mind others species may not show much variation in color at all like Green Slimer which only goes from brown to green:

As an aside I also would point out that the terms "SPS", "LPS" and "softies" do not have any scientific basis, quoting Eric Borneman "Unfortunately there is no real correlation between polyp size, where corals are found on the reef, and how they should be maintained in captivity." Aquarium Corals, Selection, Husbandry and Natural History, pg 211

Here's a simpler cannon and PAR readings for it. It has a 1000ma buckpuc driving a CW and a NW 3 watt LED stars with 80 degree lens and a 700ma buckpuc driving a B and a RB watt LED stars with 80 degree lens. At about 14" from the fixture there is a cone about 8" diameter that has roughly 100 - 120 PAR. The buckpucs are hooked up to a 24VDC power supply but for running just two LEDs they only need a 12vdc 2 amp power supply (these are teh same used in the 60 watt cannon and can work with up to 32 VDC). Being open and just a total of about 14 watts and mounted to a heat sink designed for handling a lot more wattage fans are not needed.

Oooops! Sorry! http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/23988-my-led-pdfs/?hl=cannon

The 34 watt cannon is using meanwell drivers but buckpucs can be substituted and run off a 24VDC power supply to simplify wiring coming off the cannon

The buckpucs used in the cannons were not dimmable but there are dimmable versions available that use 0-10vdc for dimming control. Also, you do not have to use the 1000ma or 700ma buckpucs if intensity is an issue, lower amperage options are available. My guess is you could fit 5 of the buckpucs if you're good with the spacing giving you 5 channels if you wanted to get fancy. I've also played with putting the heatsink and electronics inside a glass lamp shade instead of PVC but the design and layout is much more critical to get good airflow.

http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/23988-my-led-pdfs/?hl=cannon

+1

In this thread, there are a couple of pdf files with instructions on building a LED cannons using a CPU heatsink. They are useing 3 watt LED stars but the buckpucs used will work for 1 watt LED stars also and one of the cannons had I think 9 stars on it.

I see that happen periodicly with a lot of stuff, for whatever reason my tricolor frogspawn exhibits a single polyp dieoff about once a year when the other varieties I have it happens only rarely and almost always have some event associated with it like mentioned above. You do want to keep an eye on it over the next few days. As pointed out the other polyps are quite happy and it should recover just fine but it is possible for a brown jelly infection to take hold and that is something you would want to treat by dipping right away. I would NOT dip it now as the other polyps are all doing well and dipping would only stress them out uncessessarily in my opinion.

I'll be there!

How do I get someone kicked out!!!! :-D

If the hermit is Dardanus megistos the reason they are safe with fish is they are slow and clumsy compared to fish. If any fish made the mistake of using scooting under one's shell to hide it wouldn't hesitate to grab and eat it. I've seen them with leg spans pushing 8" and if they aree not handled with respect they are capable of inflicting very painfull injuries on the person handling them.

Been using instant ocean since almost forever

Sounds like for some reason the end isn't inflating and expanding along with the rest of the colony. Is it getting stung by something?

Can't belive I'm offering advice on fixing a skimmer but pool supply places have a huge array of O-rings and gaskets