Jump to content

BBMarlin

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    327

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    17

 Content Type 

Posts posted by BBMarlin

    My Sea Hare Inked Me

    in Reef Keeping

    Posted

    I thought my sea hare was toast last night so I started poking it with a pencil eraser to see if it would move. It proceeded to ink me with purple ink. I've got my reactor full of a fresh batch of carbon since this happened. Anyone ever had this happen before? Any harm to livestock?

    -brett

    Apex Incompetence

    in Reef Keeping

    Posted

    While I don't own an APEX I can address this part of your question:

    "2) More baffled by this one but... why didn't 7.5 additional hrs of lights (3 x 250watt metal halide and 4- 48" T-5 bulbs = total 966 watts) and a temperature rise of 3-4 degrees above normal didn't affect a single one of my corals... not a single one. They were all happy and fine, not a single sad looking specimen. Baffled. My fish were a little confused like they just pulled an all-nighter, but that's it!"

    Hopefully nothing bad will happen to your corals but I don't think you will see an immediate effect, if something is going to happen it might be a few days or a week and keep a special eye on your SPS as they are more sensitive to temperature swings. If you see one starting to recede be sure to frag and reposition the frag somewhere else in the tank away from the receding colony.

    My tank got hot 2 summers ago and I lost half of my tank due to a nasty RTN episode, I did frag and was able to save most of them. Once a coral starts to go it's my belief based on my anecdotal experience that they can take out adjacent colonies via some sort of chemical message.

    good luck!

    -brett

    High Calcium?

    in Reef Keeping

    Posted

    I think your API kit is probably accurate if you are following the instructions correctly. I use ELOS for calcium which I like a lot, bit more precise than API. Stay away from the Hanna Calcium checker.

    -brett

    Natural sunlight

    in Reef Keeping

    Posted

    Cool pics subsea.

    It's interesting when my LPS get direct sunlight through one of my windows (maybe 20 minutes a day this time of year). My acans and chalice get all excited and inflate/extend their tentacles, neat to see.

    My battle with GHA. A story of success.

    in Reef Keeping

    Posted

    Great news, since I battle the GHA as well. Few questions:

    You say be aggressive with GFO yet you state that you were using 1/2 recommended dose, changed every 2 weeks. I red on other forum that one guy was changing the GFO literally every day or every few days based on the phosphate reading. He was using full dose of GFO and it got saturated with phosphate in a matter of hours. I personally have been changing the recommended GFO dose every week with no good results so far.

    About the manually removing with hose, does it mean the hose was enough to pull the algae off the rock? I guess they must have been dead. Mine are attached so strong that I can only scrape them off with the use of a scalpel.

    At least there is a hope, I like the picture after the algae are gone. Beautiful tank.

    By aggressive I mean that you should start changing the GFO media more often than the recommended once / month. For me the half recommended dosage and bimonthly schedule worked out. A light just went off in my head one day that perhaps my GFO was becoming exhausted long before I would swap it.

    As far as the manually removal, what I liked about the smaller hose was that I could, with one hand, hold the hose and pinch off the GHA from the rocks and send it down to my bucket all while not syphoning a ton of water from my display. I would fill a 5G jug weekly with the stuff and call it good enough for that week. If I would not have manually removed what I could get my hand on in the tank I don't think I would be where I am at today, the GHA will not simply disappear on its own nor can a CUC deal with the amount that was growing in my tank.

    Try the manual removal route, do one side of your tank. Wait a week and see what grows back, if it’s all still growing back keep swapping your GFO and keep changing your water and keep removing it!

    Good luck.

    -brett

    My battle with GHA. A story of success.

    in Reef Keeping

    Posted

    First off, thank you all for your kind words on my tank. It's been a bit of a journey smile.png.

    I would be be hesitant myself to take the GFO offline. The biopellets in my experience really focus on removing the nitrates more than the phosphates, with nitrates being the limiting factor for bacteria growth. The GFO will remove the remainder of the phosphate once that nitrate limiting factor has been reached. So, in my experience, it's best to use them in tandem. Everytime I try to remove the GFO, bad things happen and the biopellets can't keep up with the phosphate production in my tank. But, each tank is different so you may not have that problem.

    I hear you on the GFO thing. I actually took it offline because my Valida started showing burnt tips. I haven't had an Alk spike so I'm wondering if maybe it is because of a nutrient imbalance in the tank. I'm not sure about this, but you can bet I'll keep an eye on everything.

    With respect to testing for PO4, I let the tank tell me when to replace phosphate resin. I seldom need phosphate removal resin. I use macro for nutriant export.

    I think I'll quote you on this one: "there is more than one way to do this job" grin.png

    Thanks for sharing! Have you ever tried a turf algae scrubber?

    I have not tried a turf scrubber.

    Another possible explanation for why the phosphate wasn't showing up on your test was that the amount of phosphate in your water was outside the range/capability of the test kit you were using. I saw this effectively demonstrated on a video on Dr. Tim's website. He shows how tests kits only work within a specific range and when a result is outside of that range it can actually read as a false "0"!!!

    Here's the video:

    I'll check out this video. I did compare my Hanna tests with API, which 0 and no color.

    -brett

    My battle with GHA. A story of success.

    in Reef Keeping

    Posted

    I thought I would share with everyone my battle and ultimate success against a nasty bout of GHA in my 76G Half Circle Oceanic. First, some pics: here is my tank in April and my tank yesterday (sorry for the crappy photos).

    4/7 FTS:

    Lxppt.jpg

    4/7 Left Side:

    16B7G.jpg

    4/7 Sand bed:

    3un6m.jpg

    9/3 FTS:

    TxSN6.jpg

    9/3 Left Side:

    KX9t0.jpg

    9/3 Middle:

    7KG8y.jpg

    9/3 Sand bed:

    clhNT.jpg

    Now, let’s talk about how I got where I am today. As any of you know that have dealt with a GHA issue, it’s very frustrating especially when you take care of your tank with good husbandry as I do. I do weekly water changes, I don’t feed a lot and I keep up with media changes (GFO/GAC), water chemistry etc. I am really on top of my tank, so to see my tank get overrun by nuisance algae was a real bummer.

    I moved into a new home back in early January, up until that point my tank was thriving at my old place for over 2 years. As part of the move I changed my substrate with some crushed aragonite that my buddy had left over from a tank downsize. We moved all rocks (trying to match as best we could the old formation), 50% of the water and probably replaced 70% of the substrate. We got the new tank set up and for about a month it all looked really great!

    Enter February and BLAM nastiness ensued. I think the new rock scape and “used” substrate had a ton of organic material trapped just waiting to be released into the water column, since the rocks were moved and rearranged this was causing new flow to hit parts of the rock that were hidden from flow before and I think that the substrate that I added was riddled with organics (even though we rinsed thoroughly). Both of these issues were adding loads of phosphate to my tank, but everything was testing at or near 0 according to Hanna. How can Hanna PPB PO4 tell me that I have almost 0 phosphates when my tank looks like a green hair monster? Well as I learned through this process if you’ve got an algae issue, your P04 will almost always test near 0 because the algae is eating it all up. So I really wonder if there is any point of testing for P04 anymore, shouldn’t you just let your tank tell you if there is a problem?

    Here is a timeline of things that I tried, what ultimately worked and what didn’t. You can see I’m heavy on SPS and removing the rocks and scrubbing them (I don’t think this would have worked anyway in my case) was not an option due to the large size of some of my colonies. We are looking at almost 7 months of trial and error, as everyone always says “nothing good happens quickly in a reef tank”, patience is key.

    2/1/2012 is when everything started going downhill.

    2/15/2012 Started upping the volume of my water changes (5G/week -> 20G/week)

    3/15/2012 Things keep getting worse

    3/20/2012 3 days lights out, magic bullet! NOPE. By the way, anyone that tells you that 3 days of lights out will not harm your coral do not believe them especially if you keep SPS. I lost 2 large colonies due to the 3 days lights out.

    4/11/2012 BioPellets added as a magic bullet! NOPE (even after 6 weeks)

    4/14/2012 Started dosing Dr. Tims waste away another magic bullet! NOPE

    4/30/2012 Upped MG to 2K using Kent Marine Tech M. Maybe I have bryopsis? NOPE

    5/1/2012 Added aggressive CUC

    5/15/2012 Still no relief, time to change things up. Started manual removal of the algae using ¼” syphon hose. This works wonders if you can’t remove your rocks.

    6/1/2012 Started swapping GFO (non-primo version BRS) at a rate of every 2 weeks ½ recommended dosage from BRS.

    7/1/2012 The algae that I am removing is not growing back in a week, great news. Progress!

    7/27/2012 More CUC added. Things are looking better, I’m making progress now and this is the appropriate time to get a decent CUC going (sea hare, lots of crabs)

    Lessons learned:

    If you have a nasty algae problem as I did, you must first get it under control. And by under control I mean that anything that you can manually remove does not grow back in 1 week. How do you get it under control? In most cases you are going to have some sort of phosphate problem to trigger an outbreak such as mine, be aggressive with the GFO and water changes. I saw the biggest improvement when I started swapping my GFO ever 2 weeks and manually removing the algae using the ¼” hose. It was a pain and about tripled my maintenance time that I spent each week, however I started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel once I began this regimen.

    Once you are making progress, this is the time to start thinking about adding a CUC, a CUC will do you no good if your algae problem is out of control. The crew simply cannot keep up. I’ve had the best luck with crabs, I’ve got some snails but the little blue leg guys and emeralds really have made the biggest impact in my tank. Jabba the Hutt (Sea Hare), also was a nice addition to help me clean up my rocks, he’s about finished his job and will be heading back to the Dome soon.

    You can probably tell from the photos that I still do have a little bit of GHA growing in my tank, which I am OK with. The crabs keep it trimmed and it gives the pods somewhere to hang in my display as I do not have a refugium.

    What am I doing now:

    As of last week I’ve taken my GFO offline in hopes that my biopellets will be the only media that I will have to deal with (GAC as needed). Only time will tell if the biopellets will also keep my PO4 in check, based on my reading this should be the case. We will see.

    Sorry for the long post, this turned out to be somewhat cathartic for me. I hope that my experience will ultimately help someone else that is considering giving up due to the green hair monster.

    -brett

×
×
  • Create New...