Wryknow

Great! Thanks for the nice photos!

Just make sure that he has lots of good hiding spaces and he should calm down with time. Is your LR fairly open (i.e. can he get in and out of it pretty easily from any point in the tank?)

Good lighting, water quality, and a little patience and your BTA should color up just fine. It's not a quick process, but BTAs seem pretty robust in good water conditions in my experience. Gabriel - What was the time-lapse on your before and after photos? That was certainly a stunning difference!

I'm planning on attending. I've got to check on my orphaned anemone after all.

My RBTA has split again and I have a beautiful, extra clone on my hands. This is one of the RBTAs varients that has the flourescent green around the base of the tentacles. It split about 4 weeks ago and is very healthy. I haven't been able to get a good photo yet but I'll try again tonight. I will sell it for $60 or I would be willing to trade for some nice, unusual zoanthids (PPEs, fire & ice, etc.) Regards, Jason Here's a photo of the parent:

SOLD

bump for new photos

Yeah, there's not a lot you can do when they start getting sick like that. You could try sticking him in a hospital tank if you have one (and can catch him) and perhaps dose some antibiotics but it seems like its usually too late to help by the time they are sick enough to catch in my experience. You might also try giving him some live brine shrimp to see if you can get him to eat. I hope he pulls through for you.

The easiest way to do it in my experience is to get yourself a couple of 32 gallon BRUTE trashcans from LOWES and a set of the BRUTE roller-wheels that attach to the bottoms. [The BRUTE trashcans are great because they are heavy duty, food safe LDPE 4 plastic (which is stretchy and almost impossible to shatter or tear) and you can fill them up with water with no ill effects.] I put my RO water in it, mix the salt, drop in a heater, and let it settle in the trashcan for 24 hours. The next day I just wheel it over the the tank, drain the water out into the empty can via a siphon and then pump the fresh water in with a mag 2 pump. I can do a 30 gallon water change in around 15 minutes this way on my tank. (It also helps to mark the inside of the trashcans with a sharpie in 5 gallon increments.)

Sold! Thanks for all of the interest.

MAG 24, powerful beast, runs great, $50. It's about two years old but has been gathering dust in may garage for about a year now. PM me if you're intetrested. Regards, Jason

For sale: Precision Marine Bullet 1 protein skimmer (sells for $320 new) Mag 12 pump (sells for $105 new) 6" PM waste collector (sells for $110 new) Comes complete with tubing and a 2" gate valve for the skimmer output. Everything is about 2 years old and runs great. This set-up is conservatively rated for 150 gallons but I have been using it on my 215 for over a year and it did the job quite well (until my bio-load built up to a more heavily stocked level, now I need something a bit larger.) All yours for just $280 OBO (This set-up sells new for $535 on Marine Depot.) PM if interested. Thanks! Jason

I plan on attending as well. Jason

Hmmm. Well, it could be some sort of disease. It could also have something to do with a Ph swing or salinity swing (at night for example,) or an ammonia spike that caused some toxicity. Clowns are pretty resistant to nitrates/nitrites but ammonia is a killer. It could also just have been stress (a combination of a lot of little things.) Some fish have a hard time acclimating to their new homes. My $.02 on feeding: I can't tell what size or quanitity of frozen brine shrimp you're feeding but the clowns need something a bit meatier long-term (brine shrimp are not terribly nutritious) and should be fed at least every day. I feed Spectrum sinking pellets myself and all of my fish eat them greedily. There's a lot of choices out there though for prepared foods. I try to stay away from flake food because of the high phosphates. Definitely look into an auto-top off unit too. That can cause a lot of salinity and Ph movement in a smaller tank.

Very nice!

OK, let's ask the really obvious: What/when/how much were you feeding them and were they eating well? Was there any type of markings or injuries on the fish corpses? (little white spots, gashes in the sides, etc) Jason

I would try a two-part epoxy since. It's kind of tacky so it should stick to the glass while it sets.

You can DIY with a dremmel tool and glass cutting bits. (You need two of them though - one to make a hole, and one to cut the circle.) the advantage of the standard over-flow versus the external overflow is that ther are fewer seems to potentially leak when the over-flow is in the tank. Jason

I think the trick with Berghia is to get the right number of them for your tank. If you add too many they all starve to death too quickly and can cause problems with contamination. If you have too few they won't keep up with the aptasia growth. You kind of need to have the right balance to where there's enough Berghia to keep the aptasia at a minimum from what I've read.

IMHO the majority phosphate "eliminators" are not that helpful. Their chemical make just does not allow them to absorb very much phosphate relative to the dosage. You really need the ferros-based phosphate reducers in order to adsorb a significant percentage of the phosphates. There are a couple of them on the market and they are all fairly expensive unfortunately (like $15 for a 150g container but they are good for 3 months for a 150 gallon tank so it's not that terrible really.) Phosban is the one I use but there are a couple of others with very similar composition that will most likely work just as well. The key to them is that have to move water through them pretty slowly - if the flow is too fast the particles will break down into dust and you don't want that to happen. (100-150 gph of flow is good.) You can buy a small Phosban branded reactor but a small canister filter works just as well and is great for carbon and mechanical filtration too so that seemed like a no-brainer to me. It will take a couple of weeks before you see the results but you'll be glad that you did it.

I would recommend doing a large water change (like 25-50%) or two with RO/DI water for starters. I would then also use some Phosban to help control the phosphates. I just run Phosban in an E-heim canister filter on my tank along with some activated carbon and filter pads and it makes a big difference in algae growth and general water quality. As long as your not over-feeding the tank it should start to clear up in a couple of weeks. are you skimming your tank? What kind of skimmer are you using?

Watch out though - this flu bug going around has been pretty nasty and you might be on your back for a couple of days yourself. I'd hate to be in the middle of moving a tank when it hit me. Hermits and snails will be OK with live rock, an air pump, and a heater for a couple of days or maybe even more though in my experience. Absolutely put some live rock in the bucket with them though. The rock will still be assisting in biological filtration.

Never use soap or oils as they will contaminate your tank. Go to HEB and get a gallon of distilled white vinegar ($1.49) and use that to soak whatever you need to clean up. I mix about 1:5 vinegar to water, disassemble the pump, and then give it an over night soak. All of the algae and crud brush right off after that (a tooth brush works great.) Then I rinse it off with a little RO water and put it back in the tank. Pumps should be leaned every six months or so I guess but this varies alot by individual preferences. If you're getting a lot of crud in your sump then you can always take it out and wash it I guess, but that seems like a lot of work to me. I have a live sand bed and algae in my sump so I just let the micro-fauna take care of clean up. Using a micron bag over your over-flow drains to catch debris would do the trick too I suppose.

You may need to supplement the iron a bit in order to get the chaeto to take off. (I use the Seachem myself but I haven't heard any evidence that there is much difference between any of them.) Also, how many watts of light are you using? I'm just using a GE 150w daylight DE MH ($6/bulb) on a shop light and mine grows like crazy.

W is a unit of power consumption, not light output. Just because something consumes more power doesn't mean that it necessarily creates as much useful light. Three big reasons I like the T5s are: their slender profile allows very efficient parabolic reflectors to reflect a greater percentage of light into the tank, the bulb temperature is much lower than the MH bulbs so they create a LOT less heat in the tank, and HO T5 bulbs can be over-driven by the ICECAP ballast to create about 50% more PAR per bulb (with a similar increase in power consumption.) I do not use the T5 actinics myself. When I bought my set up (about 1 year ago) the actinic bulbs available on the market were really pretty crummy - more like weak 14K bulbs than true actinics IMHO. That's why I use the 6' VHO bulbs for the actinic supplementation - it's more for appearances than PAR anyway. I have read some reports from other reefers that the new true actinic bulbs are much better than they used to be but I plan sticking with my VHOs for now.