PeeperKeeper

Whatcha got in the box? Dottyback? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I'm an eye doctor. I keep peeples peepers peepin'. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I don't think it's bad enough to need a specialist urchin. I think I'm "nipping it in the bud" but I want to make sure I have adequate numbers of CUC.

I know this is sort of an old tired subject, "How many crabs/snails per gallon....." but I did a search here and didn't see anything so thought I'd post the question. I should know this by now for as long as I've been doing this, but I wanted y'all's opinion. I have a well established 75 gallon (over 10 years old) that I moved at the beginning of August. Before moving it was doing well except for a bubble algae problem. I've been steadily adding emerald crabs so that there should be at least 6 or 7 in there but I have a feeling some didn't survive the move so there may just be 2 or 3. Just in the past week or two, I've noticed some hair algae getting started, and the rocks just generally look "dusty". I have a fuge but probably need to change the bulb on it to get more macro growth. Nothing ever shows up on n'ites nor n'ates but I haven't done a phosphates test in ages. I have no idea how many snails and crabs there are at this point. There may be as few as 4 or 5 of each. I haven't put any in since the move. So let's just say I'm starting from scratch. What would you add? I know the way to control HA is to cut back on feeding and maybe do a few days of darkness then let the CUC take over. The fish inhabitants are: a big fat green Mandarin (who eats frozen. I've had him close to 2 years) a two spot hogfish, a mystery wrasse, a purple fire fish, a bar goby and two PJ cardinals. I've been feeding a frozen cube every other day so I'm going to cut back to just twice a week until the HA is gone.

Congrats! Probably one of the less expensive things to break on an AC unit. For the sake of anyone reading this who's in the same boat, I recently had a reminder of how well plain ol' evaporation works to cool a tank. In the new location, my tank is completely enclosed in a cabinet and was getting a little warm in the afternoons. I put a fan inside the cabinet, but just down next to the tank and without an actual vent it wasn't doing much. Then I mounted the same fan at the top where it was blowing across the surface of the water. The temp immediately dropped a good 6-8 degrees! Downside is that I have to fill my top-off almost twice as often, but oh well. Now we're running around 75 instead of 80-82 at times. The first day I had just plugged the fan into an outlet and it stayed on overnight after the lights went off and the tank went down to 73 by the next morning. Now I keep it plugged into the same timer as the MH's so the temp doesn't swing so much.

Really? Shrooms and zoas aren't softies? I thought anything (i.e. any corals) without a calcified skeleton was a soft coral. On your question, I concur with those who said no need to feed the corals if you're feeding fish, but adding iodine and some other replacement minerals won't hurt in moderation. Then again, if you do regular water changes, that may be all you need for that as well.

Sending PM regarding trading for some nuclear green CC's.

I had a little frag of this that was sold to me at Aquatek as Meridiona (I think, something like that) but I had already figured out it wasn't that. Unfortunately my little frag that was on a plug got misplaced in my tank. I guess it fell down into the rocks. I was wondering if I might find it alive when I go to move my tank in a few months or if it will have died from lack of light by then.

Thanks for the link. I'll keep that one. I definitely don't think it's the cotton candy. Dinoflagellates or maybe even a variant of cyano seems more like it. I did have a cyano problem not too long ago and thought I had it kicked after a weekend of darkness and reducing my feeding.

It started building up just on this one candy cane about a week ago. I have other candy canes, but they don't have it. At first I thought this one had just snagged some frozen mysis when it was polyped out at feeding time, but it doesn't go away and it's been getting bigger. Again, it's only on that one coral, except there's another little glob of it below that coral on a rock that I think just broke off and got hung up. I'm gonna get it out because it can't be a good thing, but I was just curious if anyone knows what it is.

Funny you made this post today because just this morning (or maybe over the weekend) my redfin wrasse went through the overflow and into my sump. Funny thing is that I immediately knew something was up because although he's new to the tank (got him and a flame hawk at the same time about 3-4 weeks ago so Derek your post got my attention) he is almost always out front, so I checked behind the tank to see if he went "carpet surfing" and didn't see him. A little while later, one of my patients who is interested in salt tanks was looking at my sump and noticed him in there. I still haven't caught him. I think I'm gonna have to take the protein skimmer out to get him, so he's just hanging out for now. I might try using a soda bottle trap before I go to the trouble of taking out the skimmer. What a pain! But I've had the tank for over 10 years and rarely if ever had any jumpers, even though the hood I had until last September was wide open in back. My new hood has two openings about 2"-3" wide where the pipes exit. I have a regular Mandarin who's been in there at least a year and a half, a flame angel (bout a year), two PJ Cards (probably 8 years) and new to the tank are the flame hawk, redfin wrasse and Diamond spotted Goby.

I still haven't seen him since I let him loose Wednesday. I hope he's still okay. If he's a goner, I'm gonna have to blame the Flame Hawk and his lease may be up soon. First thing the hawk did when I got him a week ago was to kill my firefish who had been there for 5 years!

I just got him today, so I know I should just be patient, but does anyone have one that "nests" back behind all the rocks or do they almost always find a spot out front to tend? When I let him loose, he sat on a rock for a few minutes, then hid behind the rocks. I know he's doing something back there because the sand is all stirred up so the water looks cloudy, but I haven't seen him since he ducked behind the rocks. There is the slight possibility that the sand is stirred up because he and my new Flame Hawk are fighting back there, but I doubt it because I have been seeing the hawk off and on. I've been wanting a sand sifting goby for a while to keep the detritus and cyano from accumulating on the sand in front. I'm just hoping he's not going to decide to just tend the sand behind the rocks so I won't ever see him.

I think this says it all. Subsea's beautiful tank aside, most of us end up having more problems in the long run if we don't use RO/DI. Even if you go to the trouble of obtaining a water quality report on your source, who's to say the water will be the same each time you use it? I do trust the public water supply for my own consumption and that of my family. I think it's silly that so many people insist on buying bottled drinking water or doing the heavy filtration for regular drinking water. I will buy it for the convenience of being able to grab a bottle of water and go, but at home or restaurants I just drink tap. That being said, I don't trust it for my tank for the reason Liz stated above. The organisms are far more sensitive with their little delicate bodies than I am to small impurities and the system is contained so what may be a small amount of something going in can concentrate to higher levels as you keep adding it. Also, the problems people tend to have from water quality are sometimes slow to evolve and hard to determine the cause of. Bad stuff soaks into the rock, then slowly leeches out of it for a long time after you start using RO/DI.

I've never heard of a mushroom eating a fish. Do you have a link to the post? I've got a lot of fuzzy mushrooms in my tank (as you saw when you came by the office) and never thought they were in any way dangerous for fish, but I don't have clowns.

I've read in several posts here that Prof is a good source for low priced live rock and dry rock. I haven't looked at his rock myself, but I know he's a good guy.

I might have to have some of those Hawaiian zoas. PMing.

Actually, now that you say that, Dave I think that was the idea. It's been so long ago, I don't remember exactly, but it seems like someone told me a specific amount of time to wait between treatments. Like I said, it's been years and I haven't seen a FW since.

I had to use the flatworm exit several years ago, and my experience was similar to yours as far as how amazingly quickly it worked. However, I think I did have to repeat the treatment a while later. I didn't have as many delicate corals at the time as you do, so I didn't have any die off, but I do remember my GSP was mad for a long time. It wasn't nearly as bad with the second treatment. I agree with the others as far as just keep skimming, filtering with carbon and changing water til you come out the other side. Good luck!

If you still have the Monti's, I may have to take them off your hands (or off your frag rack). Not sure if I want the red or the undata. sending PM. edit: Oops, just saw you had already sold the red one. I may still come by to look at the undata.

I'll take a dozen glazed. You can deliver them to my office at Parmer and Mopac...

I would put the corals in bags like they are normally shipped to the LFS in, and pack them in the bags in a styrofoam ice chest. Aren't they usually in the bags for 24 hours when they are shipped? I think I've heard that they sometimes supersaturate those bags with oxygen, but I don't think that's always the case. I could be wrong about the oxygen thing. Would that affect the pH?

Watchman gobies can get kinda big IMHO for a nano, and I think the chromis are a type of damsel and subject to the same aggression issues mentioned above. I love the little Clown Gobies though, and Percs are so cute. Have you thought about a firefish? Of the 6 fish in my tank, the firefish is the only one who is always out front instead of hiding, and he always stays in the same spot so he doesn't seem to need much room. If I had a nano, I would make most of the coral in it zoas. I'd get all different colors: pink, blue, green, orange, etc. Good luck! It'll be fun stocking your tank, but make sure you're patient and don't introduce more than one or at the most two new organisms at a time so your bacterial bed can keep up.

Chris, is the 2 part from BRS a better deal than the one they refill at Aquatek for (I think) $3.99? I believe the brand is DT's.

Oh, and GSP might not be a bad idea. It is generally tough as far as surviving, but it can also act as kind of a canary in the mine because it will tend to close up if something isn't right. With a small tank, the challenge is that things change much faster. Concentrations of different chemicals can spike suddenly because there's not much water to dilute them. I mean think about a fish pooping in a thimble versus a the same fish pooping in a swimming pool. Also the temperature can change quickly because of the low volume, same is true of pH, calcium, etc. So if you notice one of your corals refusing to open or anything looking different, that would be a signal to check everything right away. Back on the small vs large tank conversation, the smaller tank can be more expensive in the long run because when you lose an inhabitant, whether it's a coral or fish, snail, etc. it can crash the whole thing because one dead organism can muck up all the water. So then you find yourself replacing everything in it, whereas on a larger tank it wouldn't have been an issue. So try to hold back on adding any more living things for a while, whether it's a fish, a snail or a coral. I know it's hard, especially in the beginning when you just can't wait to have all these cool things in the tank, but you have to go really really slow with that size tank. Each time you add something new, your itty bitty bacterial bed has to grow to meet the new demand of that organism.