Derry

Hey, if my screw-ups can help someone else not to make the same mistake, I'm all for it! Glad to hear that it helped you out.

You mean Randy's article that I linked to in my last post? Can you tell I'm feeling punchy after staying up until 2:30 babysitting the tank?

Well, by the grace of God, I seem to have dodged the bullet on this one. By 11pm, the sulfur smell had dissipated dramatically. I moved the K4s up closer to the surface to increase agitation there, and I kept the skimmer going full bore. I put two cups of new carbon in the media reactor, I added another two or three cups to the skimmer chamber in a bag, and I already had two cups of GFO running in another reactor. I did a 15% water change once the new water temp matched the tank temp, and I'll do another 15% this evening just to be safe. Lessons learned: If there's a problem with a closed loop, find a way to keep it limping along until the full fix can be put in so that you don't end up with stagnant water in the pipes. (I don't know why it never occurred to me to simply reinstall the super squirt - at least it was still moving water!) According to Randy Holmes-Farley, aeration, carbon and GFO all help remove hydrogen sulfide from the water (good call, Z), so it's good to have an emergency stash of carbon and GFO on hand. If at all possible, have a batch of new SW mixed and ready to go. If that's not practical, at least have a plan for how to get some mixed up in a hurry (which was the route I had to take).

And, yeah, I meant hydrogen sulfide, not sulfur dioxide.

My closed loop went down about a month ago when the motor on my OM Super Squirt burned out. I just got the replacement motor today, installed it and restarted the CL. You could IMMEDIATELY smell the sulfur from the water that had stagnated in the pipes while the CL was shut down. I just did a full changeout of my carbon, and I've got good aeration from the overflow, skimmer and surface agitating K4s. What else can I do to prevent a full carpet-bombing of my tank from the sulfur dioxide?

+1 They're pretty, but they're EXTREMELY territorial. By the time I got rid of mine, the biggest of the four would keep the other three pinned down among the live rock, strafing anybody who dared stick his nose out far enough to be seen. I made a deliberate point of NOT putting them in my main DT.

Mitchell, I don't have any pics of my rock anemones, but here area couple from marc levenson of the rock anemones he brought back from a Port A trip with MAAST a couple of years ago. Mine have more blue and red in them than these pictured.

PS - Everything was caught on the jetties using a hand net. The shrimp were caught at night on the big jetty at Port A using flashlights to pick up their eye shine. The various fish and crabs were collected from both the big jetty one night and from a smaller jetty in the state park the next day. I just worked the pools along the sides of the small jetty. BTW, you can find rock anemones in surprising colors deep in between the rocks on the big jetty in Port A. I've got two - the oral disc on the smaller one is about 1", and the bigger is about 2". They prefer things a little darker, so they've made nice accents in the shadows. They've got a MUCH stronger sting/sticky factor than my BTA, but they've not created an problems. I've even got a mandarin in there, and no issues. We found that the trick to collecting these guys is to find the ones that are attached to smaller rocks that you can remove, rock and all. Trying to coax them off of the huge granite boulders didn't work very well. Once you've got them home, take the rock out of the water and repeatedly tap the rock with a hammer near the anemone. Something about the vibrations makes the 'nem let go on its own, so you don't have to worry about tearing the foot. They'll then quickly reattach to whatever new rock you offer. I'd love to hear of someone trying the hammer trick on one of the jetty boulders to see if it works in the field.

The peppermint shrimp have slowly whittled down to about half the original number, but I think that's from internal population balancing (ie, killing each other off ; ) more than anything else. I've almost always got at least one pregnant pep in the tank at any given point in time, so the remaining shrimp must be fairly happy. I also brought back three hermit crabs and five juvie sergeant majors from that trip. They lived in my smaller tank for four months, and the fish each almost doubled in size before I cleared them out to make room for seahorses. I took care to acclimate everything well on arrival, but I also brought back a bunch of pretty bullet-proof critters, so take all that into consideration as well.

I brought back about a dozen last summer using a battery-powered pump and airstone in an empty salt bucket. I drilled a hole in the lid of the bucket for the air tubing to minimize the slosh factor. Everything went through a night in the hotel room and two water changes at the beach before driving back to Cedar Park the next afternoon with no losses.

Conspiracy theorists are everywhere...

The last two editions of Advanced Aquarist online have articles on what skimmate is made of and how much DOCs can even be removed by a skimmer.

That's a little TOO commensal for my comfort!

My understanding was a captive lifespan of 5-6 years, easy.

So I take a look at my tank this morning to see one of my green chromis dead and pinned to the side of a K4. No warning whatsoever. All params are within the normal levels, and I've not made any recent changes to the tank. The chromis is one of the original fish in the tank and has been there for almost 3 yrs. It has been eating well and has shown no unusual behavior. Body mass looked good for a slender fish like a chromis. No gill inflammation, no lesions, no bite marks, no torn tissue or missing scales (although spending the night stuck to the k4 roughed up one side, but no major damage was visible). The only thing I saw that was out of the ordinary was a small chunk missing from the gill cover on one side, but the gill underneath looked undamaged. This was my first fish loss in over a year. It's bad enough when someone goes carpet-surfing, or if you find out about a hitchhiker crab when fish start disappearing. At least you know the cause then. I have NO idea why this little guy went belly up, and that always fires up the paranoia machine.

If yours went bungie jumping, a while back I had one go skydiving off a rock about 8" off the bottom. It stood itself up and acted like nuthin' happened. Apparently, it didn't like the strength of the new currents went I added a couple of koralias.

If visiting cyrus is too far a drive, I need to thin the Caulerpa prolifera in my seahorse tank and can get you a decent handful.

If you need a plan b for the big rock, I'm interested.

Pm sent re the steel blue/purple slate zoas

Mine did the same thing when it came in as a 2" frag. Give it another week or two, and those bumps will turn into nubby spikes.

Any time btwn 2 and 4 on Sunday is fine. Still got my phone #?

The prolifera is on me. Come on over.