Gig 'em @ NDstructible

Good luck man! I always hate leaving town for extended periods of time. Most of the time I come back and there’s minimal loss, so I’m sure you’ll be just fine. Enjoy the break!

Well it seemed like my red dragon was on the mend, and as soon as I got back from Chicago it started RTNing. Did a water change, but that hasn’t changed anything apparently. Very random pattern of RTN too. 2018 has hibernation a frustrating year for my tank and acros [emoji58]

It was. It did a great job of killing off what was there, but I guess it didn’t completely eradicate it

My GHA has started to come back already. I left carbon offline for just shy of a month, but I guess that wasn’t long enough. I’ll likely be dosing again soon and starting the process over again. I have ulva in my tank and it’s not affected by Fluco at all, you could always use that as a form of nutrient export! [emoji23]

Don’t worry, that’s what we would do too when we did well rehabs and had tanks of waste water full of acid. A couple boxes of baking soda here and there and once it stopped bubbling I would call it good enough for government work [emoji38][emoji12] But I do the same thing with vinegar, once the dissolving power diminishes I replace the solution with a fresh vinegar water bath.

Leaving town is always a nail biter. Hopefully you have a friend in town that can periodically check in on things who knows what to look for. I appreciate the words of encouragement! I hope if I don’t change anything for a while everything will recover and get back to full health. Please God, no more issues🤞

My tank continues to not make up its mind wether it’s happy or struggling. I had some RTN this past week losing 90% of my SSC and nearly a whole large branch of my red dragon. I can’t really explain the SSC, but the red dragon RTN coincided with my CaRX flow stopping while I was out of state and my alk dropped below 6. The RTN has slowed and maybe stopped now that the CaRX flow has restarted. On the other hand, coral colors continue to slowly improve. They haven’t returned to optimal coloration, but a slow and steady improvement is better than none or reversal.

Haha right? Glad someone noticed...

Freaking miracle drug! I’ve shut tanks down in the past out of frustration with GHA. I’m always going to have some Fluco on hand now going forward

I’ve felt hopeful about my tank for the first time this week in a long long time. The GHA is mostly gone now thanks to the Fluco treatment, and what a difference that has made on the health of my corals! I performed a large water change this week and it seemed like the next days the colors of my corals was noticeably better. Sponge growth is definitely starting to come back, my feather dusters are starting to pop back up again, and I’m starting to see mysid shrimp in the sump again. I’m hopeful the recovery will continue and corals that have laid dormant for half a year will start growing again. Fingers crossed! New sponge growth peaking through the dead sponge. A couple FTS:

Like Jolt and Ty said, I bet you there are some in the display, just doing a good job of hiding. If you want to completely rid the tank, dose the entire system. I've had better luck over dosing according to the directions and then blasting the rocks with flow to get them into the water column to suck out.

In a cage, yes. I wouldn’t intentionally let one out to roam and create havoc!

For an iPhone, that’s pretty good! The clarity is so good I could distinguish a pest in your tank. It looks like you have some aiptasia on the left side of the tank in the middle of the rock work. I hear lasers can help, but power heads are just as effective.

True! Just hoping it continues to work and won’t be an issue for a while 🤞

I don’t want to be too optimistic and jinx myself, but it seems like things are starting to turn around for the better. The hair algae is getting more thin, hasn’t been growing back where it usually does, and may be disappearing slowly. My sponge might also be starting to recover too. You can tell the dead sponge that is more washed out and transparent and what might be new sponge growth that is more tan color in the shadows there. Hopefully that’s a sign that the tank ecosystem is returning to normal And here are a couple of tank shots just for the heck of it

I have one tuxedo urchin, but I’ve never seen it graze on GHA. ☹️ maybe it does and I just don’t notice it.

My yellow tang is useless. Sometimes it picks at ulva, but that’s about it. I’ll see if RCA has any turbo snails today.

I took carbon out and replaced it with GFO. I have two GFO canisters running now, so hopefully that’ll keep it in check!

How do you get CUC to eat the stuff? I’ve added all kinds of CUC staff and they seem to largely ignore the GHA.

So I’ve hit a rough patch with the tank ever since I left town for a few weeks on vacation in May and lost a bunch of corals. Still never was able to definitively nail down the cause, and honestly it doesn’t seem like the issue has been resolved yet... ~6 months later. I’m still having issues with some SPS. Growth seems to have slowed, colors have slowly been coming back, but I lost my two largest plating colonies and some very expensive “high end” acros. As a result of the weakened health of my corals and the subsequent coral deaths, I have now been struggling with a GHA outbreak. The stuff is everywhere in my tank now and I pulled out over two full pitchers worth of algae from my tank in October. On top of this, all of my sponge growth died back last month, I assume because GHA exploded and starved my sponges to death. Needless to say I have become discouraged with half a year of struggles and unsolved health mysteries. I couldn’t take the GHA any longer and thought maybe it was compounding my coral health issues by outcompeting them and smothering them. I bought Vibrant and dosed the entire bottle to no avail. Then last week I gave up on hoping Vibrant would work and dosed Fluco 200. The GHA is still there, but I’m starting to think it is at least stunted, if not starting to die. The pH in my tank took a sudden drop and, even with windows open last night, is lower than it has been. This tells me that some big CO2 scrubbers in the tank are taking a hit and microbial activity is starting to break the algae down and drive pH even lower. I assume (and hope) this trend will continue and is indeed indicative of dying GHA. Here’s a snap of my pH trends this week:

Yeah, it’s still around

Sorry, how many of those nems do you have to spare? [emoji23]

Man I wish I could get that much orange out of mine! I bought it from Dan & Meg at the last C4 a couple of years ago. They’re still in the hobby I believe, just not as active on the forums anymore.

So last night I noticed that there was some salt creep coming down from one of the return bulkheads of my tank. The bulkheads Marineland included with the tank are spigot style so I had hose clamped the return lines to them. I guess the wiggle of the manifold cracked the bulkhead and when I went to check the tubing this happened... I didn’t even pull that hard! I guess I’m lucky it happened while I had the return pump off, but it still made a mess and was not how I wanted to spend my Friday evening as I was winding down to relax with a drink. Two separate trips to HD and Lowe’s and I got it repaired with a new bulkhead, reducers, and unions to get it back up and running. I was a little shocked at how much detritus and junk had built up in my overflow. I had to completely drain it and dry it to get the new bulkhead in. Here’s the cup of gunk I drained out of the overflow I definitely never want to have a bottom drilled tank or deep overflows like this EVER again. Any future build will be drilled in the back utilizing solid bulkheads and plumbing. I should have bought my own bulkheads instead of using the cheap ones that Marineland provided with the tank. Hindsight is always 20/20... [emoji20]

Sounds like a plan to me!