caferacermike

By naming the store you purchased from and saying, I wish they had seen this, implies your blame. You may not see it that way but some of us reading your post might read it that way. Your post jumps to conclusion that this snail most likely is the problem and thus the problem came from the Dome. Again you may not see it that way since you wrote the post, however once read by others the pointy finger can be seen, I saw it that way. So if you feel it really was as sanitized as you claim, you wouldn't have named anyone as the source and you wouldn't have "wished" anything. Where I work we have a saying, "Wish in one hand, **it in the other and see which fills first".

Well sure it looks like one.... But then again it looks like a hundred other types of snails.

Tell me it's not this Caribbean Nerite smail

Is it a small Trochus that has not grown out a tall spiral,

And then with like so many other things in this hobby, it might be time to back off from the fine folks at the Dome and stop pointing the finger. As a consumer you share at least 50% of the blame. I don't care if you say "well I'm new to the hobby", that's not an excuse. I can remember way back when..... I just finished paying off our truck and was waiting to make a left hand turn a block from the house when I was suddenly rear ended at 50mph. I get out and it's 2 16 year old girls. Behind them was her Dad. He got out and told me to chill, she was driving home with her friend from the DMV where she just got her license. She told him they were "jamming out to a song and didn't see me or my turn signal". Dad told me to "chalk it up to inexperience"...... WTF!!?? Seriously? So I'm supposed to just take it because of someone's lack of experience? So what am I on about? It is up to you to make sure every purchase will work in your tnak. Mistakes do happen and with so many creatures looking alike it can be very difficult to ID 100% hence all the threads on this forum asking "Please ID this thingy for me"..

Also back up a minute and stop blaming the store.... There is a very good chance that the small snail came in on your initial rock work, known as a "hitchhiker" Please search previous threads and/or use your GoogleFu skills to read up on this everyday occurrence. It may have even been stashed away in the zoa rock and YOU failed to see it and properly dispose of it before placing it in your tnak. Also known as "quarantining" What is quarantining my new hobbyist with the lack of experience, it's this process of holding new corals and fish in another smaller tnak so that if there is a problem it can be identified before placing the new specimen within the display tnak where it can wreak untold havoc on the entire system.

What you say, and I'm still not finished. Back up yet again from blaming the store.... You say the zoa slimed over completely within a short period and then died off. Zoas do that. Google it, search function it. All kinds of corals will slime up, turn white before dying, and then be seen covered in snails or hermits. They are eating the detritus just as a good clean up crew should. Am I saying out loud that there is a possibility that for some unknown reason your water did not match the ideal conditions for that particular coral and it just up and died? What? In this hobby? Of course I am. I've spent countless dollars over the years watching a new specimen melt away shortly after placing the coral in the tnak.

So keep in mind that the Dome is actually your friend, however if you come online and hint around that they dealt you a wrong blow, they may not care to help you in the future. Hunter, Gary and Terry have been in the hobby for a combined total of about 940 years, give or take, and are really great people. If a mistake was made, take it up with them, not here on the forum. If they dealt you a wrong blow by telling you off in the store, scammed you at the register etc, then by all means call a shop out, however there are way to many variables in the hobby to go around trying to lay blame online for a purchase YOU made and failed to quarantine. Can you tell, from a picture, the difference between the snails I posted and the snail you posted? Probably not. Do Doctors sometime see similar symptoms and occasionally misdiagnose something? To be 100% sure all the time is not human, as the saying goes "to err is human".

I'm not just sticking up for the Dome, I'd do that for any shop you called out as you did in this post. This would not be the fault of any shop. The real issue here is simple "Is this a Sundial Snail? Did this snail eat my new zoas? If this is a Sundial Snail, what should I do now?"

It's fugly as hell but it's mine.

I'm looking at building a couple of items and I'm looking for some of the canisters that you add on (or come built in) for the prefilters or for DI canisters. I'm also looking for a couple of the refillable inner cans that you fill with DI resin.

Looking for very cheap. Can make nice SPS and LPS frags as trade.

3 spot domino damsel. Hellavu tough fish.

I've kinda always wanted to build my own de-nitrator based upon the long tubing method. From what I've read many people say a coil of 1/4" tubing with a drip rate of about 1 drip per second will cause bacteria to build up within the tubing and by the time the water reaches the end it is supposed to have been processed through the whole nitrite, nitrate, ammonia triangle. I'm pretty sure it's the same method Aquaripure uses on their set ups.

So for about $60 I can buy a 500' spool of of John Guest 1/4" PEX place it in a 5g bucket and poke some holes in the lid, voila a clean looking set up.

My plan is thus,

Get a couple of Di resin canisters and the little bottles that go in them.

Fill 1 bottle with very small live rock rubble and the other with sugar fine reef sand.

Push water into the rock first, then through the sand then onto the coil.

The coil will be about 500' of tubing in a 5g bucket covered with a lid.

I'll pack the free space with insulation as I'll probably put it in the garage away from the tnak. Tnak is directly on the other side of the wall and will be easy to plumb as I already have several other tubes running through for 2 part solutions and ATO.

Now I'm going to cheat the system a bit. Once the tubing gets into the bucket I will put an inline check valve onto the tubing then about a foot further down I will place a TEE in the tubing, next I run some tubing out of the bucket to another inline check. This check will be open so I can use a syringe to force feedings into the system. The check will allow sugar to enter the coil while the other check will prevent it from backing up into the "pre-filters". I'll be able to carbon dose into the coils. I've heard that you don't need to do that if the coil is long enough, however carbon dosing certainly causes the system to work even faster.

All of that is the easy part. The part I'm having trouble with is figuring out which pump to use. A Maxi Jet might work if I glue tubing to it but I'm worried it won't be able to force the water the long distance to the coil and then have enough head to force it through the coil. Peristaltic pump would be perfect for this but they aren't meant to run continuous.

Anybody else ever build one of these and what do you think about my plan? Any pump suggestions?

Check with Prof at Epic Reef. I know he had something about that large at his place ready to go.

Also post the dimensions you are referring to, the same size tank comes in several dimensions. I can recall one at the Tek for years that was like 8' long x 22" tall x 22" wide or something like that but then a friend of mine bought a 240 that was only 6' long so keep that in mind.

Looks very similar to the Magnificent I had for a couple of years, except it looks in bad shape. It should be very purple and green. It needs to be nursed back and if you look around online you'll see that most folks agree that the Magnificent is about the most difficult anemone to keep. Mine lived several years until my tnak crashed. I wouldn't say it was any more difficult than the other anemones I've kept. It was a very high light anemone, in fact mine stayed at the water line and would spread out across the top of the water to get the most of my metal halides. I hope you have 250w halides or brighter.

Not quite clear, you're suggesting a freight ship had a freshwater ballast of piranhas and alligators, and they somehow got 300 miles inland?

Yes.

Ok so was being sarcastic, loosen up a little.

Man you peeps all griping about other hobbyists not being responsible and what not, how can you be so sure it wasn't ballast water from some sort of trans Atlantic shipping freighter?

The ratio of water draining from the tank to the sump is directly related to your pump. It can only be a 1:1 ratio, unless your pump is to large and sucking your sump dry. The tank can only drain what the pump puts back into it. It sounds like you need a Durso standpipe. Something to raise the level up higher in your overflow chamber and then it also allows air to enter with the falling water, breaking up the suction that can create a siphon that seems like a toilet flushing.

I agree not a valida. Valida grow straight up in super dense colonies. The pics are really hard to tell. If it were more blue I might toss tenius in the hat to choose from. A couple years ago Jeremy got his Pearlberry and had such good luck with it, that well, he saturated the area with frags. You may very well have gotten a frag from him and then a frag from someone else.

Prof does.

Neighbor broke down tnak, came by and gave me some rock. I don't need it for my tnak and all I plan to do with it is put in the yard somewhere.

About 4 baseball sized pieces.

Free if you want them. No deliveries.

Ha it was like watching pron load in 1995 on a dial up. OMG, is that a nipple? Oh, oh, oh,........****, no it's a freckle.

That's a heck of a seat. Where is the neck brace? Shouldn't he have a little snap around foam neck brace thingy?

It's bad news.

I killed an entire fully grown in 75g reef and 3 shrimp eating blue ribbon eels with ozone.

It was supposed to clear up my hair algae problem. When I first introduced it to my skimmer it was great. My skimmate looked like used motor oil for several weeks. I moved about 4 months after starting the ozone. When I set the tnak back up, I decided to leave a few pieces out of service until the tnak looked perfect again. After about 3 weeks everything seemed to have done a great job of surviving so I turned the ozone on again. About an hour later I went to bed. In the morning my entire set up was dead. It was nasty. Nothing had changed that i know of. My fish all suffocated. They were all at the bottom of the tnak, the eels were literally tied in knots with broken spines from fighting death. Every single piece died. My dinner plate sized prized efflo, my magnificent anemones, the eels, everything.

If I learned anything from that, it was that I should have bought the ORP meter with it. It senses when the ozone is safe to be on and when there is to much in the water.

Your main concern will not be the weight.

Google search for this and there are a ton of stories of people with 50g+ tnaks that were broken somehow and then managed to do tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage to the apartments below.

I do nothing and it has worked for about a decade. I've lost power for several hours before, I think up to about 10 hours, and all was fine in my tnak.

Of course as I always say, what works for me might not work for you.

Yeppers he is still around. It's a 3 day weekend so maybe he can whip something up for you. I know he had a couple of good size rectangles lying around that could be easily adapted.

You can always drill it instead. How far are you trying to go? I've seen people that just drilled holes about 5/16"-3/8" about a half inch below the teeth on the overflow. Looked pretty good.

Ok, and I answered it in a direct manner.

I then added that what is pulled out, will be put back in. You are not the only person that reads this forum and thus an open ended question such as yours could cause a noob to unnecessarily fear that skimmers will cause harm to their tank. By addressing this, hopefully it can put those that could become worried an answer that can put them at ease.

They pull out both "bad" and "good" but keep in mind that through proper animal husbandry everything will be kept in balance. For instance if you are worried about pulling out a little good with a skimmer then by all accounts you wouldn't want to do water changes then right?

Pull them to high up and you won't be surface skimming. I like the water to fall at least 3/4"-1". I tend not to hear mine, probably because I've grown to ignore it. I've seen people use a very coarse black sponge media cut to the dimensions of their overflow and place it just under the weir teeth. This disrupts the flow of the water instead of a cascading waterfall. It will need to be checked often for cleanliness. If it gets grimy or covered, it may make your tnak overflow onto the floor.

Ah yes Tim but keep in mind as well that I have plenty of of old print how to set up and maintain a salt water aquarium books here at the house printed circa 1970-1985 that say the proper care and maintenance for corals is to have a "back up set" of corals soaking in a 10% bleach to water solution, so that when your display corals lose that bright white look and get covered in algae, you can then quickly swap them out for sparkling white ones.

It's just I feel, and have read, that when skimmers and MH lamps were incorporated to the hobby, that the hobby jumped leaps and bounds into the future. As you said there were some successes before that, but not many and not enough to call it a hobby. Most people were keeping fish in a tank full of dead bleached out coral skeletons. I agree that as corals adapted to the domesticated life that things also got easier, but it was the proper lighting that kept them alive in the first place. I also agree that for the most part all of my corals in the beginning were wild caught. So non of my successes were due to adapted corals.

It's been since January that I unplugged my skimmer. I haven't done a water change in over a year. My tnak is fully stocked, my corals are growing so fast now I don't know what to do with them. And yes you've seen the pictures in the for sale threads. I also top off with untreated tap water.

The thing is that I've had my tnak for at least 7 years now. I know it inside and out. We've been through it all together. I could spot a problem a week before it will actually happen. I wouldn't recommend my methods to anyone. It's just to dangerous to preach it.

Keep in mind that my tnak is fully established and not newly set up.

If you are starting out with a new tnak and don't have loads of experience than I say yes, buy a skimmer. It will make your life a lot easier and will help prevent issues. I believe 100% that skimmers and metal halide lamps are the 2 single reasons that people were able to domesticate this hobby. For about 4 decades prior folks dabbled in salt water. Corals were a huge no-no and even in the beginning it was strictly limited to softies. The mid 80's began to see significant changes and improvements. I think it is very important to set up a new tnak with the best equipment, best intentions, and the highest quality livestock possible. After it has been set up and stable for a few years you can begin to wean it off all the "extras". I'd say to make your life easier, and to have the best possible outcome, a large sump with a good skimmer and return pump and beginners basic equipment.

Once you are proficient then you might dabble in "exotic" set ups to prove just how awesome you are. Might try a Jaubert Plenum, super deep sand bed method, exotic algae sumps, under gravel plenum system, etc... but prove to yourself that you can keep a basic known set up running and healthy before trying to simplify your tnak.