oh207

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And i thought i had a large bioload... Love that shrimp!

I change the livestock up a lot. I have 17 fishes now in the tank. Mostly all are wrasses, a pair of clowns, and dragonets.
I've had the shrimp for a while. Funny thing is, I haven't seen it since I took that last picture. :mad:

Wrasse list
 

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oh207

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No water change today

I was planning to do a water change this weekend but when I went to get the 20g tank that I normally fill with RODI it had 2" of ice at the bottom and the MJ1200 pump was embedded in the ice. Also, the tank appears to have several cracks. No doubt from the ice/snow when it froze and expand.
So, no water change this month. I will probably get Nutrasea for the next change until I can pick up another 20g.
 

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oh207

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March Update

I was off the past two days from work and took the time to do some maintenance on the tank. I still don't have a tank to mix new water, so I used a 5g salt bucket to mix 5g at a time. I added a 150w heater and within 2 hours it was ready for changing (back to using ESV now). I did this 5 times over the past 2 days!

I had started dosing NOPOX late last year at 10ml a day and saw a rapid decline in my Nitrates/Phosphates. Unfortunately the drop was so quick that I lost a few LPS corals. And my most favorite, a multi-head gold torch. I have a huge frogspawn colony that has also closed up for the past 2 months and have not re-opened to its normal size. I'm hoping that it will recover fully. It's been looking a little better these past few weeks.

During this time I took my skimmer offline (since December). But I was still running carbon/gfo. When I turned my skimmer back on, it was overflowing for several days. So I took this opportunity to reroute the overflow into a 5g bucket and then add 5g newly mixed water back to the tank. Its settled down now and is back to normal skimming.
Here is a shot from today of the frogspawn.
 

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oh207

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What was your nitrates before/after. Thought about nopox myself, just not sure if I do that or just vinegar

Nitrates were higher than 60 using the Redsea kit. After a few days of nopox I finally saw it drop to 50. But I didn't test consistently after that. I just kept dosing because I like the results I was seeing. But I guess I over did it.
 

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May update

The 65g tank is doing fine. I took out the Cinnamon clowns and add my Snowflake pair back into the DT. I add them about 6 weeks ago and they spawned again last week. The Cinnamon clowns are now in the sump. I need to decide what to do with them. I was planning to put them in a new cube I just setup, but after learning how big they get, I figure thats not a good idea.

Also, I suffered a major loss due to Brooknella on my 120g. Nothing was ever QT for that tank. Lesson learned...again.

I tried to rescue the Picasso clowns from the 120g and put them into my QT but sadly they died this morning. So I took down the QT and cleaned it out with bleach. Its been up and running for a long time now, probably over a year.
 

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oh207

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New Fuge Light

Today I had to switch out the refugium light. I previously had a DeepBlue SolarFlare 15W LED unit over the fuge. About 2 weeks ago the 4 white LEDs stopped working and only the blue is working. After some research I decided to go with a standard clip on unit and a 5K bulb from HomeDepot. The lighting is crazy! I can see so much more stuff with just the spill over light. I think I will get some crazy growth from this new setup.
BTW, I had a second DeepBlue SolarFlare 15W unit over my 20g QT tank and that LED unit stopped working about a month ago. I got both at the same time 2 years ago. I guess they both reach their end-of-life. The blue LED still works on both Unit, so for the QT that's fine.

Here is a pic of the new light over the refugium.
 

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oh207

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Recently I noticed that I'm losing quite a few zoas from my colonies and newly created frags. I'm certain that I don't have any zoa eating nudis because I dip and scrub everything with revive and a toothbrush. But I also figured out the culprits were likely the recent explosion of asterina stars. I put up with them for a while because they were kinda cute and my son likes to count them. But after losing a huge colony of rastas I had to take action.
Last night I picked up a harlequin shrimp and after acclimation I placed it into the tank around 11pm. This morning when I woke up all the asterinas were running to the top of the tank. It was like they got a memo and they all took off running. They were still running when I came home today.
I didn't want to get a harlequin because I have 2 sand sifting starfish for a long time and they do a good job of throwing stuff over...but I figure I had to take the risk and hope that the harlequin will not get to them right away.
Here are some pics. Blue pic is 8 hours after putting the shrimp in the tank. I didn't realize that I had this many. I might have to start taking them out manually.
 

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oh207

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Feeding Clam

Today I took took out a frozen clam to shave off and feed the fish. But I left it out for a few extra minutes and it thawed out very fast. So I decided to drop the whole thing in the tank. This is the 3rd clam I'm feeding the tank. The first 2 I fed took about a week each to shave off and feed.
None of the fish approach the whole clam right away to eat. It almost seems as if they were scared or too shy to approach the clam.

The video was taken as soon as I drop the clam into the tank. So it doesn't show anyone eating. But after an hour or so the clam was picked clean. I was pleased to see the pintail was one of the first to pick at the clam.

Youtube Video
http://youtube.com/watch?v=dvBKcIHq5uQ
 
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oh207

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March 2016, Mix Reef update video

Here is an updated video take a couple days ago. I've added a yellow tang and a filefish. I'm planning to move the yellow tang to a bigger tank later this year.
I've got a couple of HUGE aiptasia growing, and a very annoying one on the center rock which killed a very nice encrusting colony of sunset monti. The filefish hasn't touch any of the aiptasia, neither did the peppermint shrimps. I have Aiptasia X and have already treated twice, but this one has survived both times.

I'm also battling GHA and it seems to be taking over my birdsnest colony on the left. I've got it removed from the rest of the tank, but its very difficult to remove it from the birdsnest colony. I don't think the colony will survive.

https://youtu.be/sx_FTunq3bs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx_FTunq3bs
 
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jcs11236

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Looking good.
I had aiptasia infest my nano over 10 years ago. Must have had hundreds. Only thing that works was those bergia nudis. In a mater of a month all aiptasia was gone. Never had since. I saw a guy on here selling them. Ezaudio is his screen name
 

oh207

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Radion G3 Pro Par Readings

So I finally took Par readings of my Radion G3 Pro a couple weeks ago and I was shocked by the results. In fact, I was so shocked that I stopped taking the readings, and decided I needed to reprogram the light. Thats because the Par readings were so low (<10 in some areas). I reprogrammed the unit and raised the intensity from 65% to 75%. I also change the template from "Radiant Colors" to "Traditional Reef". The picture below shows the new Par readings.

Even with the Par so low, the corals in my tank, IMO were growing healthy. But I wanted to start growing more hardy SPS corals like Styloporas, Pocilloporas, etc....so I went ahead and adjust the light settings.

This tank is a standard 65g, 36" long. The Radion G3 Pro is not meant to cover this wide of an area, but it has always met my needs of growing LPS and other soft corals.
Below is a map of the par readings. I'm going to leave this setting in place for another 6 months and see what happens.

Disclaimer: No fish were harmed in this process. The sensor was never attached to any fish to obtain par readings, the numbers overlapping any fish simply reflects the reading I capture in that general area.
 

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