7 gal and 2.5 gal Photos

[Beverly]

Finally have a few photos of our 7 gal bowfront, the 2.5 gal bowfront and one more photo of the 42 hex:

http://www.lostmymarblz.com

Enjoy!

[BCOrchidGuy]

Very cool Beverly, that 2.5 looks like it has a MH light in it... lol

Your aptasia problem... I read that a bit of vinegar injected will usually do the trick if Kalk doesn't..... did you inject the aptasia or just squirt it in the general area?

[Beverly]

Very cool Beverly, that 2.5 looks like it has a MH light in it... lol

LOL! And all I think I'm going to put in it are two types of green star polyps in there. Well, maybe three kinds if I can get a frag of one I don't have yet :-)

Your aptasia problem... I read that a bit of vinegar injected will usually do the trick if Kalk doesn't..... did you inject the aptasia or just squirt it in the general area?

Actually I injected it with kalk, to no avail. The aptasia was back to form the very next day:-(

But, I did one better than vinegar the other day. It's not for the faint of heart, so those who are sqeamish DON'T READ ON.

The kalk did not work and I couldn't think of anything I had on hand that would kill the %&# thing except for some CLR. Geez, I was nervous to even try it, but I seem to remember I'd used it for some kind of similar problem way back when we had our 180, though I couldn't remember for what.

So two days ago, I got all my tools lined up: a pair of reef-only tweezers, a small paring knife, a bowl for the CLR, the CLR, a bowl for the rock to drip into, and a whole bunch of q-tips. Then out came the aptasia rock from the 7 gal bowfront and I went to work on it.

Funny thing about aptasia when it's out of water. It shrinks down to almost nothing and I had a hard time locating it at first. But there is was, a small dollop of brown goo way inside a hole in the rock. Actually, as I dabbed the CLR onto the aptasia inside the hole, I discovered that I could get at if from two sides. Dabbing didn't get me very far because the thing was so far into the hole, so I really pushed the CLR-ed q-tip deeper and deeper into the rock from both sides.

I'm sweating like crazy hoping I could fully rinse off the CLR from the surrounding rock and not have any of it go back into the tank. But I kept working the more and more CLR into the hole. Then I got out the tweezers to push the dying tissue out the other side of the hole and dabbed more CLR onto it. Between the tweezers and paring kinfe, I managed to scrap off as much dead tissue as I could so it wouldn't foul the tank.

When I thought the dead tissue was all picked and scraped off, I began rinsing the rock with water from the 7 gal tank. After rinsing with a couple of glasses of tank water, I realized I'd have to emp, now what? I put the rock under the RO outlet and let the RO water run over the rock until there was no water left, probably 2 gallons worth.

Still scared I hadn't gotten it all off, but had run out of water, I thought there couldn't be any CLR left on the rock. There jsut couldn't be..... Back into the tank it went.

I watched the fish and corals for a few hours and all seemed okay. So, I tackled a bubble algae problem on a second rock with the CLR and rinsed it again in RO. Put it back into the tank and no harm seems to have come to the tank's inhabitants.

The bubble algae rock did have a good growth of coral on it and some RO water must have gotten on the coral, maybe a little CLR too. Plus the coral had been out of water for 10 minutes or so, too, so it was a somewhat stressed when it went back into the tank. But the next day all was well with the coral and the whole tank as far as I could tell.

The only problem is that I didn't get all the bubble algae, and the aptasia rock has 4 new tiny aptasias on it :-((( I'll wait until next week to tackle the bubble algae because it's easy to find. But those %*$ little aptasias are going to have to grow a bit bigger before I'll be able to find them out of water.

All I can say is that I sweated that whole day waiting for the tank to cack, but it didn't. Maybe I'll try vinegar next time and save myself a lot of worrying. Thanks for the tip :-)