I got lazy last week and again just ran my tank without a sock for a few days. Unreal how much better my skimmer skims but I really don't like the extra particulates in the water column.

Tony, what's the largest size micron sock you've seen? I'd be interested in acquiring some too.

Should have answered Lance's question here instead of in HIS thread, but to anyone else wondering, bulkreefsupply.com has 200 micron bags of both felt and mesh materials and they say the mesh clogs less. I'm going in on the group buy right now and getting some of each, will see what I think, if I like them they stay, otherwise I might switch back to 8". Was looking at the 8" socks that J&L sells over at globaldesigns tank and have to say I like those a lot more than the 8" ones I'm currently using (a nicer "collar" setup).

Anyhow, real reason for this post ... and I'm hella overdue for pictures here, I realize that - will try to correct that tomorrow - but - something of a 1st milestone, my carpet tank is now officially empty! I'm going to drain it and clean it tonight. Otherwise everyone from that tank is now in the cube. Carpets, couple smaller clams, buncha LPS. I can't wait to take some pictures and post them. :)

I will probably be waiting until next weekend to get the remaining fish from the 115 g over. I moved over the rabbitfish earlier this week and it was a major tank upset with me having to remove most of the rocks to get at him, so the next fish will be all of them because there's no way I'm doing that for all of them individually. Also had a major heart stopping moment when I discovered one of the butterflies had swam into a crevasse underneath a bottom rock and then the whole structure fell onto him, pinning him underneath. All I could see was a motionless tail sticking out between the rock and sand. When I got it off him he just swam away and seemed none the worse for wear. Guess there's something good about having sand after all, it cushioned him instead of impaling or crushing him. Unfortunately I have not seen my dottyback since that day now and I'm fearing that maybe he met a similar fate but did not get so lucky. Hard to say - as a slender fish he can fit into the smallest of crevasses and get out of most - but 2 days without a single sighting is starting to get a little ominous. I'll be bummed if I lost him but I don't know what else I could have done differently.

Got a little bit sidelined with the flu last few days. Spent the better part of the last 24 hours trying to sleep it off. So much for the flu shots!! Grumble. Anyhow I've upgraded my disposition from "would welcome death as a sweet release" to "would offer marginal resistance." So to commemorate the occasion I got the camera out.

Tank is going through a bit of a secondary diatom bloom - nowhere near as bad as the first go-round. Hopefully the cleanup crew can keep up. There are also a few tiny patches of cyano that literally hitched in on some things from the (now shutdown and sold) 40g. The Hippopus clam has a little on its shell and there's a frag disk with yellow polyps and red zoos with a little as well. I'm hoping that it will eventually just sort of go away in time.
http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1741-0.jpg

http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1742-0.jpg

http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1756-0.jpg

http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1757-0.jpg

http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1760-0.jpg

http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1766-0.jpg

http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1767-0.jpg

http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1768-0.jpg

http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1770-0.jpg

http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1773-0.jpg

http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1774-0.jpg

Thought this was funny - can you tell where the sand dollar has been? A nice clean 3" strip of sand up against the glass ending in a mysterious mound of rubble. :lol:
http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/a/d/...img_1775-0.jpg

Haha that's some CRAZY pankcake mofo action there Tony! I love the gorgForest in behind the scape...adds some nice depth to the tank.

I thought for a sec you had the bottom of the tank eurobraced and I was like...I don't recall that. That mofo tricked me!

And seriously you can stop calling the thing a dang sand dollar nobody's buyin' it =)

Nems look saweet too...you must be pretty happy other than welcoming death etc. I'm sick as well...and had the flu shot months ago.

Tony!! Wouldja look at that! Awesomeness!! It looks great, congrats on finally getting to this, even if it was/is incredibly painful sometimes.

The last week did have a few downers.

On Tuesday I picked up a new Signanus doliatus rabbitfish from globaldesigns. He went into the tank and settled in nicely. On Wednesday I caught my own out of the cube and moved him over. So for a few days there the two rabbits were in the 280g together.

Unfortunately, to catch mine, I had to remove most of the rock from the 115g. When replacing the rock, at one point I noticed that one of the butterflies had swam under a rock and it had shifted and toppled on top of him. It was a heart stopping moment when I noticed just the tail sticking out under the rock squished into the sand. But I was able to get the rock off him and he swam away as if nothing was the matter. But karma caught up to me because I think my dottyback might have been in one of the rocks that was taken out. It's been almost 10 days now and there has been no sign of him. :cry: So I think I likely killed him somehow.

The bad news doesn't end there. I had always wanted a pair of doliatus - I thought I had I read they do better in pairs or small schools. Well, maybe that's true if they're small together. Unfortunately the two started fighting badly. At first I thought, well, there's always this in the first day or two - I'll wait it out and see how it goes. In the past it's always been a sort of magic period of 3 days - after 3 days the aggression settles and things are fine. Well, sadly, on day 3, the smaller one I had gotten from globaldesigns died. :cry: So, that was an error of judgment on my part.

I decided that I could not accept the risk that the larger rabbit could haze the tangs and angels when the time comes to move them over - so I rehomed him on the weekend. The only other time I've had a fish literally kill another - was a sixline wrasse - and I don't miss that sixline in the least now that's he's passed on. Hazing is one thing (because it eventually stops) but when a fish kills another - they're done for me. As much as I love the look of those rabbitfish I doubt I will ever try another now that I know what they are capable of.

Aaaannd, I had a rose BTA in there who had a history of letting go of the rock he was on and letting the current take him to new places. Well unfortunately his luck ran out, on Monday this week I found what was left of him stuck inside one of the Tunze covers. Sigh.

So I'm not sure when I will move the rest of the fish over. Seeing as it was a major rock removing event to catch the one fish - I'm tempted to do them all at once and get the mayhem over with as soon as possible. So maybe on the weekend, I'll see if I have the energy to start chasing fish with nets and see how it goes.

To be moved are 3 tangs (Red Sea sailfin, lavender, and lieutenant), 3 angels (potters and a pair of bellus) and a canary wrasse. The butterflies and eel will stay put until their new tank is ready.

Looking good my man! I like it.
I sure hope all the troubles are behind you. You most definitely deserve some clear sailing now.

oooh digging the gorgonians

sorry to hear about the dolis Tony......you could try adding a smaller one once your tangs settle in????.....and ya, well.....nems is evil:mrgreen:.....this thing looks amazing with some life in it.....saweet!!!

Thanks Doug! I think I'm done with rabbitfish though. The whole reason I had been attracted to doliatus in the first place was that they're one of the smaller rabbitfish and even still I think mine had become larger than my sailfin tang. After getting used the to the look of these 8 small fish in there right now (2 clowns, the fairy wrasse, the 5 chromis) and seeing them dart in and out of the rocks like you might expect to see on a real reef (it's a neat effect, I should try for a video), putting this 7" or whatever he was rabbitfish in there felt like tossing a 10lb trout into a barrell. So even the small ones are just too dang big in the end. So I think until the day comes I get an even bigger tank (which aint gonna happen soon, if at all) I think I'm OK being done with them for the time being.

I still sorta think them nems is more dumb than evil but yeah either-or I guess, take your pick. The stupid thing is I'm still tempted to try another rose, I just like the look of them even if I can't really stand the clowns that go in them. I technically have two 3/4" sized roses in there somewhere, one is completely lost and untraceable in the rockwork (guess it will show up if it wants to some day) and another in a jar. They were both hidden right in the deepest of pits in the bottom of the rockwork in the 40g so yeah talk about antisocial. Bleached to heck and starved to tiny, at least the one in the jar seems to be staying put so I can attempt to feed it and reacclimate it to daylight but it's probably a tall order to hope anything successful will come of my efforts there but I might as well try. Stupid BTAs.

Well just caught up with whats been happening and really glad to see how things have turned out for you. Very nice Tony. I too love having a RBTA and just lost mine to a bad incident, had the thing for over 3 yrs so very upsetting. I had my true percs settle in it for most of the time.

Tank is looking good :biggrin: Sorry to hear the rabbit fish didn't work out :sad: Hope your carpet anemone behaves itself. I got lucky with my RBTA it barely moved from the spot I first put it in and it's doing really well in my tank. I think it helps that it was a rbta that had split and I bought it from a canreef member.

So, today I managed to find more basement floor (thanks again Eli!) and at the behest of Nathan, my 5 year old son, we moved over "his" starfish (a blue linckia). After getting the starfish on the drip, I thought ... well ... why not. Started pulling rock out, filled up 3 buckets and started chasing fish with nets.

I thought at first I might start with the angels and leave it at that for now. Then I thought ... oh whatever. I'm doing the tangs too. So another 10 minutes and had a bucket of angels, and a bucket of tangs. Started probing the sand since I didn't want to squish the canary wrasse and it's a good thing I did because I would have started stacking rocks back right on top of where he was hiding. So out he came too.

Staying for now are the eel, the butterflies, and the trigger. The trigger will join her friends in about a week's time - since she is the most aggressive and the fastest swimmer, she needs to go in last so that the others have a chance to settle in. I don't really anticipate problems mind you but it just seems better to do it this way for some reason. Eel and butterflies will be getting a new home and I picked up their new tank on Saturday - I'm totally stoked on that and will be starting a new thread for that in the coming days hopefully. It's a 65g tank with a black acrylic background and external overflow, 10mm glass with polished edges. No starfire glass but that's OK probably since it will be a basic FOWLR for the most part.

It was terrible to catch 7 fish to get them out of a tank, but putting 7 fish INTO a tank worked out better than I could have hoped for. They all know each other from before so the dynamics are 100% the same as before but just in a slightly different setting. They all quickly found places to hide and then gradually started venturing out to explore.

What a long journey it's been! But look! All the fish are in but one!

Here's a 10 second video I took about a half hour after they were all in:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...h_MVI_1793.jpg

And a couple random photos:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1797.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1798.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1799.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1800.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1801.jpg

The male bellus mooning the camera:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1802.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1803.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1804.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1806.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1805.jpg


Also picked up some acan frags from CoralMaster (thanks again Greg!!!) and a blue zoo frag. Not sure where to put the blue zoos so for now they are on a rock near the bottom, under an overhang.

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1794.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1795.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1796.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1811.jpg

Thanks for looking! :)

Coming along nicely there Tony. Where will you put the rumphella?

Very nice collection of fish Tony. They must be so happy...that sailfin especially is so deserving of a big tank to show off all his sexiness.

I'm so in love with my blue zoas. They're all open and getting even more colourful.

Dooooo loooove those zoas Tony.....and the cans are pretty dang sweet too!:biggrin:

Looks great Tony, bet the fish are happy with all the extra space :biggrin:

Looking good Tony. Fish look Great! Happy fish make for happy Reefers! Is the new tank going to be plumbed into the big tank or on its own?

Nice Tony! Will have to make it over sometime and see it in person. :biggrin:

Very beautiful tank Tony, well done.

Thanks all! It's so nice to finally appreciate the tank for being something other than a "Must Get This Done" kind of thing.

The fish seem to totally appreciate it too. It was funny to see them go from "OH CRAP OH CRAP OH CRAP" mentality (of being chased with nets then having to sit in buckets while acclimating) to one of "..... oh! Hey, this is not so bad!" so quickly.

@Lance - I'm thinking on its own for now but haven't fully committed. There really isn't the space or capacity in the tank room to run both a frag tank and the FOWLR but the FOWLR is going to go in there for now to allow me to finish the rest of the basement. After that's done we may choose to take it out of the tank room and have it somewhere else but that's a while away at this point - and so too technically is the need for a frag tank so it kind of works out at least from that point of view. So I guess it's a 50/50 call to run it inline and leverage the main system's skimmer etc. in the meantime, or whether it should sit independent from the get-go.

@Greg - The Rhumphella sits at the left edge of the gorg "forest" in the back - you can sort of see a glimpse of it here behind the lavender:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...f/IMG_1798.jpg

I haven't taken any close ups of the gorgs since a lot of them sustained heavy damage from the butterflies and although it's evident they are recovering nicely now in the new tank, there's still enough damage that at some point I'll have to go in and snip off the dead branches before they'll really start looking good again.

It was interesting to see how the butterflies would go through different phases. I was warned they would eat "everything" by the LFS, but I foolishly thought "well, surely not EVERYthing - let me find out what they REALLY eat and then I can tailor what I keep and I what I don't" - well over time I found out that although there was never a time they ate "everything", there was never a time they weren't interested in "something." At first they went to town on the aiptasia and majano and were content with that. After those were all gone they moved in on certain LPS but left others alone. But then they've moved onto those others when the first LPS were taken out. I tried a test SPS frag, they literally started mowing it within minutes. Same with GPS gets absolutely mowed. They wouldn't harrass clams too bad normally - unless the clam would fall over and show it's byssal gland - they'd go to town on that if they could. The only things that escaped their wrath are clove polyps (which is too bad because it's such an invasive and stinky pest), then I had one colony of yellow zoas that I've had all along that they left alone (although they took care of other zoas). Ok: lesson learned: "everything" really can indeed mean "everything."

Its really too bad about butterflies.....such a beautiful fish.....would love to be able to put them in a reef tank.....one question though....what are you doin puttin your GPS in the tank???:razz:

A mistake I made a long time ago! I *thought* I had gotten rid of all of it when I shut my 75g down. But it literally came out of nowhere again and by the time I noticed it was growing in spots in my 40g, the 40g had too many other things going on that I didn't care as much (caulerpa, aiptasia, clove polyps .. etc.).

The annoying thing is I see it cropping up already in the 280g. There's a frag disk with a few yellow polyps (which might have to be sacrificed to solve this, I'm not sure - at least I have a nice colony of them in another piece in a different spot) but the disk also has a few straggling survivors of some red/orange zoanthids which WOULD be worth saving. So I'll probably have to grab the disk out from its spot at some point and do some selective scraping. Actually I took a butylene torch to another frag I moved over a couple weeks ago to ensure the caulerpa was good and gone, other than the smell that worked out well so that might have to be the ticket again for this one.

Tony,
Are you using bio pellets and anything else on your new setup?
Sorry if I missed that somewhere along the way.

Looks great, btw!

I am playing around with zeovit on this tank. I was running pellets on the old tank but haven't yet moved the reactor over. I will probably get around to doing so at some point this week now, but I have to reload it while I'm at it since it's gotten down pretty low in there.

I've run zeovit before so have a reasonable idea of what I'm getting into with that system. When the pellets first came out I experimented with an approach of using both and then settled on just using pellets. Pellets by themselves work not too bad. Although not quite as aggressive as the zeolite based nutrient limiting methods, they definitely do pull down NO3 (and PO4 to a lesser degree) if left to their own devices, plus the bacterial film that is continually shed off as a result of the pellets tumbing is a decent source of food for both corals and fish. What pushed me back into going full on zeovit for this tank however is water clarity. I just can't get over how clear the water gets on that system. It's a little more work daily but honestly that doesn't bother me since I look at the tank as much as I can everyday anyhow and feed the fish everyday anyhow, so it's a very small step to just say "oh ok I'll pump the reactor now and add a couple drops of this or that".

The alternative to get that much water clarity but with a more passive approach would be to run UV and/or ozone and a fair amount of GFO. Was running UV for a while on the other tank and that does seem to remove the yellowing compounds in the water but I was a bit surprised how often you have to replace the lamps. Well I guess it's no worse than the T5's or the halides but it's just yet another thing you have to budget to replace every few months.

Have you considered Prodibio?

Not specifically but I hear it's pretty good. The one thing I'm not 100% sold on is the rock replacement. It's not that it's expensive per se (probably one of the cheapest elements of the whole system) but it seems sorta wasteful to send rocks to a landfill. :lol:

Sorry, what rocks?
I thought it was bacteria, ect. dosing only.

Tank looks very nice Tony. Good job. Love those fishy pics.

Thanks Doug!

Mitch - sorry, the "rocks" in this case being zeolites. The zeovit system is so named since you put these zeolites in a reactor and I guess they're porous and thus create new surface area for the dosed bacteria to colonize (I'm sure some settles on the regular substrata as well). The instructions tell you to change it out every 6 to 8 weeks or thereabouts.
http://www.jlaquatics.com/product/zv...-+1+Litre.html

I don't think Prodibio makes use of zeolites but I believe both the UltraFauna and Brightwell systems do.

Hi Tony,

Yeah, I know Zeo uses the rocks, I was just wondering if you had considered using Prodibio instead of Zeo because Prodibio uses no rocks.
I haven't heard too much regarding the water clarity and Prodibio though.
I am considering using Prodibio for my new setup.

Hey Tony,

I have a few bags of zeo rocks, good deal if you want them. let me know.

Since when do fish need navigational tools? :razz:

Heh, oops.

:lol: Sorry Tony but I couldn't resist :mrgreen:

To bad butterfly's really do eat everything, there have been a few I've seen over the years that have been tempting but I'm glad I didn't risk one since they tend to eat any and all corals.

Tony your Gorg forest will be a real showpiece once it takes off. If you need more rhumphella or Corky finger just let me know.:wink:

Thanks Greg :)

Well sounds like I've had my first disaster here.

Have been running a red slime problem and it had been getting steadily worse and worse. Got to the point that I decided to do a red slime treatment although I really was hesitant to do so on account that I hate doing them, I hate how the skimmer goes berserk for a week and all that goes with it.

Well, 2 days post treatment and it seems that all my clams are dead.

Got a panicked phone call from home but I'm stuck between an emergency at work and an emergency at home. Although I suppose at this point it's no longer an emergency but rather grim cleanup waiting for me when I get home.

I hate this hobby, I hate what it does to me.

Never seen a cyano treatment actually take out clams before. I wonder what else I will end up losing.

Aw no Tony. That's terrible! I know how much you love your clams. I feel your pain.