Colour changes....
 

One of the behaviours that I really enjoy seeing is how the fish use colour changes to express their state of mind.

I've noticed that one of the fish that does this dramatically is the unicorn tang (N. unicornis). This is his dark phase, which is only displayed when near the cleaner shrimp. He also has a light phase, also used when near the cleaner shrimp and a camouflage colour when sleeping. That's four very different colour schemes and he can alter them within about 2 seconds.

Look at the change in the yellow surrounding his eye:
http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...s/100_0457.jpg

Normally, he looks like this:
http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...s/100_0418.jpg

Pretty cool. Looking forward to someday having a tank large enough to enjoy these guys myself.

I'm not sure that I have a tank large enough to enjoy them! I suppose it seems ok for now.

My Naso Tang does the same thing when he is being cleaned by my cleaner wrasse. He will get very, very dark. At first it worried me.

Whats really funny about my Naso, is that he likes to get cleaned (mostly mouth) but if the wrasse goes near his gills, the tang gets upset and chases him around! I found this very strange.

Brad, I have to admit I didn't read the entire thread, I've only got a few hours before I have to leave for work. I have the Wilkerson(?) book on clowns if you want to borrow it, it has a lot of information on raising clown. My ex lives on Blue Mtn and has my son so I am out there to pick him up 3 days a week so I could drop it by if you are interested.

Douglas

Thanks for thinking of me, but I know enough about raising clowns to know that I'm not willing to do it any time soon. Might make a good retirement project someday.... Now that I think about it, that might be sooner than I think!

And if you are interested in coming by just to see the tank, you don't need to bring a book as entry fee. Send me a PM if you like.

It has taken me a few days, but finally read the whole thread.
Excellent work Brad! Keep it up. I have learned a lot here.
Thank you

Sad day...
 

With some sadness I announce that Buster, the White Cheek Tang has succumbed to complications related to crypto (saltwater ich).

He first displayed symptoms of some sort of secondary skin problems in late December. He continued to eat well and behave normally right until the very end. He lost significant body weight in the last 2 days in spite of continued normal eating.

My theory is that ich damaged his skin so badly that some sort of bacterial/fungal/viral infection took over. No other fish in the tank has displayed any similar symptom.

Here is a shot from his last evening.... Poor guy. I let him down.
http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...s/100_0496.jpg

From happier times....
http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...s/101_0149.jpg
http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...h_100_0222.jpg

:sad:

Sorry to hear that, I hate loosing anything never mind a fish like that, hope it does'nt effect any of the others. Great video by the way.

Aww, that sucks. Sorry to hear that Brad :neutral:

Sucks to read that. You can get pretty attached to these guys.

Too bad about the tang, I hate losing fish

Sorry to hear about your loss. Your video looked like it was very active and fun to watch.

Sorry for your loss brad :cry:

:sad: Sorry for your loss, he was a beautiful fish.

Damn... Sorry to hear man!

Great video though of better times.

Sorry Brad
The frag you gave me is still going strong ... thanks

Sorry to hear about the tang, I thought it would have pulled through.

Growing pains...
 

The tank is approaching two years old now. It seems to have an entirely new set of challenges now.

Some of the faster growing coral heads are simply collapsing under their own weight. Well...Freckles (aka "the submarine") might give them a gentle nudge. But they inevitably snap off right at their tiny base.

Here's today's frag!
http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...s/100_0500.jpg

As the coral gets really large, the inner/lower areas don't get any light and tend to die off. As a result the coral just adds weight to it's top and never reinforces the bottom. It would seem that a healthy dose of constant trimming is the ticket to longer term, sustainable, large coral heads. (at least with faster growing types)

I wonder why this does not happen in the ocean. I was wondering the same thing as I notice that my bases of many of my corals don't seem very thick, and I figure this may be caused by my dosing which causes the coral to grow quickly and more slender, where as without dosing maybe the coral would have grown slower but thicker. So do you dose your tank (i don't remember)?

I suppose in the wild this might just collapse on itself and spread/grow over again. Between storms and waves I would expect that wild coral never gets this far extended.

I don't generally dose anything to my tank that would cause unusually fast growth, but I suspect my fake reef is more consistently sunny than a real one.

I'm not shedding a tear for this particular coral. I have other very large pieces of this same coral and you can see that it wasn't very healthy in general.

I've often thought that with regular trimming you would also be able to have the coral spread out rather than just up...sort of like trimming hedges...

What do you mean by far extended? Just curious because obviously corals in the ocean get many, many times larger than this without breaking off. I went on a dive after a pretty bad storm in Australia and was surprised by how little damage was done to the reef. Seems that wild colonies are just growing much stronger?

Here's my unsolicited $0.02 :)

I think our tanks are more like gardens than they are forests, ie., they are cultivated garden reefs, not wild reefs. Thus, it's not unreasonable to expect to have to prune and manage over the long term to maintain a balance. Like plants, some corals will grow faster and some will grow slower. Think about how a forest grows, there are distinct stages or phases. First, the quick growers fill in and compete for space, but tend to be weaker or shorter lived, followed by slower growing but longer living species. (Like here in Alberta at least, Poplars are usually among the first trees to grow after an area is forested, they live for about 30 years or so, they get ridiculously tall in that timeframe, too big for their own trunks to support their own weight, so they start dieing off or falling in windstorms, leaving openings for slower growing, but longer living or stronger tree species to fill in. And so on...)

So I would think that in the wild reefs, storms and waves do likely create some damage among species like staghorns, which break off quickly. I suspect that you don't see as much damage as you expect because there is a greater diversity of species. But I have seen reefs where the ocean floor was literally littered with staghorn rubble, which in turn is brilliant fish habitat.

But because our reef tanks tend to be collections of things that interest us, it tends to be a more random assortment of species that may not necessarily inhabit reefs in the same zones or phases in the wild.

Plus there's just the challenges of maintaining ideal flow conditions, which gets harder as pieces grow, plus the challenges of static light locations, and the fact that the bases always get shaded .... I am truly amazed when someone can grow large pieces of coral without this sort of thing happening..

This thread over at RC has some amazing large specimens:
http://reefcentral.com/forums/showth...readid=1561866

Look at this beast in particular:
http://www.wamas.org/forums/uploads/...276_103724.jpg

How on earth someone manages to grow a piece like that in a tank, is simply beyond me. That's incredible.

just looked over the link, and all I can say is wow, I can't imagine my corals ever getting to those sizes.

People laugh when I say it took me 1 year to build the aquarium...but it then took me another two years to finally finish the bar! Today, it is finally done! So...I had a rum 'n coke to celebrate!

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...n/100_0505.jpg

As the bar has two mirrored walls, all the fish found the other aquarium very interesting....

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...100_0502-1.jpg

OUTSTANDING! WOW just isn't enough. :biggrin:

Gah, I love your tank :biggrin: How's everything faring?

Dealing with some coral death at the moment, actually. I had this spot on where a colony of hynophora used to be, and it kept growing back and killing other coral nearby. So I attacked it that spot with a scrub brush to try to kill it. It worked, but it has triggered an outbreak of STN death in my other two large colonies of hynophora, which has also caused some tissue loss for nearby stylos. I think I'm going to lose one entire colony of the hynophora before this is done.

So...you know...pretty typical stuff.

Too bad about the corals, but I know you will persevere.
Outstanding bar!
I wonder what the fish think of the "other" fish in the mirror, while looking around the bacardi

Sheesh!!...that sucks!...."typical" is right. It's that chain reaction effect that comes in ,hits you hard,keeps on coming,and stops only after its killed a few prized colonies.....oh brother, how I know! Frag what's left and turf the rest!

Life and Death in the tank...
 

Really tough times going on here. I'm losing coral all over the place. Mostly from the tips.

Desperate to try to figure out what is going on, I took a measurement of Nitrate and Phosphate yesterday. Historically, I've rarely been able to detect nitrate, and had barely measureable phosphate. Today...20ppm nitrate and 18ppm phosphate. Every other measurement I can make seems fine. I've turned my Ca reactor down a bit as my alk was reading 8.5dKh....but really...8.5dKh is not something I would usually be concerned about.

That's not the kind of numbers that cause coral to die that I'm aware of...but I suppose it is a signal that something isn't right. I'm running some ferric oxide to see if I can absorb phosphate, but so far it has made no difference.

So....I thought I would vaccuum out the main sump as it has become pretty filthy. I look into the sump at something I think is a fish poop...and learn I have sea cucumber babies! I bet there is 50+ of them in that sump. I was easily able to find about 15 once I started to look. Here's a shot of a couple babies. The larger of the two might be 1" long.

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...100_0508-1.jpg

Since they most look like this cucumber, I'm assuming this is mom...or dad...or both...I'm not sure how it works for cuces! New promo...Free Donkey Dung with frag purchase!

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...s/100_0509.jpg

Sorry about the coral loss, but the baby cucumbers is a neat little developent.

It does look like poop!

Perhaps there is a correlation between the coral death and the cuc's. Just a thought because cuc's are toxic and all. Maybe young one's getting sucked up the return? I have had a cuc nuke before but usually fish are affected as well...this could be a low grade nuking or I could be trippin' out.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Sorry to hear about the troubles bro.

If it's cuc toxin, maybe time to do a really good water change and add a healthy dose of carbon.

I suppose anything is possible. I always run GAC anyway...I'll step up that a bit. I'm going to focus on the 'trate and 'phate because that is something I can measure to verify improvement.

My guess would be phosphates. The only time I have ever really had problems with sps was with high phosphates. Nitrates don't seem to bother them all that much (within reason of course). When I had a phosphate spike a few years back in a smaller sps tank I was keeping, everything browned out VERY fast. But nothing actually died off, so maybe its not that.

Man this is so terrible to hear! I hope you get things back in order soon...:sad:

EDIT: I have also had a cucumber die in my tank and it did kill all the fish but never effected the corals. Perhaps I was just lucky though.

Yeah, it's tough to say, all you can do at this point is clean up your water and hope for the best. Maybe separate the young ones just in case. This hobby kills me sometimes, I have close to 20 reef,FOWLR,and freshwater aquariums, keeps me busy but does nothing for keeping the hair on my head!lol