Time for another update!
I have added some more clean up crew members so here is my current livestock list.
Fish:
Purple firefish
Invertebrates:
Scarlet Hermits (x3)
Blue legged hermits (x4)
Trochus snails (x5)
Astrea snails (x3)
Spiny star astrea snails (x3)
Cerith snails (x3)
Fighting conch
Orange lip conch
I've noticed a large increase in pods. They were all over my glass until I had to scrape it clean and I've seen them scurrying around on my rocks as well. Also, there's small spots of coraline algae popping up all over my rocks.
A project that I completed and added to the tank last night was converting an old Aquaclear110 into a HOB refugium for chaeto. I've been monitoring my nitrates and they were hovering around 10ppm with only one fish and the inverts listed (feeding Vitalis pellets once daily but a very small amount). I'm planning on adding more fish and possibly more inverts down the road and I'd like to keep the nutrients down closer to 2-5ppm. I'll be posting some pictures but essentially I built a containment device to keep the chaeto from getting into the tank out of egg crate and used some black plastic pieces to build a wall that comes up around the light to prevent it from lighting up the tank when the IM Chaetomax comes on at night. I dialed the flow back a little bit and used an old Aquaclear attachment to skim the surface water instead of pulling water from the lower water column. It's only been running since last night but I had fun building it and used almost entirely old parts laying around in my bins of aquarium stuff that I've collected over the years.
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