120gal mixed predatory reef tank

[manaf]

wowow i hate you, ur tank makes mine look bad lol

[whatcaneyedo]

I was trying to take some good close up shots of various acros that I have for sale this evening. Unfortunately I succeeded and as a result I discovered that I have F@#$%^G Red Bugs again! I wiped all of these little bastards out over a year ago and now they're back. I've given every new SPS purchase I've made an overnight interceptor bath but it seems that wasn't enough. So once again I have to treat the tank... I'll be following Melev's system again for this one and starting my first treatment tonight. http://www.melevsreef.com/redbugs.html

[busypencil]

thanks for replying.
My situation has changed and I am off work for medical reasons, NO INCOME
till U.I. cuts in. Bad time of year will have to put off buying for a few months
Linda

[whatcaneyedo]

The redbugs are gone once more and everything seems to be as it should. I've upgraded the overflow plumbing from 1-1/2" to 2" in order to quite it down a bit. I still run the small risk of an overflow because I only have the single drain so I've mounted a water level sensor to the top rim of the tank and connected it to my controller. If the water rises too high because something is blocking the overflow the alarm will sound, I'll get a text message and the return pump will shut off. This saved me from a potential disaster over the christmas holiday. Learn from my mistake folks... drill your tank for TWO overflows.



My skimmer is running a little bit better now with this Iwaki 70 pump which replaced the Iwaki 55 that I was using. It ran well before switching but now its able to process even more water.



The coral keeps growing and thankfully the bryosis is receding. Unfortunately most of my fish are the hiding sort (unless its feeding time). In there somewhere is a tomato clown, purple tang, mandarin dragonet, fu manchu lionfish, snowflake moray eel, and copperbanded butterfly.



The frag tank is where I spend most of my time. Sawing and snipping, tethering and gluing... I bought that big elegance a month ago. What I ordered was a frag of an Australian elegance and what I received was a large colony instead. I'm hoping that my purchase and placement was educated enough and that I will be successful. This is the second (and the last) elegance that I will buy. The first one was an Indonesian a few years ago that died within a week. If I'm successful with this Australian I plan to try fragging it in a years time.

[whatcaneyedo]

Look who came out to pose for the camera!

[whatcaneyedo]

Not a lot to report on. I lost my big golden tear drop maxima clam last week. On the Monday its mantle looked pinched in one spot so I moved it to my frag tank because I though it may have been nipped by one of the fish. By Wednesday it looked pretty bad so I gave it a fresh water dip. By Friday it was dead. I guess I waited too long to dip but I'm not sure. I had the clam for 5 years and it died in 5 days... sucks.

Here is a picture of how the maxima looked on the Wednesday before the dip. Normally the mantle would be very well extended. Theres probably a regular picture of it in this thread.


Most of the other 6 clams are doing fine and havent had any problems. However I did freshwater dip my squamosa about 3 weeks ago when it started exhibiting signs of pinch mantle. The squamosa recovered without incident. Ironically I've never had any problems with the 'difficult' to keep crocea clams. Just the 'easier' maxima, squamosa and derasa...

March 19 FTS

[neoh]

Read the whole thread, very inspiring! That Fu Manchu is awesome. I saw one at the LFS a couple weeks ago and have vouched to get one when I can house it properly.

Very nice work.

And for the record, I too am a sawdust sweeping degree holding metalhead ;D

[whatcaneyedo]

Here are a few new interesting pictures. The small green coral is a tiny little trachyphyllia frag that accidentally came off of the larger colony that I recently sold. I've added an arrow to point to a pod for size reference. It started out as a little chunk of skeleton with some tissue attached that fell off the side after I did some cutting and has grown into a mini colony with its own mouth and feeder tentacles.



This just looks cool...



FTS May 14. I'm feeling pretty lucky these days. My only real problem is the red slime that still wont go away.



Here are a few pictures of my Australian elegance coral that I got back in December. This is a picture from the first day. Notice the location of the tissue on the skeleton...



... Here is a picture of the elegance at night all closed up. You can see here how much it has grown in the past 6 months! *note: I cut 1" of old skeleton off of the bottom so that it wouldnt sit so tall.



Here is a day time shot with the tissue fully expanded. I'm pretty excited about my success so far. The only other elegance I've tried was an Indo and it was dead within a week. If this Australian continues to thrive and grow for another six months I'll try fragging it.

[Sebae again]

Awesome colour and shot of the open brain coral.

[whatcaneyedo]

I haven't posted anything here in over a month so here are some updates on the world within my tank. Shortly after my FTOTM release the yellow coris wrasse disappeared. I suspect my eel may have eaten it but I'm not sure. I had had it for over two years and it was 3" long... There was no trace of it inside or outside of the tank so maybe I'll never know.



It seems like every month comes with a new problem/challenge and I think I may have solved this one. My beautiful blue and pink chalice has recently been showing some recession while the other chalice frag I have under identical conditions continues to grow very well. They are both in my frag tank which does not contain any fish, crabs, shrimp or anything else that could pick on them... or at least that is what I thought until I found a crab molt the other day. So I did some exploring and found a little gorilla crab hiding under a large coral that was very close to where I kept this chalice. The crab has since been removed to a fish bowl in my sump so hopefully that solves the mystery.

Before


After


Red circled crab in exile


Some good news... This coral continues to grow at an exponential rate. Here are two pictures taken one year apart.

May 2009


May 2010


I did a little system tweaking this month too and added this solenoid to my fresh water reservoir. I bought the valve on ebay from valvesforprojects and wired it to a 12VDC adapter from an old internet router that doesn't work anymore. It is on a timer to turn the flow on for an hour each day. This way my RO/DI filter doesn't have to turn on and off 40+ times a day whenever the Tunze top-off system replenishes some evaporated water.