400 gallon project

untamed · #1 10-03-2007, 01:50 AM

Time to introduce the world to another fish. I've actually had her for about a month, but she was in such poor shape when I purchased her that I wasn't sure she would make it. Fortunately, she was interested in food. I had to hand feed her for the first week that she spent mostly laying on the bottom of the tank.

This is the wife of Zues...so naturally her name is Hera.

She is a bit smaller than Zues. So far, he has paid little attention to her.

You know...the fish shop should sell fish at a deep discount once they hit a certain stage. A sort of "if you can save it" special price. I'm quite pleased that I saved this one.

You can still see that she is a bit thin looking (you can see how sculpted out she looks on her back and cheeks). But she is getting at least 1/2 of all the food that goes in the tank now, so I'm sure she'll fill in. Between the two triggers, feeding time is becoming a bit like a shark feeding frenzy....you don't go putting your fingers in there .

untamed · #2 10-03-2007, 01:59 AM

This isn't the first reef I've ever run, but it is proving to be different than my previous effort.

When I planned this, I attempted to just do everything as I had always done...just bigger. This has now proven not to work. The reason - bigger fish. In particular...Tangs.

My previous tank was much too small to house any Tangs. I grew lovely macro algae and harvested it as necessary to maintain balance. I like the look of macro algae in the display and figured I would do the same thing in the larger tank.

Moe (the Naso Tang) ate all the macro algae.

One of the golden rules of aquarium keeping is "Algae will grow". It's either nice algae that you like or nasty algae that you don't like. Since all the nice algae was being eaten, the hair algae took over.

Attempting to keep control of hair algae by weeding it from a 400 gallon tank is well...impossible.

untamed · #3 10-03-2007, 02:08 AM

How to rid the tank of hair algae?

The first thing is to eliminate Phosphates from the system. Twin phosban reactors have been running for a month now. I can't yet measure phosphate accurately enough to know if they are working or not, but the theory is solid.

Grow algae somewhere else. I have now added a refugium to the system. The idea here is to run the light over the refugium nearly 24 hours/day so that this algae uses up the available nutrients first. Because this algae is in one spot, it is easy to harvest as it grows. (all this explanation is because I have non-aquarists who enjoy following my tank saga)

Finally, you have to go on the attack to eliminate the hair algae from the main tank. To that end, I have added two sea hares and some more urchins. The sea hares are very effective at mowing hair algae. (photo to follow) Should the sea hares ever successfully eat all the algae, I'll return them to the fish shop so that they can help someone else out.

untamed · #4 10-06-2007, 11:00 PM

This is what a sea hare looks like. It took a while before he got himself into a photographable position. There are two of them in the tank. The really surprising thing is how difficult they are to find when they aren't actively eating. They seem to have a real talent for hiding. This is the larger of the two.

untamed · #5 10-06-2007, 11:02 PM

I took a few shots today because I realized that my coral was growing, yet I had no photos to refer to. For no reason, here you go.

michika · #6 10-08-2007, 10:17 PM

Nice shots!

I hope the seahare works out for you. Are you seeing a lot of cleaning action from your urchins?

untamed · #7 10-08-2007, 10:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by michika

Nice shots!

I hope the seahare works out for you. Are you seeing a lot of cleaning action from your urchins?

Two seahares...and so far I'm impressed by the job they are doing. While I like the urchins, I would not say that they are very effective at eating hair algae. I think the urchins prefer coraline algae.