Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[mseepman]

Hey any updates on this? Anxiously awaiting to see how it moves forward from here. What does your rock look like now?

[ashr]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

Well I just picked them up yesterday and haven't sorted out how I'm going to hang them yet (Kevin is helping me come up with something that will allow me to raise and lower them), so at the moment this is the closest I've got to a pic...



I did however take one of those MP60's and put it in the tank yesterday and holy freaking crap. I'm going to have to do some playing around with rock scaping and power head placement. With the powerhead about half way between the sand and the top of the water, it can cause full blown sand tornados on the second lowest setting! The power of it gives me tingles.

This picture just blows my mind haha. So much money spent right here.. wow.

Great looking tank and setup!!

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by mseepman

Hey any updates on this? Anxiously awaiting to see how it moves forward from here. What does your rock look like now?

It has been a while hasn't it?

Well, I'm not gonna post any pics just yet as I was a little over zealous with the cycling process and caused a nasty algae problem before I even had any fish. Thankfully it's getting better now, but I'm still working on getting my nutrient export system dialled in. NO3 and PO4 keep testing at zero, so I'm having to go visually at how fast the algae that's left is growing.

As for the rocks - I got a 66 pound box of Walt Smith live rock shipped directly from Fiji (thanks Kevin!) and picked it up at the end of April (I think). I put it in the sump to cure it, then left town for most of May. When I got home, the tank looked like garbage, which I was expecting, so right now I'm bringing the tank down to a low nutrient system using BP and GFO, which I expect to take a bit of time and fiddling around

The tank looked WAY too full with all the marco rock plus the live rock in the display, so I took out about 50 pounds of Marco rock. Some went in the frag chamber, some is in my garage. The rock structure looks pretty close to the earlier pics I posted, only now the visible stuff is made up of mostly live rock. I'm going to rescape again in the not too distant future so that there are more hiding places in both rock structures, I don't want there being any aggression over sleeping sites.

I put all the corals I had in my 5 gallon pico in to the tank to test the lights, and at 100% for 6 hours a day, almost every single thing bleached. I lost a scoly (on the sand bed), and am worried that a big chalice (2 inches off the sand bed) and a small elegance (on the sand bed) might not pull through. In all fairness, those 'tester' corals were in the tank before I put 66 pounds of completely uncured live rock in the sump then left for weeks, so they likely had compounding issues, but the chalice coral was about 1/3 in the shade, and only the surface exposed to the light bleached. The clam I had in the pico is about half way up in the tank, and it was barely even opening until I dialled the lights way back. They now come on with a simulated sunrise at 7:30, slowly ramp up through 20K to 12K at 60% at noon, then gradually gain another 5% intensity over the course of 6 hours, and at 6 start dimming down through 20K to a simulated sunset at 9. I added a medium sized open brain coral to the sand bed and one small tester frag of SPS about half way up the rock work this week and am going to use them as my indicators for light levels going forward. The two corals that seemed to have no problem with the lights at 100% were my two Acans frags. If anything they got more colourful under the radions.

As soon as I get the algae issue a little more under control I'll post pics. I'm sort of working against myself a little at the moment as I have started buying fish and I'm having a hard time getting them to eat anything except mysis shrimp. I bought a blue-eyed bristle tooth tang when I got home from hawaii to help with algae clean up, and he won't even acknowledge nori sheets. I've also got a couple other fish that I'm trying to get started on pellets, krill, and chopped seafood, but so far all I'm doing is adding a whole bunch of extra, uneaten nutrients to the water.

[mseepman]

Hmmm...seems like you have your hands full. It would seem that you should halt everything until you get that nutrient issue under control. Otherwise you keep changing the rules and will never figure out the solution.

looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in a FTS when you're ready.

[fishytime]

aw, cmon Adam.....we all go through those new tank blues....dont be embarrassed....show us those "hairy rocks"

[mseepman]

You know, someone could get the wrong idea when you ask another dude to show you his "hairy rocks".

[asylumdown]

hehe, I may have been exaggerating the problem a little. It was REALLY bad when I came home from hawaii, but what I'm most grossed out by is the sand. I got the caribsea special grade sand, which has grains just big enough for macro algae to take root on it. The rocks are almost totally cleaned of the bad stuff except two minor spots of hair algae and some weird translucent purple macro algae that grew on on of the pieces of walt smith rock, but the sand just looks like garbage. I've got 5 conches in there that are making it better slowly, but I need more I think.

I'm headed to Edmonton for the weekend, but I'll try and take pictures when I get home. LED's and camera sensor's do not get along, I have discovered, I'll have to get some pointers from Levi to figure it out.

The one cool thing that I didn't mention is that about half of the big rock pieces I got from Walt smith were built by what to me looks like a some kind of montipora, and on almost all of them, large patches of the coral that built the rock are still alive. It's not pretty at all, like a tan body with tiny white polyps, but it's pretty freaking cool either way.

[mseepman]

Wow, looking forward to the pics of the Walt Smith stuff! You're scaring me on the sand comments since I've pre-bought 160lbs of that to mix with 60-90lbs of the select.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by mseepman

Wow, looking forward to the pics of the Walt Smith stuff! You're scaring me on the sand comments since I've pre-bought 160lbs of that to mix with 60-90lbs of the select.

Nah don't be. Unless you plan on wrecking your tank with a nutrient orgy. My sand is brand new, so there's not a whole lot in terms of micro-fauna living in it yet (I just spotted my first worm against the glass yesterday) and I really over did it with the cycle. Before I left for Hawaii I had been letting between 3 and 5 shrimp rot in a bag in my sump every 2 days for the better part of a month to try and build the biggest possible bacterial population on my rocks in anticipation of receiving 60 pounds of uncured live rock. I give that process partial credit for why the coral on the Walt Smith rock survived curing, but before I left for hawaii, my water was testing over 60 ppm nitrates and 1.2 ppm phosphates. I had also added a small piece of seed live rock from a store here in town to try and trigger a diatom bloom in mid April, and that piece of rock seeded my tank with a really specific kind of pale green macro algae that looks like hair algae from far away, but isn't when you look at it closely. Since it was an otherwise sterile tank, it basically became a massive mono-culture of the stuff, and it grew on the sand as easily as it grew on the rocks. The nutrient issues are largely resolving now, and thankfully that first species of algae was like crack to the bristle tooth tang so he's polished to rocks and over flow boxes pretty effectively. However, he doesn't like to eat it off the sand and I'm having to wait while the glacially slow conches clean it up. In the meantime, the remaining algae on the sand (a lot of it seems to be dead) is collecting detritus, making it look even worse.

Moral of the story, I don't think there's anything wrong with that particular sand, but my process was really hard on it. As the algae continues to recede and get eaten and the population of decomposers builds up in my sand, I expect it will return to sparkling white again.

[asylumdown]

Alright, it's picture time, but be warned, iPhone's just can't seem to cope with LED lighting. Like seriously, after you take the photo you look at it, then the tank, and wonder if it somehow took a picture of someone else's tank.

The algae issue continues to abate. Most of the algae on the sand-bed died, but I was tired of waiting for the conches to eat all the dead stuff (which was basically a magnet for detritus) so yesterday I put one end of a hose in the filter sock and then vacuumed the heck out of the sand to get all the clumps of dead algae up. The tank looks SO much better. I also added another 2 cups of biopellets to my re-circulating reactor, increased the flow rate, and decreased the tumble rate slightly. I've also cut back on my feedings as I'm no longer trying to get my fish to eat all the different kinds of foods I was feeding. I know now what they'll eat and what they won't, so there's far less uneaten waste entering the tank. It's still not pristine, but I'm really pleased with where I'm at at this stage.

I'm still amazed at how different the live rock looks from the marco rock. But since I study biological succession (though from a terrestrial point of view) I'm not entirely surprised. The types of algae growing on the marco rock seems to be very opportunistic and aren't invested in the long term, it's easy to remove with my fingers, and seems less robust in general, with a focus on rapid colonization. The species diversity is clearly really low (some marco rocks have only one or two species on them), and under the algae that's grown the rock is still bright white. The live rock from Fiji is covered with a dark bio-film that clearly represents the 'climax' community of rock covering organisms, and it will be interesting to watch how the Marco rock progresses toward this type of community over time.

But enough talk! I only took pictures from the dining room tonight as there's just not that much to see.

FTS:


North end:


South End:


Marked difference between Marco and live rock. Note how the Marco rock is covered with stringy, early succession filamentous algae. There's also a little nub of coral that hitchhiked in from Fiji in this shot (though you probably can't see it):


My first little collection of corals. The pictures are so bad you can barely see tell that there are two SPS frags in this pic


The next two are horrible shots of the spa that hitchhiked in on the rock from Fiji. In full light it's a very light pink with white polyps, and in the shade it's a dark brown with almost green polyps. It's literally everywhere in the tank.



The only other thing to note is that so far, I'm using my frag chamber in the sump as a place to house marco rock that I had to pull out of the display after I added the live rock, and all the rubble from the live rock box that I didn't want in the display. It's slowly turning out to be a crypto-fugium of sorts as tiny little non-photosynthetic tunicates are popping up all over the place in there. Pretty cool.