280g Inwall

[Jason McK]

Looking Amazing Tony. Great looking coral and fish.

[lastlight]

Things look awesome especially those acans! Those watchmen appear to be a lot more confident than the last time I saw them.

[Lance]

Everything looks fit as a fiddle Tony. I'm particularly envious of your Bellus pair; I've been looking for a pair for quite sometime now. Keep up the good work.

[fishoholic]

Looks great, I love all the fish pic's

[christyf5]

Originally Posted by Lance

Everything looks fit as a fiddle Tony. I'm particularly envious of your Bellus pair; I've been looking for a pair for quite sometime now. Keep up the good work.

The males are apparently terrible shippers. Get two females and wait it out, thats what I'm doing. Just waiting for a second one as only one came in on the last order

[Delphinus]

Wish I could offer some advice on that but these guys came to me together out of a tank being shutdown.

The most fighting in the tank occurs among the angels. The male chases the female an awful lot to the point that I worry one day I'll find her outside the tank. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of damage done if he catches up to her, so I'm not really certain what is going on there. And then both the male and the female will have their individual spats with the potters, although like the occasional spat among the tangs (who aren't the best of friends but will tolerate each other for the most part), seem to only last a minute or two and then they go their separate ways.

Every so often I have seen the male do a display for the female however, and it is kind of neat to watch. He will swim sideways, occasionally flipping sides, and vibrate his tail. At least I think it's a display because he clearly looks for the female before he starts all this. I remember thinking "yeah right buddy, good luck with that. You are so sleeping on the fishy couch tonight."

[Delphinus]

Well I finally broke down and added GFO to the system this week, and the results so far are .. well .. astonishing. Or at least, suffice it to say, I'm not sure I understand what's going on.

On Sunday I added 16 Tblsp (1 cup) of GFO to a TLF 150 reactor. Being concerned of a sudden PO4 drop (as this is reasonably well documented to be stressful to corals and can cause tissue recession and so on), I started with what I thought was a conservative amount of GFO (high capacity GFO, sourced by Eli at CaCO3Reef). Established guidelines for HC-GFO seem to suggest starting around 8 Tblsp per 8 gallons (before eventually being able to double that) so for a system with 300 gallons you'd think you'd want 37.5 Tblsp, 1 cup is 16 Tblsp so this is less than half of that so here I was thinking I was starting off with "half of the half amount for starters."

Set the flowrate to the reactor to slow (estimate maybe 50ml/min). At 50 ml/min it is basically a slow trickle. If I have my math right, it would take about 16 days to fully turnover one tank volume at this flowrate.

I thought it would be fun to test the tank PO4 and the reactor's output of PO4 for the first little bit. Doing dual tests like this should tell me a couple things:
1) If the GFO is "working" at all
2) How fast the PO4 is dropping in the tank
3) When the GFO is expended and needs to be replaced.
.. All good things to know.

Soooo anyhow, here are the results so far:

Day 0: Tank PO4=0.17ppm Reactor PO4=0.15
(I thought, oh good, it's only lowering the PO4 a little bit, this should be a nice safe slow reduction.)

Day 2: Tank PO4=0.08ppm Reactor PO4=0.18
(I thought, huh? Ok, I did some bad tests here. Try again tomorrow.)

Day 3: Tank PO4=0.07ppm Reactor PO4=0.00
(Makes me think the reactor testing from the day before was the bad result.)

So um ... Wow? Does this even make sense? That GFO must be one heck of a PO4 scavenger if it has halved the PO4 in the tank already after 2-3 days at such a small volume and small turnover.

So far there is one coral exhibiting some slight tip burn. It is very minor at this point however. It should easily recover assuming it doesn't get worse first. The piece in question is a Cali tort which hasn't actually been blue in over a year now (it did phenomenally well in the first quarter of the first year and then has been struggling ever since. It is clearly a strong coral however though, because in this time any other coral that has shown the slightest bit of distress over the PO4 eventually RTN'd at some point.)

I'm really excited to see where the reduced PO4 levels should take me in terms of coral growth and colour. I hope this is a positive step for the tank. It would be nice, for example, to see the Cali tort start to look like an actual Cali tort again. Oh, the possibilities!

[Myka]

Holy crap Tony, I didn't realize you finally had water in this bad boy! I will have to read through your journal later and get up to speed.

[globaldesigns]

Oh come on now Tony, you start things, and I have to follow! Now this? Reminds me of the BioPellet Days. Tagging along to see the overall results.

[Delphinus]

Originally Posted by Myka

Holy crap Tony, I didn't realize you finally had water in this bad boy! I will have to read through your journal later and get up to speed.

Hahahaha! Sadly I can't really tell if you're kidding or not. I know this is was one of the slowest builds ever (and the record probably still holds) but there's been water in the tank since .. um .. late 2010 or thereabouts.