Coral Hind

I would put some foam or something over the intake so you don't kill something else. Why do you not keep the shrimp in the display part of the tank? The idea for a skimmer is to remove nutrients before they can breakdown, so why leave something in the tank to rot? You might as well just unplug the skimmer.

It seems backwards to me. I always expected DFS to buy Petco. Hopefully the merger goes so that the DFS's experience and website are used. Petco's site is terrible.

Impressive!!

How about a pictures with white lights. The blue tends to throw off the natural colors. Honestly, I'm not into all that glamour naming of corals, they look like zoanthids or button polyps to me.

For late in the day testing the pH could be a little higher. I bet if you tested in the morning it would be even lower. Do you have a lid on the tank?

pH is a little low but it is probably from CO2. What time of the day did you check the pH?

Once the corals adjust to the better light penetration they should color back up. It can take a few months for the transition to slowly happen.

There is normally no issue with the pipes extending deep below the surface unless you have high flow with a high amount of air getting suck down which can cause large bubbles to pop out and create splashing. Each tank is different so you can't read something online and think it will work with your tank perfectly. A lot of this hobby is trial and error.

Let me know if you need any help. I've changed a few ballasts over the years.

I would put a 3/4" plywood deck on it and then a layer of foam or rubber pad to remove any imperfections and smooth it out.

I would recommend an ozone generator. I had a cloudiness issue that wouldn't go away but one day of ozone use cleared it right up.

What kind of blenny? What other fish do you have?

He looks hungry, roaming around for food. Ever since I saw the clear flatworms eating the small brown ones I have been a fan of them. Mine rarely came out in the daytime, mostly active at night. I guess with no predators in the tank the pods and worms have nothing to fear.

Are you leaving the hobby or upgrading tanks?

I think you will be happy with the rabbit and foxface choice. They also eat algae that most tangs will not touch. I really like my algea blenny but it can be aggressive to my tangs, even the large vlamingii. It doesn't bother the other smaller fish but it chases the tangs away from the rocks.

I don't think those are going to remain windows as there is no header over them. I think they just haven't added on OSB yet to those areas. I do agree with you that they would let more light in if those were windows. Sky lights or solar tubes might be a good idea too.

Very cool. You know you are doing things right as a reefer when the inhabitants start to breed. Nice job!

You will have to treat all the fish to remove the ich and let the main tank go fishless for four weeks. Just treating one fish will not solve the problem because as soon as it is put back in the tank it will just get ich again. The ich is probably on all the fish already, just not in high populations that are visible and probably more confined to the gill areas.

I tried the transfer method and to me it was too much work sterilizing and setting back up tanks before each move. Seems more stressful to fish and me when I constantly have to catch and move them early in the morning before the ich can get back on the fish. When you have several fish to do it is even more of a pain. I would only try the transfer method on really sensitive fish and then I don't feel it is 100% effective in two weeks.

Are you using a hospital tank and only treating that one fish? If you have other fish they will all need to be treated at the same time. For most fish like tangs I prefer copper in a QT tank over hypo. Hypo only kills ich and unless you are really sure it is ich then doing hypo would be a waste of time. Copper will kill ich and other things like velvet. One key to copper is starting the dose low and increase slowly over a few days to get to the desired level to hold it at for a couple of weeks. Tell us a little more of what you plan to do for treatment.

I spend much less than 10 minutes a day on my tank. I haven't cleaned the viewing surfaces since July 19th.

If it's just the slime that it excreted then it will be fine as it will just make more, nothing to worry about. It was probably making slime to clean itself from the other debris you were kicking up while cleaning the tank.

If the room that your tank is in gets a lot of daylight coming in windows you could be messing up sleep patterns of your fish causing them to be awake longer then normal. Just something to think about.

Once it settles in it will be fine. When do your lights turn off?

A 1/4 tablespoon is too much for one fish of that size. You might not need to feed at all if you just have the one fish. If you started the tank with good live rock it should have pods on it which the scooter can feed off of.