monkeydad

Here is the tank after another nine months. This is what it grew to before I recently started taking it down for a move to Phoenix. As you can see, the GSP was really taking over! I put in a Tunes wave pump (the magnetic/wireless one) really awesome. A small Koralia steady pump Upgraded the stock main pump to a 900gpm one BioCube skimmer Bag of carbon changed regularly Changed the back actinic to a 50/50 white/actinic I can't wait until we settled into our new house and set up a (much) larger system. Thanks for all the help!

I stumbled upon a way to get rid of bubble algae. At first, I would p#*!k it with a long, skinny, sharpened, solid siphon tube attached to a syringe, sucking up the gooey inside so as not to spread it. This worked okay, but it still let some of the gooey insides out. I left it alone, until one bubble got to be about 3-4mm, and I was curious, so I touched it. I discovered it had a hard shell.... Hmm.... So I wiggled it, and it popped right off the rock! I tossed it out. Another piece had grown, this one about 6mm (pretty big), so I tried to pop it out too. It was more difficult, and required very gently, patiently wiggling it back and forth until it popped out too. So far I've been lucky in that each piece that's grown was reachable by hand. I've hand-removed all of my bubble algae, and have not seen any in over two months! BTW, pick them off when they are less than 5mm or so, the shells on the smaller diameter are harder, and you can wiggle them with more force than the larger ones.

Wow. I've got a large one also, in my BC14. I've decided to leave it in there, it's very interesting. It is very bold, and comes out in the daytime to feed on detritus on the sand bed. He pokes around the rubble. I've grown quite fond of him! So far I have not observed any "bad" behavior from him.

We have one that is approaching that size. He/it is very bold, and comes out all the time during the day. It is the best detritus eater I have! He poke out about half-way, and munches on the sand surface. I really like it! Great pic thanks.

Thanks all. I think it is lympho as well. I'd like to scrape it, but that fish is as fast as the Millinium Falcon, and as maneuverable as an F1 car! I really don't want it to infect the percula that's in there with it.... I'll leave it in the main tank, stay on top of params, and feed it well. Just gonna haveta watch and see. Sam, are you sure it will get worse? I was thinking I could take better care of him if he was alone and getting fed etc. etc. ...I leave town for six days, I come back, and my tank looks like H-E-double hockey sticks, the water is off, and my damsel has the clap! WTHO?? ...I did a thorough cleaning and water change before leaving too...

My YT blue damsel has a virus/fungus/infection/parasite. My LFS owner thinks is a virus, a fairly common one, and that the virus has no cure... It is possible that it is something treatable, but without removing the fish and bringing it to someone who can get a sample and look at it under a microscope, identification by visual means seems to me hit-and-miss because so many illnesses look similar, but they have different treatment regimens. Here is the best photo I can muster... I do not have a cycled hospital tank. I do have a 5g tank with hood (light, filter, pump) that I can set up with just my existing tank water. Choices: I can try several treatment methods over the next month (each unsuccessful attempt is surely going to cause stress for the fish). I can give it away to a fellow reefer who can take it (unlikely). I can euthanize the fish. I cannot leave this fish in my tank for obvious reasons. If it is the virus my LFS owner thinks, it has no cure, and is not fatal-usually, if the fish stays totally healthy-but is communicable. I'm leaning on euthanasia. What do you more experienced reefers make of this situation?

VEry useful!! I'd like to share one with all of you. My wife is a nurse anesthetist, and I asked here to bring home some syringes. 3ml for dosing small amounts 20ml for target feeding 60ml for cleaning: I found that injecting the sandbed gently with tankwater turns the sand over very nicely, gets the detritus into suspension, and lets me get rid of it with the water change I do right after.

Why 'wet' skimming? I thought the most efficient way to run a protein skimmer is to run it so that it makes lots of bubbles with as little water as possible. THanks!

zygote, thanks for the original. its interesting to read he used gravel, but more recent advise is to use fine-grained aragonite

Thanks dbartco and sen, I'll leave it. It is sloughing off a clear globulous slime-strands (maybe a spawn?), and the tentacles are turning brown, as if burned. I feel horrible:cry: I have had high phosphates, despite religious water changes. I put a macroalgae in the tank behind my rockscape to eat it up. The phosphates have dropped from.50 to .25 and I hope to see it go to normal soon. I fed it, and it perked up a bit, but after an hour, it started looking worse again...I fed him Rod's Coral Blend.

1 U-shaped Coralife 10k 24watt florescent 1 U-shaped Coralife actinic

Good idea trockafella. I don't like that the dead matter flew all around my tank though... I did a partial change last night when it happened.

Stock BC lights. What does the spawning look like?

It is a long tentacle plate. I learned about the sandbed preference yesterday. It's in it's original place on the sand where it was happy before. Thanks.

We'll see what happens. It was stressed some, but in the last 24 hours it's flesh turned into a brown jelly as described in my coral book. It happened very fast. Stated treatment was a fresh water dip. Params are as in my above post. I'll give it another 24hrs.

14g BC Most water parameters good. Amonia NH3/NH4: zero Nitrite NO2: zero Nitrate NO3: .05 pH: 8.2 in morning, 8.4 late afternoon. Until buffer treatment began five days ago the night time drop was from 8.4 to 7.9-8.0 Calcium: Has been low until calcium additive started five days ago. From 350-380 to 420-440 ppm Alkalinity: Has swung around, but in the normal range from low to medium of proper meq/L range 3.00-3.8 meq/L Temp: Set for 78F, over the last five days it briefly hit 80.0-80.5F from the warmer house temps. I've regulated it to 78 since. I currently dose 1 ml of Purple Up calcium additive and 1 ml of buffer solution for my 14g. The water seems to be holding a stable pH and Alkalinity now. I do partial water changes twice a week. My plate coral looked great up until last night. The before and after photos below illustrate what has happened over the last 48 hours. Man, when I read that bad things can happen fast, I never thought it could happen that quickly, especially with seemingly decent water params and frequent water changes! The quickness and severity of the changes are shocking. I saw that in 48 hours the plate coral's flesh was dying off. All other corals in tank were/are happy. Acans, mushrooms, GSP, monti growing nicely. Last night I came home from Mr. Coral's (to pick up my FREE FRAG-THANK YOU!!), and the plate coral looked horribly discolored (gray/brown). I picked it up and saw it's flesh was decayed, so I shook the dead material off, and it filled the tank with the decayed flesh-ewe-and I got a bad feeling that maybe I should have done that in a bucket... Reading a book this morning, I suspect brown jelly (protozoan) infection. What I see fits the symptoms well. Treatment: I shook off the material again this morning in a bucket of salt-water, and dipped in fresh water (both from LFS) for several minutes, and placed back into tank. Lets hope it bounces back! I also placed over $200 worth of Mr. Coral's corals in the tank, and now they are exposed to the infection... Water changes twice a day for a few days are on my to-do list... Lessons learned: -Cause of infection; I moved the plate coral around a lot reefscaping, and dropped it a couple of time. Also, I put it up on a rock and a snail knocked it down and it sat overnight upside down. From what I've read, a healthy coral that gets damaged can have the infection introduced. Also, high temps could be a factor as well. I suspect my rough handling of it let it get infected. -Don't shake off what you might even SLIGHTLY suspect is dead flesh of a coral in tank-QUARANTINE ASAP! Brown jelly (and many other things) is/are contagious. -Did I mention, QUARANTINE ASAP! I was ill prepared to quarantine. -Be sure to warm up the water for quarantine and dipping water....I did not, and didn't realize how cold the water was until I put my hand in placing the coral. So, I'm embarrassed to tell of this experience, but I hope any other Noobs out there can learn from this. The plate coral is on top center of the rockscape in the before pic.

killrblue, Nicely done! I have the same BC (14g). I had some questions: Chamber 1 - removed false floor, 50W Heater, I have a Skimmer from Oceanic but waiting to see if I need or not with the weekly water changes. What kind of heater, and how did you rig it? Does the floor pull out, or was it cut? Partition slit between Chamber 1 and 2 cut What does this do for you? Chamber 2 - empty for now, but will have a Mediabasket with Floss, Chemi-pure Elite, Cheato with 5w underwater light in a few days. No bio-balls? I was thinking of putting in some macro-algae in the back of my display, but I like the idea of Cheato out of site. I am also considering a 5g refugium with Cheato under the tank in my stand. I am leary of getting rid of the bio-balls. I've had one or two people say get rid of them "after a while" but I don't know why. Aren't they an integral part of the bio-filter? Chamber 3 - kept the sponge and upgraded the stock return pump to a maxi-jet 900 Is this the large pump on the right side of your tank, or did you change the pump inside the sump, and add the powerhead as well? Thank you!

Very cool folks, thanks a lot. I was thinking if I wanted Harlequin shrimp, then I would trade my peppermint in on a mated pair of Harlequins netting a gain of only one crustacean. But as I did some more reading on the peppermint shrimp, I saw they eat aiptasia. I had one aiptasia on a coral frag, key word HAD. It was gone....hmm, I wonder if my peppermint ate it. I'm going to keep the peppermint! Maybe a Harlequin later. I'm going to keep the asterina and watch what happens.

Thanks L8 2 Rise, Google revealed conflicting info like I'm seeing here. They are either harmless or eat "GSP, acropora, xenia, green star polyps, zoanthids, and several types of soft leather corals." which is from a nano-reef.com information post. The Harlequin Shrimp look pretty neat, but I already have one peppermint and one fire/blood shrimp in my 14g nano-reef biocube and I want to be careful to not overload the bio filter.

Wow that was fast zygote2k! It would be my luck to have a pest starfish! My googling revealed that they eat several varieties of coral that I want to have (and my GSP, which I already have) and that the multiply rapidly. Getting him out is going to be TOUGH.

So I'm sittin' in my chair with a cup of joe watching life happen in my 14g nano reef tank with Fiji LR and I see an almost imperceptible movement of 'something'. Hmmm, what's this? It appears to be a slug, possibly a snail. It has a small, pink, oval-shaped shell that barely covers the body. It is about an inch long, and I can't believe I hadn't seen it until today (tank is two months old). So as I'm staring at this thing, I notice what looks like a starfish. I'm thinking, "I didn't put that in there"... Is it just a shell on/in the rock? So I stick my mitt in the tank and touched it. IT MOVED! Wow, not only did it start to amble off, but it changed colors! It has five points and is certainly not a brittle type with skinny long arms and button body. Its arms were fairly short and stocky at the base tapering to a point and were a bit stiff. Did I mention it changed color! When I touched it, it turned white, then slowly matched the background. Anyone know what these are (especially the 'starfish')?? As always, THANKS! On each picture, look for the starfish at the 7 O'clock position relative to the red colored epoxy/putty.

Thank you sen. I don't think I can scrape paint off at this point. Maybe before I filled it, but now its set up and stocked. Can you scrape paint in an active aquarium? I am thinking of setting up a 5g refugium in the cabinet. I need to work out how to get water up and down... I've been measuring parameters and changed the water again, and levels have dropped to zero. My biggest issue right now is pH, and alkalinity. I just got a bottle of calcium and am supplementing. My pH swings around quite a bit, I think I may need to buffer.

Thanks all, We've been out of town and have not cleaned in 10 days or so. From what I'm reading this is normal. I tried a protein skimmer from Bio Cube, made for this tank, but I could not seem to regulate the bubbles very well and all it ever did was make water. I went back to the media filter with activated charcoal as it came out of the box. Water params today are perfect as for amon/trite/trate/pH. I haven't changed the water in about six days, so I think the bio filter has caught up to the critter load.

Ar...sorry folks... local areas of red and green. Red primarily on and just below substrate, green on surface of substrate and glass. Jan, yes. I added "cycle" with last weeks multiple water changes to boost microbe production. zygote2k, I don't think this is happening. All I've done to chemistry is change water. I do need to start adding calcium I think for my corals. Coral Hind, I don't know the brand, it's from my LFS who makes salt water in big batches with RO water. What products? All, what is the safest way to clean off the algae? I don't want to dump another load of organics to feed another bloom.

Hi all, I'm very grateful to all those that gave advise to me so far, and I have another question. 14G BioCube, stock factory filtration. I overfed and had another cycle in my tank. I performed water changes every other day, and had the critters and fish (2) on a "bread and water" diet while the bacteria caught up to the bio-load. Now, there is an overabundance of phosphate that is causing an algae bloom to begin. What I'm doing: Reduced lights on hours per day Change water (I'm getting a little tired of water changes....several per week) Scrub algae off glass I have yet to begin adding kalk or calcium, will start later today. I'm also getting another test kit to start checking more parameters than amonia/nitrite/nitrate/pH. Any ideas of how to be able to start feeding my critters what they need and take care of the phosphate buildup? Thanks!