Marc Weaver

Welcome!! What part of PA are you from?

Mine does as well. I don't know why either.

Things are looking good!! The "worm" thing with a silk strand is a vermetid snail. Their "nets" can irritate coral. If you can, get the frogspawn out and break the tube off at the base, or you can stick a needle down into the tube to kill the snail if you can.

I get mine from noridirect.com. Grade B. You can rubber-band it to a piece of live rock if the tang is afraid of the clip.

I also use the htc one with my apex on my wireless network and through 3G. It works fine.

Based on what I have experienced and read, lanthanum is not a viable long-term replacement for GFO. It will not lower phosphate to low levels (below .07) reliably and consistently. It's best usage is to lower high phosphates to manageable levels, then stop and use GFO. I have tried it before, it works well for lowering phosphates below .1 if they are higher. I dosed it right into the sump of my tank when I first started it to combat extremely high phosphates. There were only a few random corals and some fish that were not affected by the dosing. Apparently this was not a good idea because of the precipitate that lands everywhere. I didn't see any negative effects, but I stopped when I realized I was not going to get any lower than .06-.08 and switched to GFO. I used Ultralife Liguid Phosphate Remover for reef tanks. That little bottle goes an EXTREMELY long way. Only a few drops per day were all I needed and it only took around a week. I still have 90% of it left, and that was on a 150 gallon tank with a 55 gallon sump.

I buy all my filter socks here: http://www.mcmaster.com/9316t111

Some updated pics. Coralline is taking off like crazy and SPS are coloring up.

After a long battle with an EVIL citron goby, the SPS can actually grow now. He messed up some nice stuff, like the red planet and hyacinthus. I tried to catch him for 2 weeks by shocking him with a flashlight after dark and netting him near his favorite hangouts to no avail. I had a fish trap in the whole time with some rock and a monti. While I was looking at the tank one day, he finally swam right into the trap. He's in the mangrove tank now. Here's a picture of the damage. He was ripping the flesh all over this one, laughing at me.

Mine had to be first and foremost when any type of food was involved, and always made a beeline for the largest piece of anything. He loved eating flipped over snails. I'd definitely have another, though. Great fish with lots of personality.

I hope you are not disappointed, they only look like they do in the pictures from directly above for some reason. I'm not talking about Dr Mac's only, they are all like that.

Mine loved seaweed too and was right up at the veggie clip with the tangs. When we switched tanks, I forgot about him and he was buried in the old tank's sand for 24 hours with little to no water. I was downstairs looking at the new tank and it hit me!! Found him in the last square foot of sand I was searching. He was alive and well!! The shock took its toll on him and he died 3 days later, unfortunately.

Whenever you start feeding seaweed, she will probably quickly learn that she likes it better than algae. If she's not veggie-clip trained already, it may take a little while for her to warm up to it. My tangs, filefish, and lawnmower blenny mob the veggie clip when it is put into the tank. They get very excited when I take it out to re-load it. They learn quickly. I would definitely get her used to it now because your macro/hair algae may eventually disappear (at least you hope it will.)

No, the eggs are naturally "glued" on and will not come off with a soft brush. They can be scraped off or superglued over, though. They will not be attached to live coral tissue, only the dead skeleton or on the plug. They are usually near the bottom on the underside of a lower branch and/or at the bottom of the main "trunk" of the frag in a dead area.

+1 on the tunze osmolator. Well worth the $200. Hasn't failed once in 3 years (my friend used one for 8 years.) It uses an optical sensor instead of a float switch.

Funny. It's like a fish reality show.

I know after re-reading it I can picture Ben Stein reading it and saying "anyone, anyone?"

I used to dose bulk reef supply soda ash and calcium once a day by hand and never noticed anything bad happening. I was up to 75 mL of each in a 220 gallon SPS dominant and just poured them in the sump slowly 1/2 hour apart. I then started using a dosing pump and dosing a few mL once an hour all day long when demand got higher. The dosing pump controller I have is one where you just tell it how much you want to dose per day and how many times a day and it takes care of the rest. I use a calcium reactor now and will never look back, but that is beside the point.... I wouldn't worry about upsetting the coral by manually dosing all of it at a time at first, but once your reef shows lots of demand it will become a pain. It all depends on how much alk demand you have every day. You want to try and avoid a roller coaster type fluctuation of your basic parameters whenever possible. The last time I checked my 220 (which was a long time ago) my reef was using around 1/3 dKH of alk a day. My current tank is still young and when the calcium reactor failed (due to my mistake) I lost .7 dKH in 1 day.

I think he was just trying to show everyone that at regular 10% water changes alk is not affected as much as you may think. His example was at the opposite ends of the usual ranges. I would not use this formula in place of testing, though. It all depends on the sensitivity of the animals you are keeping. For example, in a full blown, ultra-low nutrient SPS tank with a normal alk of 7.5, I would not do a 20% water change with 12dKH water. That may cause a shock. But for fish/soft coral/LPS I am willing to bet that a 1/2 to 1 dKH immediate change would not cause any problems (other that pissing the coral off for a little while.)

I've handled them before with bare hands and it did nothing to me. Maybe the skin on our hands is thicker than the wrist area. That looks painful.

They can kill some types of coral, so it's best to put them in and let them find their spot first.

Definitely true. I know the Osmolator from Tunze that I use will turn the pump off after 5 minutes or so and lock the system so that's all the water that will be put into the tank. Your topoff tank should be proportionate to your system volume. Don't use a 32 gallon trash can for a nano tank LOL.

In my case, I agree with you on this one. I use a latching relay/solenoid controlled RO/DI topoff reservoir (brute can) that fills back up at around 6" from the bottom and fills until 6" or so from the top (around 25 gallons at a time.) Before I started circulating with a powerhead, the water would become stagnant and smell nasty after a few weeks. The brute is tightly covered. But, I also agree with Rob in the fact that storing that much RO/DI unless it is for auto-topoff is a waste of time, unless maybe for an emergency if it helps your peace of mind.

I forgot to tell you that the TDS out of the RO will spike and go down within a minute or so every time you turn it on, so test again after running the system for a minute or so.

You are right on all counts. Between RO and DI should be no higher than 3 or 4 (2% of your tap TDS.) You DI will not last very long at all if your measurements are correct.