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cpu933k

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  1. Also added these Tinker's Butterflyfish (Chaetodon tinkeri). They were supposedly caught as a wild pair, but who really knows? They haven't killed each other after 8 weeks of QT, so there's that. They are pretty hard to come by right now because according to the collectors, they shut down the west side of one of the islands they normally collect them at. I happened to find a LFS in SoCal that had several of them in stock. Their price for a pair was cheaper than the price for 2 individually, so I suspect it's probably not a true wild caught pair as retailers usually charge a premium for true pairs.

     

    tinkeri 1:

     

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    tinkeri 2, I think one of his dorsal fins is slightly damaged, but doesn't seem to affect him:

     

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    Pair:

     

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    Hawaiian buddies with a cowfish photobomb:

     

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    Full tank shots:

     

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    Regal is still the boss and chases everyone around.
  2. Before jumping into dosing copper, I would suggest reading up on it. There are two different kinds, ionic (cupramine) and chelated (coppersafe, copper power) and different fish may be more sensitive to one or the other. Also you need different copper test kits for measuring ionic vs chelated.

     




     

    Also read this thread about a warning regarding coppersafe and the hanna high range copper tester showing promise for measuring both ionic and chelated copper:

     

  3. Thanks for sharing your experience, where did you get the flucanazole and what mg did you use? I am having a hair algae problem myself on my tank and its out of control.

     

     

     

    You can get fluco from Payless Pet Products https://www.payless-petproducts.com/fluconazole200.html or Reef Flux HD: https://www.bulkreefsupply.com/reef-flux-fluconazole-treatment-reefhd.html

     

    It's a one time dose (not daily).

     

    More info here, though it's mainly for bryopsis, but also works for GHA (but takes longer and may not be as effective):

     

    https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/bryopsis-cure-my-battle-with-bryopsis-using-fluconazole.285096/

  4. Next up: Moorish Idol

     

    Once again, got lucky and this guy ate pellets from Day 1 in QT. Eats everything and is the most voracious eater in the DT. Became buddies with the semilarvatus and they often swim back and forth in front of the tank together. The Regal used to just chill in his caves in the bank of the tank and only came out during feeding time, but once I added the idol, the regal is out all the time now. Regal has to show him who the boss of the tank is.

     

    Check out his long streamer:

     

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    Buddies:

     

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    Who's the boss?

     

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  5. Next up: Yellow Belly Regal Angel

     

    Despite all advice not to buy regal angelfish on sale (b/c that usually means the retailer is trying to get rid of it - probably due to not eating) and not to buy these too large, I chanced it with this 5.5 inch regal. Judging by the price and it only being advertised as a yellow belly regal, it is probably not a Red Sea specimen as it would have been advertised as such and commanded a much higher price.

     

    FedEx was 4 hours late with the delivery on one of the coldest days of the year. Opened the box and it was laying on its side at the bottom of the bag motionless. Bag water measured around 60 F. Thought for sure it was DOA and even took photos of it to document it as DOA. Since I had a QT set up for it I tossed it in there while waiting for the DOA claim to go through since I'm not supposed to dispose of the body until they say so and didn't want to freeze it or leave it outside rotting.

     

    Went on with my day and came down to feed my other fish a few hours later and lo and behold, who is swimming around the QT! Canceled my DOA claim (that probably doesn't happen too often). This is one tough fish. He is a pig and has eaten everything I threw at it including pellets from Day 1. He does prefer smaller particles though, so I switched over to Hikari mysis vs PE since I got tired of cutting the PE into smaller pieces.

     

    He's got a slight misbar on his left side:

     

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    Who are you calling fat?

     

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  6. Ok, done describing equipment. On to the main attraction: Fish.

     

    My first inhabitant and which caused me to do this build: the Longhorned Cowfish:

     

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    Are you looking at me?

     

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    He hangs out at the top of the tank with his horns out of the water:

     

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    Waiting/begging for food:

     

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    He hasn't started spitting water at me yet.

     

    I used to have the Eheim feeding station, which is supposed to keep pellets from going down the overflow while they soak enough water to sink. Well, this little guy was not patient enough for the pellets to sink:

     

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  7. I was going to leave my tank open top as I was not planning on stocking any fish that are known jumpers. Then I started reading about other people's fish (non-known jumpers) jumping to their unfortunate deaths when they got spooked. Being a FOWLR and not wanting to spend a lot of money on a cover/canopy, I looked into the mesh kits on BRS, but would have to get three of them and do a lot of cutouts for the lights, overflows, autofeeder, and feeding "door". I decided just to go with eggcrate, but black so it wouldn't stand out too much. All the cutouts worked great, but it cut down the light too much for my liking. Since I already bought the eggcrate and put in all that work to do all the cutouts, I decided to try a hybrid eggcrate/mesh lid. I cut out the middle sections of the eggcrate and zip tied the mesh to the eggcrate. Light transmission and jump protection solved. I probably should have used black zip ties for that first lid, but oh well. For the middle lid, I cut it into two as I use the non-mesh eggcrate portion as my feeding "door"/area. Not really a door, I just remove that area during feeding.

     

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  8. Done with the cycle and added pods, phyto and macroalgae:

     

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    With nothing to consume the phytos except the pods, it created a phyto bloom, so I stopped dosing the phyto.

     

    Which I think led to this hair algae outbreak which lasted 4 months.

     

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    I used the same dry rock on my previous tank and never got hair algae like this so I suspect it was the phyto. The macroalgae was doing nicely, growing and keeping a good color, until I added a large cleanup crew with turbo snails, which preferred eventually decimated all my macro.

     

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