DaJMasta

+1 it's usually a really loose brown sludge that accumulates in places with very low flow (I had it at the bottom of the rear chambers in my AIO.) Haven't noticed particular creatures that seem to thrive in it, so I think it's pretty safe to just siphon out - I have on several occasions to no ill effects - but it does stir up easily so turn off the flow or prepare for some cloudiness.

I got an order from their live sale this past week and while they said they had fewer fire shrimp than expected from some losses from their supplier, they sent an email to notify me and the rest arrived healthy and well packed (big box, lots of water, 5 small heat packs in my case.) I did get confused because I am used to picking a delivery day whereas with their checkout you pick a shipping day, but I could be home for the following day so it was no big loss. All in all, my experience was positive. I've had worse cancellations (not telling you it isn't shipping until you open the box) and much shoddier shipping.

In the top bar there should be a Store button and under that should be orders when you are logged in, that should show any outstanding and previous invoices for membership. They also generally send an email, but this may not be long before it expires (mine's coming up in early April and I haven't gotten an email yet, so maybe a month out?) and to whatever email was on file.

I can make myself free on Friday to help lift. No suction cups but could bring a furniture dolly.

It varies a lot, as said traps are a pretty reliable option, but honestly, if your fish recognize you and you don't go chasing them around when working in the tank, a lot of fish can be herded into an area where you can net them against the glass with a couple of smaller nets to block holes and something to slowly move them along. Of course there are fish that dart under a rock and don't particularly care about most foods, so that won't work with everything.

I honestly don't know how much zinc is required or what for, though I know iodine has some known uses in tanks (though the form of which is important for its bioavailability). I also know my tank has tested low for iodine at every ICP even despite dosing and it's generally been pretty healthy. I think generally covering as many bases is possible is good, but aside from widely-known-to-be-important elements, "critically low" should be taken with a grain of salt. For example, I don't know if dosing silica would be all that beneficial unless you want diatoms or sponges to grow. I would pick something that covers as many as possible, then dose something otherwise if you feel like it - iodine specific supplements are easy to find and just a few drops a week is probably plenty, so it's likely not something that needs to be on a doser.

Unfortunately, chasing individual numbers often involves individual additive bottles and regular testing. That said, you can sort of cover a lot of your bases by some baseline dosing of a mix of elements. B-Ionic may help with the levels, but it's designed as a replacement for regular old 2 part, so you'd have to replace at least some of your normal dosing regimen with it. The combination trace element bottles are often blended with what can keep separate from what, but if there's a particular mix that covers a lot of your bases - in their recommendation "Daily Traces A" - then just dosing that alone should help. Dosing quantity should scale linearly, so just slide the decimal place over 4 and you should be good. Iodine/Manganese/Iron has been low in my tank so I dosed some Chaetogro and some lugols iodine on sort of an irregular schedule. I didn't notice a huge difference, but the numbers on subsequent tests went up a bit. Worth mentioning that the 32.5ppt really will skew your numbers, though. I don't expect a lot of the "critically low" marked ones in regular salt mix to correct those, but having lower overall salinity will lower all of your primary numbers too (magnesium, calcium, potassium, strontium, etc.)

Not super difficult, you'll want to isolate the male before he releases the babies so you can grab them before other tankmates/the current does, then you'll want an isolated, low flow place to raise them early on, and ideally, you have a live food available when he spits them out. Artemia nauplii are easy to hatch, cheap, and are readily accepted, so I'd go with those. Then after a week or two, small prepared foods will be fine (maybe feed that first because they will prefer the live if you still offer it), though unless the tankmates are gentle and small, I'd keep them in their own space for a couple of months. Also worth keeping a top on where they're kept while growing up is good - there will be some casual sibling aggression and you don't want jumpers (it seems to be easier for the small ones.)

I'm looking to convert a tank into a sump and I need a small amount of untempered plate glass for it (probably 4x2 feet, 1/4" thick.) I've contacted a couple places near Columbia, MD (where I'm at) and they haven't given me the time of day - seems to not be worth the effort. So I'm sure we have some who have built or modified tanks - who would supply you glass? I know I can go with polycarbonate, but the silicone won't bond as strong and I'd like to be sure that the baffles can hold back a good bit of water without any pressure from the opposite side.

Weird! While I've had my calcium run away before, I wouldn't have expected the kit to read zero. At least high calcium isn't so detrimental and regular old water changes or waiting should do alright to fix it.

Could it be that it's overrange? Could it be that there's some asterisk that different parameters can throw it off (I think Mg test kits usually only work well in a specific calcium range, for example.) Definitely seems like an odd one. A way to check would be to dilute your water with new saltwater and see what direction it changes.

I've been sort of eyeing big tanks I can't yet afford and aside from black friday deals, SCA has got some of the best prices I've seen. They even do by-default eurobracing which I'm a fan of.

And my experience has been just throw in 200-300 mL every couple of months when I check, while Randy Holmes Farley seems to prefer 'don't bother even measuring' in many cases. At any rate, slow adjustment is probably always somewhat better, but may be a more conservative method of doing it. If your magnesium was 700 ppm, for example, raising it to 800, 900, 1000, 1100, 1200 over the course of a week or two would be far worse than raising to >1000 and then raising to 1300-1400 in two steps, imo.

It's not good form to dose a ton, but there comes a point where it's better to shock things and get parameters in line vs. trying to be slow. That said, 1200 or so is low but not unreasonably so, so I would probably do it in at least a couple steps over a few days.

Sorry I saw this late after being in DC during the day, but I've moved to be just a bit south, good to hear things made it alright.

The idea for printing was that if you had it against the glass, you could still see in like a normal kreisel, but that if it's mesh to the outside tank, the tank can be much bigger (or part of a running system) so water changes aren't such an issue. The fishbowl had come to mind (even tried an upwelling design with a bubbler down a globe shaped tank), but I had sort of dismissed them as being a bit too small to do it without a lot of maintenance, and it seemed like you needed a fair bit of flow to keep things from settling (I think with a cylinder you need a lot less because you don't need the water to "sweep" the bottom in every drection.) I later found that there were some significant advantages to using their own vessels (hydroid contamination) and kind of dropped the printed ones, but I was basically printing a cylinder with a mesh rear face and a piece of silicone airline tubing for a gasket against the glass (the larvae could get caught in narrow gaps and the amphipods could get in), then some kind of airlift pump to drive circulation from the outside in. The more recent buckets I had some limited success in were basically a smaller printed bucket with a false bottom of mesh (I think around 200 micron), and while with minimal flow the larvae did spend a lot of time on the mesh at the bottom, because it was off the true bottom a lot seemed to survive ok. Those kreisels are still $100 btw!

Nice results! I never had much luck with my kreisel designs but have definitely seen that my mesh bottom bucket method leave them with a lot of time at the bottom (I think coarser mesh lets them be closer to "floating" than fine mesh or an actual bottom of a vessel.) I've got a bigger printer and hopefully soon a bigger sump and may try to revive those designs.

If shipping, overnight in insulated containers with appropriate heat packs is going to be the most reliable. Animals are more tolerant of cold than hot, but too cold is also bad (maybe moreso for corals than fish.) You would probably want to catch/pack in the early afternoon to get them to your carrier's drop-off site before the last truck for the day to help minimize transit time. I'd say take as few as you can, you can get more at the far side, it's expensive, and the more animals in need of acclimation and appropriately ready habitat for that bioload, the harder it is to pull off. People go through TSA with fish and even corals, basically, the animal being alive is proof the liquid isn't dangerous, but it is potentially risky (haven't heard many horror stories, but it is their discretion), and you still want them insulated and physically protected.

One thing you could try for the copperband is just hiding a portion of the tank - it seems a lot of their initial eating issues is just environmental stress, and I remember an interview with a fish quarantine specialist saying they blacked out the tanks they were QT'd in and rarely had issues getting them to eat. It's my understanding that they don't really go for copepods (mine hasn't), but they do hunt for bivalves and worms (and aiptasia), but that it's looking around is a great sign. Since they naturally eat off the rocks, it could be worth turning the pumps off for a few minutes and letting food settle. I've heard using masstick on a clam shell or just feeding frozen halfshell clams can work well, but I think mine first took to frozen bloodworms (this seems to be common for a lot of finicky eating fish.)

There are a few BTAs that seem to be splitting well for people in the club, so it's pretty normal to see them in the for sale section and at meetings. A lot of shops will carry them too, but usually at decent premiums over a hobbyist who's keeps splitting and doesn't have the space. A year in and hopefully things have stabilized to the point you can really see it growing.

Sounds like it, hope they can sort it out properly for you quickly. His thread was in the Dedicated Tank (build) Forum:

The pics could be clearer and I am no expert, but I would say ich or velvet, leaning towards ich.

Dang I want a clam again. Also, interesting to see the swaying types at the top and the sticks in the middle - fancy lighting settings or the torches just are fine with it?

Well, the run is over, and unfortunately no settlement. In the last month I had lost all but one of the older larvae and I just got back from a week away and had lost the last one in that time. I believe most of the losses were happening around a molt, around the end of the predicted timetable, but it's tough to say for sure. I have some video of a newly dead larvae (second to last one) which appeared to have its main body carapace splayed open somewhat (presumably a molt) but with some eye twitching still going on. Honestly, I'm not sure what could have caused that, especially since they seem to leave each other alone (even larvae months younger seem to be untouched.) This last loss was probably nutrition related - on my trip I had no new artemia hatching, and while I tried to stock the tank with that and copepods and then regularly had them fed with phyto, I had my doubts it was enough, and the bucket it had been moved into had a bit of a hydroid infestation which was consuming at least some of that food too. My guess is that last one was from the March batch, since it had been way over 5 months since February. That means my record for how long they've lived is about 4.5 months. Sad, but where to go from here? First, I've got another vacation at the end of August, so I'll start trying to collect larvae again in September. I'll try keeping the bucket warmer - I've got an inkbird and a bigger heater now and it should allow for more control and consistency, but the higher temperature should speed growth somewhat. I found that leaving the top open farther significantly reduced the temperature, so hopefully the controller will keep it much more consistent. I'll try to stay on top of salinity management a bit more - they seem pretty tolerant of high salinity and big swings (39ppt and 2ppt in one day), but I don't want to make that a habit, it doesn't take a lot of checking. I'll use my newer version of the bucket insert (wide mesh in the bottom, deeper chamber, in-wall air lift pump.) I want to keep consistent water changes, not to a huge degree, but minimum once a month and twice a month preferable (this is more often than this batch got.) I also want to do something about nutrition, and while it's not sustainable with these buckets and my water change schedule, starting from maybe just before the first or second water change I want to feed the larvae from frozen food. Maybe reef frenzy like my main tank gets, maybe something like PE calanus. I read in a paper that their larva were fed fresh meaty foods, and while it would be a great normal food for every day feeding if they were being held as part of a larger system, it will definitely pollute it, so I think trying it out as a nutrition supplement before water changes should hopefully get some extra vitamin input without the ammonia buildup. I already observed them eating their deceased siblings, and the bodies would be gone within 12 hours or so, so they can definitely handle large meaty foods after a bit of development, so even if the food settles on the mesh bottom, it will probably be good for them. I've also been observing a pretty significant loss of larvae around day 10 in most of the batches. Not sure of the cause, but in case it is nutritional, I'll try to preempt it with some frozen food (or something I come up with) around day 8, then a water change. The water change alone didn't seem to do the trick - it's not a cleanliness issue - but maybe the nutrition is. So, a hiatus for a month, and then maybe come January of next year I'll be caught up to where I've already gotten to and have a shot at settlement in February. These timetables are insane

Epoxy would work great but you'd need to vacuum chamber it to reliably get out the bubbles. Why not enclose it in a display box so it can't be touched instead? I would imagine some matte polyurethane top coat or similar could help some, but you may have to get a few coats deep before there's any noticeable difference in strength.