DaJMasta

I think frozen food is your best bet, and it's pretty common for fish to eat sort of sparingly in the first few days in the tank (don't know how long it's been exactly). In my experience they will only really go for pellets immediately if they eat out of the water column and it's falling (usually different fish) or if they already have been eating it and are used to it. Provided it's acting alert and not looking slim, you've still got time for it to come around. Remember also that the relatively sedentary lifestyle (especially if there's not a ton of flow to contend with), means that its requirement for food is lower than those free swimming always-active types.

I'm sort of surprised the tank only dropped 1 pH with that much vinegar, but I suppose the high buffering capacity probably helps with that. Was this early in the day, before the bulk of the photoperiod? Could be that all the photosynthesis helped burn up the extra in short order too. It's worth keeping an eye on, but since you saw a bacterial bloom your tank has probably already used up the vinegar, maybe keep an eye out for cyano/dinos in the very low nutrient environment, but I think you've probably dodged the acidic bullet!

Not quite yet, 18 days in, but over the last two days his mouth has inflated further. He's having more trouble keeping his mouth closed most of the time (it's easier to see in), the little pouch under his chin is no longer moving in and out (just out), and today when he breathes, you can see the area on the lower back of the jaw actually shift down (a little like an accordion opening), whereas before it just sort of puffed out like the rest. The eggs are getting bigger, and I can occasionally get a glimpse of their reddish orange color. Soon!

The tank is 5 months old! Having a bit of a hair algae issue at the moment, but there's nice things and all in all, the tank is going well right now. And while my phone's focus did not cooperate, I got a couple decent pictures of some growth/nice looking stuff in the tank: I ended up adding a few smaller pieces of rock to the tank, a few of those then used as bases for the acans which were on plugs in the sand. You can see a couple of the little assembled gardens here, and some of the smaller new polyps, but they haven't grown in enough to not look like plugs glued to rock yet. The little softie section of the tank (with that green ricordea sort of dripping off, I think it will drop a new one soon), as well as some montis and encrusting things around. The yellow in the sand bed is out of focus, but is a mustard yellow flower anemone that's probably twice the diameter as when I got it, and in the bottom and on the bottom left there are two other color variants. They wander around but generally haven't bothered things too much, and a few actually stay still. A bit of green leptastrea that you can really see the growth on - not the only stony coral fully encrusting beyond the plug, but unfortunately the only somewhat in focus one of the pictures I took.... Despite the hair algae and the tiny bit of cyano in that back softie corner, things are going well. I'm seeing reasonable growth out of most things (slower in some), and I'm dosing 300mL of kalkwasser solution a day to maintain alkalinity and calcium, which reflects the continuing growth. I've got a couple of acros which are brown and a couple which are not quite the color they're supposed to be, but I think this is a couple things - one being light. I've got a single XR-15 over the tank and was running fairly high settings - I had thought - but never measured the PAR, and after a while of things not gaining their normal color, I bumped it up maybe 10%... and within a week I think I saw some improvements/coloration that wasn't there before. I gave it another 10% and it's probably about as high as it can get for the photoperiod, but that was about two weeks ago, so I'll have to see how things like it in the coming weeks. At least some of the delayed growth is also just new frags in a new system and the issues I've run into previously. The fish get along with the exception of the firefish - but after trying to catch the one being bullied for several days, I'm just going to wait and see. He's clearly the one being bullied, but he also comes out most of the day (and hides in a corner or near a powerhead), and eats every day and even fights back against the other one somewhat. I don't think it can go on indefinitely, but I think he's wary enough about my net that I will wait for him to get tired and try to catch him then. The two mandarins are getting along well, though the new one still likes to go up the back wall and on top of a powerhead in search for food when I turn them off and feed the tank, so she could probably be eating more than she is now. The male Banggai cardinal is in the last stages of them spawning - no eyes in his mouth yet, but he's 19 days post spawn and the jaws are getting wider and his mouth is less able to fully close, so I think he'll have baby fish in there in the next couple of days. My plan for algae going forward is to try to do a bit more regular manual removal to keep the overall growth rate down so that the urchins can take care of it mostly on their own - they eat plenty, but not enough to keep up with it yet. I also feed a lot and will continue too, but I think I can cut back on the pellet food, since the fish seem least interested in that in any case and it's probably the most nutrient dense. Other than that, I keep feeding and things keep growing. I have a few critters I've got my eyes on for additions (a fromia tile star, a tridacna clam, a possum wrasse), but I'll see when I can find good ones and try to confirm that they'll actually work in the tank. Outside of the tank, I'm up to 6 gallons of phytoplankton culture of three strains, and two gallons of apocyclops pods with some parvocalanus and hopefully some pseudodioptomus cultures started in the next week, and while I feed the tank phyto every day now and dump in some extras of the pods, they're going for the purpose of raising babies, so while the new Banggai cardinals shouldn't need a lot of it, I hope I can get other spawns and try to raise other things. I collected some cerith eggs that appeared one day and put them in a jug with some phyto - not sure if any of the parameters are ideal, but apparently they are easy to raise (they can be invasive in other hatcheries), so I'll give it a shot. It would be neat to be able to farm some clean up crew types of critters and it can probably be done with very small vessels, so I will collect what I can find (have seen some cortez cerith eggs too, haven't gathered any, though).

Two weeks from spawning, it doesn't look like any of the eggs have hatched yet, but he's still carrying them and looks pretty good for not eating for two weeks. The pair still stick around a good bit of the time, I occasionally see her pursuing him a little, but they are more or less acting normal and relaxed, minus the dash to eat from the male when it's food time. I think the two need a name but nothing has come to mind yet, any suggestions? Oh and I've been reading that snails shouldn't be too hard to raise with live phyto, so I think I'm going to try to harvest that string of cerith eggs in back and give it a shot with some extra phyto.

If you scroll down a bit in the main section while logged in, there's a set of forums visible only to members, and in there there's a for sale/trade forum that sees a good bit of activity. Otherwise, even craiglist and such can have a deal every now and then, especially on the equipment side.

From the perspective of someone in MD, NOVA seems to have all the shops and people selling frags on the board! The classifieds section is usually hopping and there are a number of people who sell packs or inexpensive frags which could be good to help fill things up, but while the availability of colonies and the overall price of livestock is probably up a ways since you last had a tank, the availability of colorful, resilient, affordable frags is quite high, and we're seeing more aquacultured livestock than ever before, so if you're not looking for the latest and greatest named designer limited edition coral, you can probably find something really nice to grow out.

There is always some residual algae/biofilm they can eat, and some snails will go after detrius and uneaten food too. The short answer is they probably won't need anything supplemental provided you keep feeding the other stuff in the tank, but if you have a lot of them they have a higher chance of going hungry. I'm not sure there are many ways to specifically feed them because they just sort of search around at random, so if you think they are going hungry, the best way is probably just feeding a little more to the tank.

I do think ballasts are considered a regular replacement (more often than the fixture) sort of item even though you don't swap them nearly as often as bulbs, so it's probably the right direction to look. Troubleshooting the ballast itself can be tricky because of the high voltage output, but in my limited experience a failing or failed one often makes a bunch of noise or lights flickering leading into the failure. The other telltale thing would be if all the lights on a ballast fail together instead of individual tubes. If you have a multimeter, you can unplug it and then check continuity between the two AC lines to make sure it's not a short (and between the outputs of the ballast), but odds are good a short would have brought down a breaker or at least the other parts of the hood, so I'd doubt this being the problem.

He's made it a week with no food, and while his back half looks a bit thinner, he seems to be in good shape and his mouth is still full. I sort of expected the eggs to be gradually expanding, but I haven't noticed more puffed cheeks, if anything they look very slightly smaller and he's readjusting the eggs less frequently (snapping open is mouth randomly). Not a lot to report but behavior, the pair are spending a good bit of time around together, somewhat more than usual, but then they also have their time apart. The male in particular seems to be just trying to stay low and out of the way (presumably to conserve energy), and the female does seem to be keeping watch somewhat, but I can't say it's all that distinctively different. What I have seen is the slightest hint of aggression towards other fish - the firefish have been bickering and every so often I see one of the cardinals sort of snap in their direction if they suddenly swim close, and I actually saw the male swim up to a mandarin and push his side into the mandarin to try to tell it to get going (actually a behavior I saw in the flame angel when it was the boss of the tank). Of course the mandarin just kept doing its thing, and the next few times it came around forraging the cardinals didn't seem to care, but it does seem like there's some effort to keep other things away from the male while he's carrying the eggs. Another week and there may be some more notable changes.

Congrats, that's very cool! Let us know if it spawns in your tank and you have some spare babies that settle out on the sand

Apologies for the lack of updates, and while this is a bit of a teaser, I'm happy to say it's not because of further problems. For as much trouble as the cyanobacteria treatment caused, it definitely needed it, I've been running a few weeks of record kalkwasser dosing for the tank to maintain my alkalinity and visible growth and encrusting of most of the corals I've got. Some new additions, some rearranging, a lot of manual hair algae removal, but things are overall good. Fish stuff is mostly good too, my two firefish being the exception as they started acting aggressive, needed to be separated, and it appears to not have ended after a new reintroduction. The cardinals, though, have spawned again and the male is approaching a week since spawning and looks good, and I got a second mandarin and trained it to eat frozen foods, and while there was a tad bit of chasing the first two days, they're getting on great (the faded look of the skin is the early stages of them going to sleep). I'm now 3 for 3 in training mandarins to eat frozen foods, and I took video of my feedings for the new introduction (the redhead on the left), so while it's probably still a few weeks out, I intend to have the method and process documented to encourage people to train them, especially in smaller tanks. Oh and my phytoplankton cultures are online enough that I'm dosing phyto every morning - saw enough sponge growth in two weeks to have sponge rocks stick to each other whereas the same rocks didn't stick to each other in the first months they were in the tank and I've got a few feather dusters which evidently that polyclad worm didn't eat, so they're starting to come back out.

Funny the shrimp goes after the coral, I've heard they eat the mucus on the anemones they're supposed to host in normally, so maybe it's the same sort of thing for corals. They are fun little shrimp.

They can work fine, the principal is straightforward enough, but if you get a tiny leak in your vessel or plumbing above the waterline, you will end up with the full ATO worth dumped into the tank in short order, so they probably work best in the format shown, where you have one complete, sealed vessel just going into the tank. That said, you don't lose that much water in a small tank. I've got a couple <5G tanks and during the summer, at least, I'm dumping in maybe a cup of top off water a day, if that. If your water isn't too hot, evaporation isn't going to be huge, especially if it's in the vicinity of other tanks which are keeping the humidity up. Adding a top to it may let you go days without even seeing a drop in water level, so maybe a top off every week so long as nothing in it is too parameter sensitive. While it may be difficult to achieve a low enough flow rate, you could also try the old school kalkwasser doser method of just filling up a bottle with an airline and a valve, turning the valve until its a slow drip, and just letting it go. You may actually be best served with drip rates of like 1 every 30s or a minute, but if you can get down that low you could just let it take care of regular maintenance and just top off occasionally when it seems to not drip enough.

They spawned this afternoon while I was out, somewhere between 1:30pm and 4pm, making it just under 26 days from the last spawn. That would predict somewhere around Tuesday the 7th they could be released from the male's mouth, while they will probably have hatched a week or more before then. I will aim to try and gently catch him (a fish trap) that weekend before and transfer him into a smaller tank for the fry to come out in - at least that's the plan. I've got a vossen larval trap if needed though they may be too big/strong swimmers for it to really be right, so I'll have my eyes out and I will try to get some pics of them inside his mouth in the time leading up to it. It's my understanding that since they develop for a time in the male's mouth, they are generally somewhat easier to rear than a lot of fish because they are large enough to eat bigger, and even prepared foods, but they do need to be away from predators (omnivores with a big enough mouth) and in lower flow areas, and they do need lots of food available. My zooplankton cultures are starting to really come online now, so the hope is to have both parvocalanus and apocyclops available in some quantity daily, but I've got some sizes of TDO to try out as well, and the tank I'm planning on moving them too has a basic setup already going and a biofilter established - I'm going to use a different approach than most breeders seem to of basically using a normal tank but with no real other livestock except for a basic CUC and with very low flow, but I will see how successful that actually is. The idea is that the established filtration and pod population mean that feeding them and dealing with the residual isn't as difficult in a small tank, since I really don't have the space for anything of a decent size. I'm rooting for them!

Spawning is imminent! I observed their courtship behavior around 6:30pm today (25 days from the previous spawn, about an hour earlier), and it has continued at least 3 hours afterwards without any egg transfer yet. Will have to see if the male takes food tomorrow or if perhaps they spawn tomorrow or in coming days. Very short turnaround, and short of a full lunar cycle (not that my lights were running a lunar cycle for the duration either), and they weren't too shy. I noticed the behavior only a couple minutes after taking my hands out of the tank to pull out some hair algae.

It was my understanding that every clam wants to anchor itself to something solid with byssal threads, and that even trying to move them around once their threads were down could damage the relatively fragile organ that secretes them. I see a lot of places offering/people selling them offering them on small rocks so that they have a secure holdfast that doesn't need to be altered if you want to move them. From the talks I've seen about them, I would consider them somewhat high light requirement (at least not shaded), as they seem to be cultured outdoors in the tropics in shallow tanks, and while they will often benefit from plankton feeding, they should be able to get most of the nutrition they need from photosynthesis from 2-3" in size. Could you have a fish or invert that is picking at the mantle and contributing to their downfall?

I've got a 5W always on heater in a 3.7G tank and it's about right to raise things from room to tropical level with the low power circulation pump. It would actually be worth setting it up without anything and seeing - especially if you're getting decent flow for the size, a few watts of dissipation from the pump would probably be enough. Of course that only works with a relatively stable room temperature, otherwise a heater controller and a 5W always on would probably do well (only one layer of safety, though). While it's a more extreme example, I know the maxijet I use in my 5G bucket for fresh saltwater are enough, on their own, to raise the water temperature above 80F with the lid on, so maybe 50-100gph worth of pump in that tank would actually heat it plenty.

Well, that's something. I would assume that the chaeto supplement has a fair bit of iron in total, so you may actually already have a source you can dose... but thinking about that, I wonder if the brightwell product includes some phosphate, which could sort of magnify it when so low on nitrates and iron. Maybe there's a way to dose iron only or iron and nitrate? Iron is required for most macroalgae, so this could at least partly explain the chaeto growth issues and the supplement helping. I know there are specifically phosphate reducing additives (mostly based on lanthanum, I think), but if it were me, I would probably try to dose iron and see how the numbers level out. It could be with enough to let the plants grow, the phosphate gets consumed at a faster rate than now and it balances itself out somewhat, though if not, there's the phosphate specific products which could be an option.

They do! Pretty effective little snowplows and primary herbivores on a lot of reefs, but there are some disadvantages that stop people from going that route. While they eat algae all day, there are at least some species that make no distinction between microalgae, macroalgae, and even coralline algae. As they get bigger, they also can fit between fewer gaps than smaller snails or bigger fish, and they are fairly strong so they can push over frags and things. There are also some short spine species that will grab on to bits of their surroundings as camouflage, which can include corals and other things you may not want ripped off their base and moved around the tank. I've got a bit of a hair algae thing going on in my tank and the urchins seem to be oddly selective about the areas they eat, but when they do it goes completely clean, so hopefully they will get to most of it eventually. I've seen similar cleaning results with several kinds of snails, but again it sort of depends on where they are when they want to start going at it, so the results can be patchy, and generally the impact of a single snail is less.

The second could be more standard filamentous algae - hard to tell out of the water. Bryopsis looks sort of fern like (stalk with lots of branching parts on opposite sides to make a flat frond), whereas other algaes generally just look like strands. I think you have the right idea for the causes, but to add to the potential list: perhaps there was some nutrients that leeched out of the rock or that your lighting cycle is too long. My preference is usually carbon dosing to get rid of things provided the nutrient input is reasonable, but bryposis can have more specific treatments if it's that, and maybe just more clean up crew can keep it in check. Something like a sea hare could also just bulldoze quite a bit of it, though it may eat it too quickly to manage the problem in the long term vs. just eat everything and starve.

I wonder if they pair up but don't mate for life, I can't say I've seen a lot of information around, but I figure they are common enough fish that people have tried and noticed things.

I guess two other to add to the list for new tanks but which may not be cheap could be Ultum Nature Systems and Lifegard Aquatics. They both offer low iron glass AIO tanks in around the right size, generally rimless, but would be easy to use on an arbitrary stand and with whatever equipment. I've got a little Lifegard pico and the build quality is good and included parts work well, though I've only had it up for a little while. If you think a short tank could work, maybe even acrylic frag tanks. Could be tricky to light with just a single kessil, but the wide format can be nice and sometimes they have the AIO compartments too (though maybe tough to get a skimmer in depending on depth requirements).

You say no Red Sea options, but the E170 fits pretty much everything except for the lid, and while I don't know what mesh sizes you've tried, I've seen BRS offer 1/8" clear mesh, which could potentially be a mesh top option - otherwise places can make laser cut polycarbonate lids for a lot of things, so there could be a custom option (maybe not that cheap) to get a lid on a tank. It's been my experience that most tanks that come with glass tops still leave enough of a gap to be problematic, even if they are close. I mention the E170 because they are common enough that they show up on the used market for reasonable prices, I think I paid $500-600 for mine off craigslist but it came with the stand and light. Worth mentioning: you would probably need the stand for it, since there is a gasket for optional sump plumbing that protrudes slightly from the bottom. Otherwise, people seem to love the Waterbox tanks, I've heard good things about Nuvo too, but I assume you're not interested in just going back after a leak. For durability concerns, there's always the acrylic option, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was more expensive and then there's the scratching issues. If it were me, I'd probably just look around for what's available used, but it's trickier with the trickling clock if you've already got something in there.

Regular firefish, and the picture was representative of their behavior for the majority of the time. Both appear to be fully grown, or at least around it, and they haven't gotten much bigger since I got them. The two were originally seen as a group of three where one was clearly shunned and these two hung out together, but perhaps that was less indicative of their long term tolerance of each other than I thought. Here's an oddity of firefish behavior observed last night, thanks to the third decent sized power outage I've had in the last four months When the lights suddenly went off, the one left in the display really started freaking out. Within a few minutes I found it stuck along the overflow (the pump was on a UPS), and when I went to get it off, it just swam off. The room was fairly dark and I was using a flashlight to look around, and the firefish followed the light, almost like a larva would, whereas other fish either avoided the light/were freaked out by it. This was to the point that shining it in from the top meant this firefish would actually get its nose 3/4" out of the water to try and get towards the flashlight, but when I pulled the light back and aimed at the side, it noticeably calmed down, swam more in the middle of the water column, but still seemed to follow the light somewhat. I think the sudden darkness meant that it could no longer spot the hole it usually hides in, so it was freaking out about being exposed and in an unfamiliar setting. Probably good to avoid sudden, unpredictable blackouts when possible. They both seemed to go to sleep back in their hole around the same time every night, so they can probably manage in a sudden lights out environment if it's on a timer, but the fade out is probably preferred.