DaJMasta

My first thought was turbinaria too, but checking for a skeleton is definitely a helpful one for an ID.

Herbivores as management (fish, urchins, snails, crabs) is usually the best option and manual removal can help things get jumpstarted, especially when there's a lot of buildup. Flucanozole treatment is also effective, but while it's generally considered reef safe, there is certainly plenty of evidence that it does disrupt some things and will require a settling period again after treatment before everything is back in balance. How big is the tank? How bad is the algae? What's normal range for the parameters? What herbivores do you already have? Could get you some more targeted advice.

There are probably tons of options, cameras with both pan and tilt are pretty inexpensive. If you want detailed views, of course get at least a 1080p sensor, but looking for a narrower field of view will mean you get more pixels per unit size of what you're looking at, even if you have to pan around. A wider field of view is more common (better for most security applications), but even at high resolution only shows you moderate detail in smaller areas. If you have readouts from devices you want to keep track of, having a second camera for monitoring that could be a good option - it's very easy to add another if they're wireless and run off an app. I've been pretty happy with my Eufy Indoor Cam Mini and it's been pretty good - low bitrate video (maybe configurable), but cheap, pan and tilt, relatively wide FoV, wireless except for power (no battery, though), and their app works well enough. Only downside is it needs the 2.4GHz band of your WiFi, can't do the 5GHz bands.

Don't know who your water utility is, but they probably publish water quality reports including what they use to treat. I'm on WSSC up north and they have been using chloramines for a while. They don't really outgas themselves like chlorine does, and I've never heard that just waiting for a while reduces them, so I think some kind of conditioner or treatment of the water with a carbon filter (or multiple, as we use with RODIs). Chloramine can also damage RO membranes, so if you know you have chloramine in your water, you want at least two carbon blocks and ideally, at least one of them is one rated for chloramine (generally has a lot more potency and costs somewhat more). I don't know if chlorine test kits are available for saltwater, but as I understand, chlorine/chloramine test strips exist for fresh water, so you could also test the RODI to see if there's some getting through. Could also be worth replacing the membrane.

A little update with a useful tidbit: I've observed some of these little guys carrying eggs already, so apparently around 2 months from settling as juveniles, they can start producing their own offspring. Quick turnaround!

Wrote my process up here: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/peppermint-shrimp-breeding-success-documentation.1069850/ A microscope tour of the larvae as they develop:

A nice surprise early this morning!

Well it's an entire year later... but I think I'm getting close:

Nope, pretty common to see in darker, higher flow areas. Just little sponges filter feeding on particulate in the water. If they get in the way of flow or maintenance there's no problem with removing them, but they are otherwise benign.

Dark spots being the little orangy brown things? If so, pineapple sponges, albeit a slightly darker color than I usually see them.

You'd get much better transmission with a solid polycarbonate sheet. It's more expensive, but if your tank is only 17G, you don't need it to be thick because the distance its spanning isn't far - probably 1/8" thick would be plenty. Glass would also work, and would probably be a little cheaper. I don't know what the algae concerns specifically are - usually the answer is either blocking light to the area you don't want it or cleaning it (or heribvores).

I haven't really kept any duplicate equipment because my tanks are relatively small and I've got a good number of accumulated bits. I do keep a spare heater for each tank, but otherwise, some combination of the small utility pumps and wavemakers will suffice for flow in case one of the big ones go out, even if they look unsightly. Would be harder to manage if I had hundreds of gallons, but maybe in time you get some spares from upgrades and things in that case.

So not actually too much since the gorgonians probably can't eat the mysis - though maybe the fines are contributing. I wonder if the lower temperature helps them.

What are you feeding the tank? Seems to be working for those NPS gorgonians.

Is that some sort of film over his eye? If so could be some kind of bacterial infection, and while I don't doubt there are some people here who can help, you may get more tested/quicker results asking another place - my first instinct would be humble.fish as their forums are dedicated almost entirely to fish disease. There's also someone I've seen a talk on who seems more or less to be the go-to eel expert who goes by "The Eel Lady", she seems to have a Facebook page for her business, but maybe there's a place where she offers advice (or a youtube video going over some basics.) I seem to remember a week or two without food is not necessarily bad for them, especially if they had been eating well before, but behavior wise it does sound like something is bothering it more than usual.

If the 'worry about' is noise, you can also try cleaning the heatsink/fan/mesh covering it. A bit of airflow blockage will mean they need to run much faster to get the same amount of cooling, so a bit of regular maintenance does help (but IMO, they Prime HD 16s at least are kinda loud.)

Some may have seen the result of this at our last meeting (they were swimming around in a small tank with some frags cut from the main reef), but in the last month I've managed to get what I think are called grass shrimp (clear saltwater shrimp sold as feeders) to spawn in my tank, and I've raised 20-30 of them to settled juveniles. I actually raised the first two 'accidentally' in a container that was floated in the tank with its parents and got a little natural water exchange with it on almost solely artemia nauplii, then I collected a much larger batch of larvae and raised them up in a bucket like my other attempts and had nearly all that were caught, settle. I also caught them in the display portion of the tank, where their parents were living in the sump, so they seem to be quite durable as larvae and are likely some of the easier shrimp to get to settle. I don't have a comprehensive breakdown of the timeline they settle in or my exact methods - I wasn't expecting success and had two runs overlapping, so I just wasn't recording details as I normally would - but I did get some video as larvae and some video as settled juveniles, which I've put together here: For the basics, this is a rundown: Grass shrimp - mostly clear, develops darker patterns (and maybe cloudiness) in a few days in response to the environment, a little smaller than a peppermint shrimp when fully grown, fairly outgoing and inquisitive, happy to live in groups and get along with each other Larvae are strong swimmers and are phototactic, so they can be caught pretty easily with a source of light and dark surroundings. Larvae don't seem to need any flow (light turnover to keep parameters consistent is still advisable), can eat decent sized foods (artemia nauplii from day one), and aren't particularly disoriented by multiple light sources. They can be fed several times a day with prey organisms and you will see modest feeding amounts disappear within 12 hours. I also fed mixed copepods, it was not the majority of things available and I can't say for sure if it was important for their development. They don't seem to have much trouble living with adult copepods, and don't need immaculate water quality. Settled juveniles still swim some, but larvae swim always tail first and juveniles do walk/run and swim head first as a normal shrimp. You probably want to keep them away from predators, stinging corals, and powerheads while they're young, but I've had a couple from an early batch roam in my tank and they've lived alongside their parents (3-4x the length) and even have gone through the powerhead again to make it back to the display. Adults and juveniles are basically detritivores, but seem to like meaty frozen food over pellets. Full sized foods (like bloodworms) may be more difficult for the small shrimps to eat, though they'll take whatever they can get into. With the sump on the opposite photoperiod from the display, I don't know exactly how frequently they spawn, but I hope to get at least a few more batches to raise up.

For nearly turnkey systems, I think Jellyfish Art is one of the relatively few options, and I seem to remember a giveaway through the club or something in past years - maybe a former sponsor? I know there are a few sources for specific kinds of jellys, but there seem to be fewer options for tanks available outside of custom orders. What kind of jellies are you interested in? I think of all of them, upsidedown jellyfish are probably the simplest just because they don't need that kreisel style bottom since they lay on the substrate.

The nitrogen cycle usually isn't completed in our tanks - it just gets removed through nutrient export. Ammonia is converted to nitrite which is then converted to nitrate, unless the nitrate is absorbed by plants or converted into nitrogen gas (an anaerobic process and the reason for deep sand beds back in the day), so unless you're removing it with carbon, a skimmer, or water changes (or similar), nitrate will just accumulate over time. That it was converted to nitrate and isn't still ammonia or nitrite, that's the sign the tank is cycled.

If your magnesium and potassium are both looking good, I would start looking into other less likely things. It may be worth checking for stray voltage, for cracks in magnets or pumps that could rust, making sure that your lights and pumps are working properly, maybe sending away for an ICP to look for high levels of heavy metals. Did the montis make any kind of recovery?

Check your magnesium and maybe dose some anyways. Could also be potassium, but that usually has a broader effect early on. If you are already checking, it may be worth confirming the result with a different kit.

Interesting, both nice of them and probably a good opportunity to pick up some customers. Also worth mentioning, they seem to be heavily discounting their water filtration equipment as clearance - not a whole lot of choices, but I'm not going to say no to a $1.25 sediment filter or a $5 carbon block filter: https://www.icp-analysis.com/collections/aquarium-water-quality-solutions/Filtration

Triton doesn't have an ICP-MS test though, correct? While there are lots of labs doing similar things, the mass spectrometry (MS) technique instead of the optical emission spectrometry (OES) is substantially more sensitive, to the point that I don't know if OES spectrometers can give you reliable ppb measurements in a sample, there's just a lot more noise. Looks like reef moonshiners has one.... for double the price. Oceanmo has one too, but I don't know how it works for being in the US.

Honestly, I don't know if you can. My schedule is nothing schedule, I tried to pick colors that looked good - whiter in the day, bluer at night - a photoperiod close to when I'd be looking at it, and then tried to adjust it to a level that seemed to be keeping the corals happy. My lights are mounted about 13" off the water, and having two is because I can run them lower (less fan noise), I get better coverage on the long rectangle footprint, and because I had one start to fail, ordered a replacement, and then found out it was just the power supply failing. The image gives you a rough idea - roughly 10 hours at high brightness, maximum of a little less than 100% on any channel and around 38W as the top total power level. This is meant for corals with brighter requirements than what you're describing, but really for high light corals.

This is my schedule for a pair of Prime HD 16s over a standard 10g. Some montiporta, favites, micromussa, zoas, gorgs, and a rock flower anemone. My guess is your schedule is a bit low, but it may do the job for the lower light corals you're describing.