davelin315

Didn't realize you had moved as I have been very out of touch lately but congratulations on retirement and enjoy your next chapter!

I agree with the ones above that say same old same old. Heaters are one of the least reliable pieces of equipment on the market and I have been through tons of them myself. I find that amongst the reputable brands you're still going to come across failures more often than not. I go with an Inkbird controller so that it can alert me audibly and through the app and try to replace the titanium heaters whenever I remember to (I try to replace once per year but I am not always successful with that). Bottom line with them is to plan for a failure and think around that possible failure (e.g. secure temp probes and don't rely on the suction cups, check your heater periodically to ensure that it's working, set your controller up appropriately and understand error codes, undersize if possible and keep backups on hand, etc.).

Since it’s living tissue is on the outside you could attempt to simply scrub it with a stiff brush but the little flakes that break off would probably grow elsewhere so perhaps break those off first and then scrub down whatever is left. I would think (not sure of this) that you would kill it off this way and leave behind the nice blue skeleton for other corals to grow over. Maybe test this out on a small piece?

With the cardinals and the chromis people are often misled into thinking they will school peacefully which is not the case (one subspecies of chromis will do it but figuring out how to tell the difference between them is beyond me). Banggais will kill each other off until you have a pair (our aquariums are generally too small to provide enough territory for more) and same thing with the chromises. The rest of the fish depending on their size and age could simply be natural deaths.

Check out this link, you should be fine with anything but planktonic life. https://www.seattleaquarium.org/blog/are-basket-stars-sea-stars

Agree with @menglish but if I had to guess I would say sponge or based solely on shape a macroalgae (failing to see the green tip that is on the one I am thinking, though).

AquaUV is a great brand. Higher wattage bulbs means less contact time needed so higher flow, the TurboTwist would do the job but the flow is so much slower that it would take forever to filter out your tank despite wrapping the water around it multiple times.

I can say from seeing it in another that I doubt that there is any sort of tolerance built up. I have been hit twice with it, once severe enough to knock me out over night (high fever, chills, aches, pains, etc. but no hospitalization) and the second time just discomfort but I attribute it to realizing faster that my hands were exposed to palytoxin and taking immediate measures to wash it off as best as I could. A co-worker, however, was hospitalized his second time being exposed but not the first.

Looks like a hairy green metallic mushroom. I know that there are some strains today that go for a lot more than what I feel they are worth but I for one have never been able to tell the difference between them and have never been much of a named coral guy.

Nothing wrong with having sand but deep sand beds require a lot of upkeep and in a refugium would not be very advisable given the low flow that you would probably want to maintain. Their efficacy is questionable (I ran one in a large garbage can and was never able to get any sort of success out of it) and there are a lot of new methods for nitrate and phosphate removal today that are far more effective with a lot less effort.

Very cool but just a heads up, sometimes they spawn when water conditions are not good as a defense mechanism.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/TcJnXQ8ectr13cZW9 This is my current octopus. Unfortunately she appears to be aging too much and might be on the decline but what a journey it has been so far with her. Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

I have had a couple of joubini octopuses and never had them in a completely sealed aquarium. Only escapees I have ever had were actually a species I tentatively identified as starry night octopuses and that was when one crawled through a bulkhead screen and into my shark tank - you can imagine that didn’t go very well at all. That said, they are apt to potentially crawl out of a bio cube or into the filtration area. I have not had any that really went out of the water but they can certainly do so if they want to so I would view the overflow as the biggest hazard. I have sealed off overflows with screen so they can’t squeeze through but if memory serves me correctly biocubes have decent sized slots so not sure what you would use to do this.

Each fish has a unique personality but yes, they do get more and more aggressive as their space decreases and they claim more territory. The larger the fish the more space it wants and the easier other animals become to eat as well. I have had them in the past (way back nearly 30 years ago) in predator tanks and the triggers always started to eat the tank mates and some even started to attack equipment in the tanks. I remember one store that I used to go to that had triggers in this genus that would shatter heaters in the tanks and one even bit the finger of an employee.

Moved this to the sponsor’s forum.