discordja

Steve, I had a chance to talk to Johnny at the social a few weeks ago about the URI T5 actinics. If I recall, he advised me that they are marketing it as a overdriven very blue bulb and it's not like a true VHO actinic or even the Geismann T5 actinics. I believe it's more like a 20k t5. That being the case, I'd say either a) use VHOs as I still don't think the T5 actinics can match or b) go with the Geismann as it's still a true actinic. If I'm wrong on that description of the URI feel free to correct me.

I've a Royal Gramma in my 75 along with a peppermint, coral banded and cleaner and I've never seen him go after them. ymmv, of course.

Chris, moving from where to where?

Susceptibility is mostly fish dependent as well. My Blue Tang went through 3 cycles of ich till I kicked it from my tank. The other fish during this time showed no signs of infection. In fact, surgeons are the pretty much garaunteed to get completely infected at least once of their lives. May as well just prepare for it happening every so often.

Ah I can finally respond to this. I finally got a test done for phosphates and i came back with a giant 0 ppm. So I'm at a real loss here. This algae is unstoppable and it's taking over lots of rock surface area and I have no idea how to stem the tide.

Be careful not to get caught trying to count watts. Watts consumed is a ballpark figure, sure, but it's secondary to the PAR (Photosynthetically Active Radiation) of your lights. You can have 1000 watts consumed but if most of the power is thrown away due to resistence, what's the point? Power Compacts, or compact fluorescents, are basically fluorescents that are bent and plug on one side. Due to their shaping, they often don't throw an optimal light pattern. They are low cost and somewhat inefficient where it comes to actually generating PAR / Watt. They are, in the end, a good low cost alternative and work well for softies and less light intensive LPS/SPS. Clams can survive but they may not thrive like they would under something else. VHOs and now their successor the T5 are true fluorescents. VHOs (or T12s) are just modified versions of the same kind of bulbs that are in your office to be high output. T5s improve on the basic VHO by making the bulb much smaller diameter bulb and the wattage is reduced. They also run exclusively on electronic balasts. These Ebalasts mean much less of the power is lost to resistence and the bulbs run much cooler as a result. All this means you can use several more T5s than VHOs in the same space to generate more PAR. There is also a much more consistent PAR over the whole of the tank because they are not a point source like Metal Halides. T5s are still in their infancy for this hobby. As a result, while they have proved to be very good so far for crisp white PAR numbers, they have yet to catch up with VHO actinics (so they don't create that same incredible blue pop). Metal Halides are derivations of standard mercury vapor lamps. As a result of the mercury, the light they throw is incredibly crisp white light with the kelvin going more toward the blue spectrum. They can be driven by Eballasts which do a whole lot for temperature. They are also the only point lighting available so the only option if you really want the shimmer effect. I'd say for very large tanks reefers will continue to use Metal Halides for some time, especially for deep tanks. T5s have certainly already started making inroads however because they are just much more cost effective. All that said, I echo the others here. You get get a good T5 hood and lamps for not a ton of money and they will whip anything PC you can throw at it. They should let you keep a clam and some SPS if you want. Hope this helps

American Psycho

Steve, Yes on 1. I change about 10 gallons of RODI every week and top off with RODI a couple of times a week No on 2. Probably as far away from a windows as it can possibly get. I'm gonna spend the week with the lights off and a about 40 gallons of water changes .. and see what that does for me. Do any snails or hermits eat this stuff? Maybe larger turbo snails? Everything is healthy and corals are really growing well so there are certainly worse things to have than a little bit of nuisance algae.

Not a great pic but hopefully enough to tell. It looks a little red here but that is short brown algae like it's a layer of carpet over the rock. So it's neither the ugly diatom or cyano. and it's growing like mad. A bit easier to tell how it's growing in the little cracks and crevices and such Took a test of the topoff water as well to be sure it's not adding extra nutrients to the tank as well. It's registering 0 nitrates and 1 on the total disolved solvents count. Also tested to make sure that I was right on the nitrates for the tank and it's around .2-.5 ppm atm Any chance this can be managed with just some more algae grazers? I've not a ton of detrivores in the tank because of the barebottom and I tend to remove the waste before it has a chance to break down.

I've a 75 now up for 3 months. I stabilized the water parameters and things are mostly trouble free. I change 10 gallons a week. Params: Nitrate .5 Nitrite 0 Amo 0 Calc 380 Alk 9 dkh SG 1.026 I changed old bulbs and licked my fits of Cyano and a green carpet/hair algae but now I've got a surge of brown carpet like algae growin all over the rocks, spreading rapidly, and making a real mess of things. Anyone have any ideas?

The answer to your question is ... maybe. Depends on the types of fish you have really. Surgeons and such seem to catch ich at the drop of a hat. Some other species seem to be completely resistent to it. If the Midas had ich comin it, you'll likely see a surge of ich in a few days from now, after it falls off and gestates in the sand bed and live rock. I just came off of my blue tang being completely covered in ich and it looks like I've finally got it out of control.

ebay craigslist http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/

in case some of you all are unsure what a sea bunny looks like you can see one here

Or inside your cat

A standard 90 is actually 48x18x24, but yes, it sounds like what he's selling is some sort of 90LONG and it's probably 60x18x20 to keep with the standard foot long breaks.

19,720 cubic inches = 85 gallons

for a cheap alternative you can use lemon extract and inject the stalk (not the head). note: they'll need to be a bit larger to do this.

I wanted to go out looking for this link after Lee Stearns mentioned it to me yesterday. It's a very good article and hopefully it can remove some of the 'black art' aspects of reef keeping for new and old alike. Written by Randy Holmes, these are all of your major water parameters, what they mean, what your target is, and how to get them there. This is what we are trying to simulate in our aquariums. Water and it's basic chemistry is the most important thng. So without further ado http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-05/rhf/index.php

Depends on how you define large. I'd say for anything under 40 gallons you can have just the tank and deal with 'nutrient export' (the fancy phrase we tend to bandy about meaning getting the nitrates and phosphate levels down in your tank) with regular water changes and good feeding habits. On these tanks you can also often times forgo to use of a skimmer as well. Once you get to larger tanks you are going to start getting into the realm where managing water changes large enough to deal with the nutrient build up gets a bit taxing and you will find it's more efficient to start using a skimmer or a refugium or often times both.

this is an overflow http://superfishstore.com/waterworld/nfosc...%20overflow.jpg In this case, water comes over the lip of the overflow, swirls around a bit and heads down that stand pipe (the candy cane pvc thing). From there, it normally goes down into a sump such as this http://www.melevsreef.com/29g/sump/sump_month1.jpg in that pic, the water flows in on the right, through a small refuge area where macroalgae grows, and then makes it's return trip with the pump on the left. normally it will flow back up through the left most white tube on the left in that first picture. That is a very simple set up. water overflows, into a refue area, back up through pump. They can get more than more complex. I attached my sump to this image. I have the same kind of overflow and return but in mine, I come down into the left most area where my skimmer resides, it then spills into the main return chamber, and I have a second small minijet pumping water into the refuge chamber on the right where rock, sand and macroalgae are. For the most part, filtration in a reef aquarium is a completely different planet than freshwater. Most people don't use wet/dry filters because they can become nitrate factories. Some people use cannister filters but only do so from time to time or do so in conjunction with Ozone. The goal in reefs is to minimize nitrates and keep water clarity to a maximum. So in the world of marine, you have a couple of standard mechanisms. 1) protein skimming. You can see in the image I attached, to the left is my protein skimmer. Protein skimmers remove materials in the water that would eventually break down into amonia -> nitrate. This will help limit the overall amount of nitrate you are producing. Skimmers can also help in removing particulant matter from the water column. 2) some kind of refugium. This is normally in sump. The first pic is an example of this, macroalgae grows and feeds off of light and nitrates/phosphates in the water. Neither of these two include the biological filtration that your tank from denitrifying sandbeds and live rock. PS K I lied about attaching an image. It's too large. So I'll just link to it when I get it up. http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d189/dis...ja/IMG_0368.jpg

also Wally's Aquarium in Alexandria

gorram double post

will call soon as I have the opportunity but for counting purposes pound of seafood 3 packs of nori half packs of hikari brine and krill

An 'I'm sorry' to admins and wamas officers. I don't likely have the authority for this but I think it needs to be made known to visitors of our site because it's a serious security risk. Our forum was hacked by a spyware/expliot gang known as traffdollars. Some of you may have noticed it acting weird, having trouble with posting, generall funniness. If you view the source of the pages you will see many iframe injections pointing to an unsafe location called doubleh.fr/audio/index.htm This is a wmf/jar exploit (designed to compromise your machine) and if you are using IE (this does not appear to be a problem for non IE browsers) and are not patched or do not have an up to date AV software you need to do one or both. For a free AV program go to http://free.grisoft.com. This is a known issue that was corrected in the 2.0.4 and later version of invision. Since we are using one itteration less than that we were struck. for information concerning this bug http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=694025 Most likely, none of your personal information on these forums were compromised, but your system still could have been and this is your cue to clean up the mess. As far as the software, we will have to move to 2.0.4 or later (2.1.5 is the current release) or this problem will hang around.