sachabballi reef August 25, 2013 August 25, 2013 wade do I count 3 urchins in there or am I losing it?
wade August 26, 2013 Author August 26, 2013 4 it is! Excellent grazers. Only once in a while do they pick up a frag. Sent with Tapatalk 4.
sachabballi reef August 26, 2013 August 26, 2013 4 it is! Excellent grazers. Only once in a while do they pick up a frag. Sent with Tapatalk 4. are they eating the Acetabularia?
Origami August 26, 2013 August 26, 2013 Nice rock work, Wade. Are you hoping that the urchins clear out the algae? Have you considered using something like AlgaeFix Marine to try to get rid of it completely? That Wikipedia link seemed to imply that the nucleus was in the rhizome so that, even if the top were lopped off, it would regenerate. (Hard to believe that this is a single-celled organism seeing how large and complex looking they are. They're similar to caulerpa that way, I suppose.)
wade August 26, 2013 Author August 26, 2013 I've never used a chemical treatment before... not even sure if something like that would work or not. Any experience with AlgaeFix? The tangs (the yellow at least) do eat the caps off of the algae, but that doesn't do much when you have thousands of them. But to be honest, I'm not even concerned about those as much as the brown thick mat of algae that hides underneath many of them. The urcins do a marvelous job of cleaning... but its sporadic. I get trails up and down rocks that are cleaned of everything... so they certainly help keep it in check, but they won't get rid of it all. I recently started running some phosphate removal media to try to fight it as well.. seems to be working albeit slowly.
Origami August 26, 2013 August 26, 2013 I used it to knock down some hair algae in a smaller tank a while back. MBVette used it to knock down a free-floating single-celled microalgae that clouded his tank last winter. I think that it interrupts the algae's metabolic processes and leads to it bleaching or weakening. In the case of large stuff like you have, you'd want to vacuum it out once it was weakened and before it dumped the nutrients right back in to the water.
sachabballi reef August 26, 2013 August 26, 2013 I like algae fix and have used it with success...I think if you use too much you murder your snails though...
sachabballi reef August 26, 2013 August 26, 2013 here Wade...go get a beer and a comfy chair http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1595003
wade September 11, 2013 Author September 11, 2013 Update: very short video of the tank from tonight. Warning: the camera has no idea how to handle the blue light so things aren't very crisp, but its something. I will take a much better one soon. Oh, and I apologize for the music, but the background clatter of dog toenails and baby banging in the background was even more distracting.
Origami September 11, 2013 September 11, 2013 It's coming along nicely, Wade. Nice selection of fish.
wade September 11, 2013 Author September 11, 2013 Thanks. The school of firefish was a hope I had based on what I'd seen in the wild. So far, of the 6 I put in, 5 actually stay together and have totally become used to the tank and always stay out. Even when I put my hand in the tank. The brown algae is mostly under control. Corals are growing like mad and I finally am starting to see corraline on the glass.
YHSublime September 11, 2013 September 11, 2013 Loving the aquascape, the tank looks amazing, well done, all that sps will be nice once grown in!
wade October 10, 2013 Author October 10, 2013 Since I'm stuck at home, I just tried to take some more pics of the tank. These LEDs make photoraphy tough... at any rate, here are 3 images of the tank. Nothing is cleaned up, just 'as is'. This is ~4.5 months in. Seeing some great growth. Colors are generally staying bright. Down to only yellow tang, flame angel, 3 firefish, and a scooter blenny from my previous post (the video above) due to fluke infection. My cleaner wrasse did a bang up job on the tang and angel before it succumbed itself. Lesson learned... get 2 so they can clean each other. Anyway, here are some pics. I'll try to stitch together a pano of the whole tank so folks can see more detail.
Leishman October 10, 2013 October 10, 2013 I just searched Adamstown, MD and see you are less than 8 miles from me. LMK when you are up for a tank tour......!
wade October 10, 2013 Author October 10, 2013 Can do. Still have some items to get together on the tank before that happens. Need to rework my return line and get my reactors flowing again (using powerheads is a mess). Give me a few months and it'll be ready to go!
wade October 10, 2013 Author October 10, 2013 (edited) Whole tank shot, this represented the colors fairly well. Had to adjust it to 12000K. I'll do this as an attachment as well, since I think its a bigger image. Edited October 10, 2013 by wade
Cliff Puckstable October 10, 2013 October 10, 2013 The tank looks great. I see you got rid of the AIDS.
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