3.7g Pico

[AlanM]

Left to right: nassarius snorkel, hermit crab back, ruby red dragonet, and some angry zoas.

 

[DaJMasta]

Nice dragonet!  I've always liked their coloration/pattern.  Do you know if this one already eats prepared foods?  I remember years ago there was some trouble keeping them (or at least mandarins) in smaller tanks because they wouldn't always take prepared foods, so there was some extra value associated with ones raised on non-live foods.

[tpallas]

1 hour ago, AlanM said:

Life! 

 

I visited the fish store.  Got a few hermit crabs, a single nassarius snail, a rock of random zoas, and a ruby red dragonet.  

 

I'm afraid we are going to need pics

 

Edit; you posted them while I was on the page...nice!

Edited April 11, 2021 by tpallas

[AlanM]

Yep, they didn't know.  I have seen it eating on the pods in the tank which there are a lot of at the moment.  I have a brine napulii hatchery that I'll do every few days from when I kept jellyfish.  I also ordered some pods from Reef Nutrition because they're a great company, and I'd been intending to for a while.

 

I'd like to get it on LRS or something like that, though, so I'll be feeding a bit of that to keep the snail, hermits, and zoas happy and see if he will eat it.

[AlanM]

2 minutes ago, tpallas said:

 

I'm afraid we are going to need pics

Scroll up, my dude.

[lynn.reef.nerd]

I found that the red dragonet jump  . 

 

Everything looking good Alan! 

[AlanM]

25 minutes ago, lynn.reef.nerd said:

I found that the red dragonet jump  . 

 

 

Yep, I am watching out for that.  I have a glass lid on it which seems to work well, but it has a 1"x2" little hole in the front that I hope it misses.

[jhOU]

 
Yep, I am watching out for that.  I have a glass lid on it which seems to work well, but it has a 1"x2" little hole in the front that I hope it misses.

my clown goby managed to jump out of that hole RIP:( you can turn the lid around so the hole is over the rear chamber, just slightly annoying for feeding


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[AlanM]

1 hour ago, jhOU said:

my clown goby managed to jump out of that hole RIP:( you can turn the lid around so the hole is over the rear chamber, just slightly annoying for feeding


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Ack.  OK.  I can do that.  The front of the glass lid has rounded corners, which makes it nice to have the lid this way since it fits the rest of the tank, but I can turn it around.

[YHSublime]

Nice! I would love another mandarin, especially the dragonets, but refuse to put a lid on my tank. 

[AlanM]

21 hours ago, YHSublime said:

Nice! I would love another mandarin, especially the dragonets, but refuse to put a lid on my tank. 

 

I like it a lot without the lid.  Lid helps with evaporation quite a bit, though.  I had a mandarin jump in my 75g as soon as he started eating frozen food, and it still upsets me.  I loved that guy.  I'm going to try very hard not to let this one jump.

 

One of the advantages of running it for three months without fish in it is that I was able to learn what not to do.  I discovered that, for me, the hardest part of running a tiny saltwater tank is mixing up small quantities of new salt water to closely match the water in the tank. 

 

When I used to mix up a 40 gallon brute of saltwater I could just kind of eyeball it and pour in a bunch and measure while pouring.  Now I'm working with a 1/4 cup measure into a 5 gallon bucket trying to get the salinity right and trying to carefully match the temperature because a 2 quart water change into a tank with only around 3 gallons of water volume is a relatively large one.

 

The good aspect is that it's really easy to siphon out a 2 quart pitcher of old water and replace it with 2 quarts of new water without walking buckets up and down the stairs.  My wife likes not having hundreds of gallons per minute running through our basement ceiling down to the sump, but I do still miss that tank most days.

[YHSublime]

1 hour ago, AlanM said:

My wife likes not having hundreds of gallons per minute running through our basement ceiling down to the sump, but I do still miss that tank most days.

 

What a rush! You should plumb this into a 150 gallon rubbermaid stock tank downstairs! It's a low priority for me, but I will eventually do something like that. 

[AlanM]

33 minutes ago, YHSublime said:

 

What a rush! You should plumb this into a 150 gallon rubbermaid stock tank downstairs! It's a low priority for me, but I will eventually do something like that. 

 

Yeah, the gentle hum of a Reeflo running downstairs pushing it up and the big whoosh as the upstairs overflow filled with water and started pushing the air out of the siphon line until it quieted down once the pump was restarted after a water change.

[AlanM]

Everything still alive and doing well. 

 

I added two bottles of live pods from Reef Nutrition.  The place looked like it was snowing tiny swimming critters.  The dragonet just kind of sat there looking confused, but I assume he will start getting them eventually. 8)

[AlanM]

Pico is going well so far.

 

I've gotten a few zoas, ricordia, and xenia for it and also put in some possibly ill-conceived SPS.  

 

So far everything is doing fine.  

 

The fish is a jumper for sure.  I heard it splashing off the glass lid yesterday evening.  I assume it's because it doesn't really swim.  It kind of jumps from rock to rock.  In the wild it may jump from pool to pool hunting.  It's hard to get a photo of, but here are the corals for now and you can kind of see the fish inside the cave on the left.  It's pretty cryptic.

 

 

 

[YHSublime]

Looking really nice. I'm digging how it's all coming together! Glad you have the lid! 

[AlanM]

Confession time:

 

I had a crash Friday night.  I don't know exactly what happened, but when I woke up Saturday morning the water was cloudy and my dragonet and sole hermit crab were dead.  The corals were also all very unhappy. 

 

I've been changing 2 quarts of water per day so around a 15% daily water change.  I assumed that was enough to keep the water quality good despite not having a skimmer or any mechanical filtration, but I guess it was building up in there nevertheless.

 

The thing I changed on Friday was that I made a screen top and set that on it instead of the glass lid.  My theory is that I had been building up ammonia in the tank, but the glass lid kept the pH low and the ammonia non-toxic.  When I put the screen on top the pH probably went up and the ammonia started killing things.  Just a theory, but that's all that changed overnight.

 

Saturday I did a 2 gallon water change after removing the dead things, then I put in some floss and spent the day occasionally blowing off the rocks and stirring up the sand to trap a bunch in the floss to remove it. 

 

Everything looks good today.  Dwarf Ceriths and nerites are looking good.  It will be a lower nutrient tank if I'm not trying to keep a fish happy, so I think it will be fishless for a while.  I have mostly zoas and ricordia, but have a little bit of SPS.  Digitata looks fine.  Birdsnest started to lose tissue.  Anacropora looks fine.

[howaboutme]

Curious Alan, what was your ph when you had the glass lid?

[AlanM]

I also confess that I've never tested any parameters of the water in this tank.  Nothing except temperature and salinity (with refractometer).  I figured I knew what I was doing and wasn't putting in challenging corals, so what's the use of testing lots of stuff. 

 

I have no idea what the pH was in any situations.

[tpallas]

Sucks about the crash, but the tank looks great!

[YHSublime]

Bummer, but it happens. 

[AlanM]

For the last few days I've been dealing with a mystery now of cloudy water and unhappy, closed zoas and xenia.  It's easy to do nearly 100% water changes on this tank, so I've been doing that each day, but it stays unhappy. 

 

It looks like maybe there's a dieoff of the algae on the back wall as well?  It's definitely kind of cleaning up.  I ran carbon for a couple of days and that does seem to be helping a bit, but it's a real mystery to me trying to figure out what is going on (without testing).

 

The water is clear this morning, so fingers crossed that it's turning around.  

[WheresTheReef]

Might be a bacterial bloom. I’ve only experienced it one time and it lasted a couple weeks. Might test for ammonia just in case. You can either wait it out or use a small UV like the green killing machine. Some have seen the bloom return when they turned off the UV. That’s why I just waited it out. Just make sure you have enough aeration/surface agitation because the bloom can reduce oxygen levels.

[AlanM]

On 6/1/2021 at 10:52 AM, WheresTheReef said:

Might be a bacterial bloom. I’ve only experienced it one time and it lasted a couple weeks. Might test for ammonia just in case. You can either wait it out or use a small UV like the green killing machine. Some have seen the bloom return when they turned off the UV. That’s why I just waited it out. Just make sure you have enough aeration/surface agitation because the bloom can reduce oxygen levels.

 

I think you're right about what it was. Delayed bloom after the initial crash.

 

It has cleared up now, but the coral responses are interesting. I have one SPS in the tank, a digital, and as soon as the water improved those polyps came back out.  The zoas and Xenia are still mad though. 

 

SPS are more delicate and can completely die quicky, but forgive you faster once quality improves.  Softies are hardier, but hold a grudge longer.

[AlanM]

Tank is looking much better.  All zoas and other corals recovered and opened up.  I'll just keep a close watch on it. 

 

I may add a tiny skimmer, mostly for fun:

 

https://premiumaquatics.com/products/reef-glass-nano-protein-skimmer.html