DaJMasta's 45G AIO Cube Mixed Reef

[YHSublime]

I don't think I ever had one in my tank, it's been so long ago I've since forgotten, but when Quantum Reefs had their grand opening for a store front, they had a few FS. They were very cool to watch, if I did get one I probably killed it. 

[DaJMasta]

At least from older articles, they're considered fairly hard to keep because they need a fair amount of particulate food and are not photosynthetic, but I've sort of set my feeding regimen up for lots of particulate food, so at least from what I can tell, mine is still doing well.

Will take a few months more to know for sure, but last month I actually put in a fully NPS gorgonian (red with white polyps, visible of the pic with the little acro stick), and while there's some grime that still collects on it, I'm seeing good polyp extension for a bunch of the day and none of it looks like it's dying back yet after a month or so.

[YHSublime]

35 minutes ago, DaJMasta said:

At least from older articles, they're considered fairly hard to keep because they need a fair amount of particulate food and are not photosynthetic, but I've sort of set my feeding regimen up for lots of particulate food, so at least from what I can tell, mine is still doing well.

Will take a few months more to know for sure, but last month I actually put in a fully NPS gorgonian (red with white polyps, visible of the pic with the little acro stick), and while there's some grime that still collects on it, I'm seeing good polyp extension for a bunch of the day and none of it looks like it's dying back yet after a month or so.

Love to hear it, our last speaker had a lot to say about NPS, I have a hard enough time with the basic reef aquarium!

[DaJMasta]

Well it's past time for an update, so here goes:

 

Almost 11 months now, spent the last few with varying algae problems but with a slowly improving path, and despite the look and the slower than hoped and lower success rate growth of corals.... the non-corals seem to be very happy - I've got at least 5 pairs of organisms I put in the tank spawning on a fairly regular basis.

 

The journey of the last few months goes something like this:

I had been combatting algae for... ever, basically, and when examined up close it appeared to have some strands with fronds (like a fern), though they were patchy, and sometimes little bits of algae would catch a sort of silvery blue light in the evening - not really what I'd expect from your basic GHA.  After a couple weeks of trying to increase export and manual removal every couple of days having little effect, I decided it was probably bryopsis, and that I would go for a whole tank treatment - fluconazole - in the form of Flux Rx.  The tank looked like this before the treatment:

 

Four days after the application, this:

 

Then five days after that:

 

From there, the lack of algae seemed to provoke a red cyano outbreak, which by day 9 I may have even started treating for, and though I stepped down my vodka dosing a couple of times, treating the cyano lead to dinoflagellates.  They never got super out of hand, but they collected on remaining algae and corals (especially the gorgonians).  Those persist to today, but are trailing off thanks to manual removal and slowly turning down the vodka dosing.

 

In the mean time, my alkalinity uptake sort of bottomed out, which meant no daily kalkwasser, which meant low pH being indoors all day and apparently having somewhat elevated CO2 indoors, but with treating the dinos that started to recover.  Today, I'm dosing half a liter of kalkwasser a day and it's not keeping up with demand.  My alkalinity is still a bit low as I'm trying to dial in the soda ash dosing, but it's looking like maybe 10-15mL per day at current growth.  Speaking of, this is today:

 

And it definitely appears less red in person, no filter used so I think the blue washed out the color balance a bit.  But corals are finally growing - while I can see some growth looking at the older FTS pictures, I had never seen this kind of alkalinity consumption, and I'm finally to the point that none of the corals seem like they're receeding or not growing, it's just varying rates of health and growth.

In the in between I got a few new fish, a few clams, and recently some new corals, and everyone has their quirks.  I had a larger (3-4") hippopus clam which was neat, but a snail actually climbed into its shell, irritating it so that it closed over it.  It started gaping and being unhappy, so I eventually moved it to the ledge, the snail took like 3 hours to climb out, but it started doing better.  For whatever reason, though, it lasted about two more weeks and then died.  It could be that stress wasn't recoverable, it could be that the dinos in the tank were particularly bad for it, it could be that I damaged it somehow in moving it (I thought hippopus didn't have byssal threads, but in the last time I moved it, I did see a short sort of tail of sand below it).  I think the snail's still going, at least.

 

My cardinals have continued doing their thing, giving me 34 babies in the last clutch, spawning again 4 days later (the poor guy barely got to eat), and then he didn't seem to be able to fully close his mouth around the eggs, and spit them out two days later.  So while they have an off cycle, I'll get as many of their babies to a good size as I can.

 

In addition to the cardinals and the cleaner shrimp spawning, I've also had at least two porcelain crabs spawning - their larvae are really easy to ID because of their long protrusion), because there have been some larvae released that are 2x the size of the first ones I found.  No success yet, but I'm working on refining my techniques with each new spawn.

Maybe the spawn I'm most excited about, though, this month my pair of mandarins started spawning.  I have final proof that their nutritional needs are being met by the frozen food I trained them onto!  They do their little dance in the evening, between 10 and 11pm, usually, and then release a few dozen eggs into the water.  The eggs are tiny (a little less than 1mm around), completely clear, and not even that buoyant, so it takes a few minutes of collecting to get most of them after the flick of the tail at the end of spawning sends them all over, but while I have had only the very preliminary stages of development so far, I'm hoping I can get some adorable tiny mandarins at some point.  At the current stage of development, they look decidedly not like their parents.

You can see a couple of perfectly round, slightly translucent eggs in the 10mL beaker.

 

And that, believe it or not, is what a mandarin egg turns into after about 12 hours.

 

 

So the tank's been.... goodish?  Improving, at least.  And the more important part, a lot of the animals seem to be very happy.  Still got that flame scallop I put in early last summer and the NPS gorgonian collects detrius easily (and lots with the algae problems), but has white polyps out every day, so I think it's doing alright.

[jhOU]

around the same timeframe i dealt with similar ugly stage. I’m a firm believer micro-biodiversity is the key to getting past it. If you fight it too hard with chemicals/treatments, you might just be delaying the natural progression. Introducing the beneficial bacteria, pods, micro brittles, ect… and just maintaining conditions that favor the good critters, maintaining nutrients and dosing phyto is what i believe helped me the most.

[DaJMasta]

I definitely think it takes a while for the microbiome to stabilize in proportions that support things properly without the unsightlyness, but in my case, I don't think initial or even current biodiversity was the problem.  I started with live rock from the ocean, then added in corals and animals from a half dozen systems around the US, so I probably got a pretty good innoculating dose of variety, at least.  Since my live rock was shipped very quickly (to Dulles, arrived the day it was shipped), I actually have a little video of the grunge in the bottom of the box which writhed and ran away when a light was shone on it - and all that went in.  That said, I think the wrasses and the mandarins probably keep the pod population in check enough that the pods themselves probably have minimal impact on the ugly stage culprits.

 

In any case, it seems to be largely past it, which is great.  There's still some algae and it still may be bryopsis, but there's much less and the urchins will eat it all the same, and the dinoflagellates, while present, they seem to be slowly dwindling and not massing up day over day like they once were.

[roni]

On 2/25/2022 at 7:05 PM, jhOU said:

around the same timeframe i dealt with similar ugly stage. I’m a firm believer micro-biodiversity is the key to getting past it. If you fight it too hard with chemicals/treatments, you might just be delaying the natural progression. Introducing the beneficial bacteria, pods, micro brittles, ect… and just maintaining conditions that favor the good critters, maintaining nutrients and dosing phyto is what i believe helped me the most.

Yeah, I can't agree more here.  I had a long battle with dinos and ultimately it was following this advice from @jhOU that helped.  I regularly still dose phytoplankton, though I have pretty much stopped dosing extra bacteria these days. 

 

On 2/26/2022 at 12:08 AM, DaJMasta said:

I definitely think it takes a while for the microbiome to stabilize in proportions that support things properly without the unsightlyness, but in my case, I don't think initial or even current biodiversity was the problem.  I started with live rock from the ocean, then added in corals and animals from a half dozen systems around the US, so I probably got a pretty good innoculating dose of variety, at least.  Since my live rock was shipped very quickly (to Dulles, arrived the day it was shipped), I actually have a little video of the grunge in the bottom of the box which writhed and ran away when a light was shone on it - and all that went in.  That said, I think the wrasses and the mandarins probably keep the pod population in check enough that the pods themselves probably have minimal impact on the ugly stage culprits.

 

In any case, it seems to be largely past it, which is great.  There's still some algae and it still may be bryopsis, but there's much less and the urchins will eat it all the same, and the dinoflagellates, while present, they seem to be slowly dwindling and not massing up day over day like they once were.

That's fantastic that you were able to get rock that way.  I miss the days of walt smith Fiji rock with corals still growing on it.  My last tank was dry start and it's the first time I've ever had significant problems with algae.  

[DaJMasta]

The dinos are slowly fading and the dosing is increasing - intermittent soda ash dosing is no longer enough to maintain alkalinity, so I'm trying 30mL a day (plus 500mL a day of kalkwasser) to recover it a bit, right now dipping to about 7.8dKH where I think my target is about 9dKH.  The increase in uptake is definitely reflected in the corals, and since there has been some growth and some really nice color since the last update, I would take some pictures of the corals today.  So here are some moderately in focus shots of some nicer bits:

Got this derasa a few months ago and it got notably bluer in my tank.  Also seems to want to hug the acans - I actually moved them farther from it thinking they would irritate the mantle, and the next day it was scrunched up against them again.

 

I don't remember what these zoas are called, but they seem to like it in the tank, are growing steadily, and really have a great pattern and color.

 

This acro came as a stick on a plug with a bit of encrusting, it was one of the only acros willing to grow in the interim, and it's really grown and has great coloration.  It's a purple candle tip from cultivated reef (I remember one!)

 

This monti has been one of the other longer term growers and while the color isn't quite as vivid as some seem to be, I'm happy to see the gradient near the edges and the slow encrusting of the rock.

For the grime that still persists, I have managed to get some very nice color in small patches!

[roni]

Nice growth!  That acro looks similar to a tricolor valida.  Is the encrusting piece the rainbow monti? That stuff is beautiful but watch the area as in my experience it'll grow over anything.  I have a patch in my softie tank and put rocks with coral on it to keep it contained

[DaJMasta]

It does kind of, but I think I've got a proper tricolor and a garf bonsai that are little stubby frags still, will have to see how much they differentiate themselves.

 

I think the monti is a rainbow, and so long as it doesn't encrust over other corals, I will be happy enough with polyp covered rocks!

[YHSublime]

I can't see any of the photos you're linking... just me? 

[DaJMasta]

If they show up as just text strings, try reloading the page - I've been seeing a bit of that with the website stuff recently.  I at least think they're all there...

[ReefAddict]

Pics showing for me.

[YHSublime]

I see them all now on Tapatalk. That clam might be part of the reason for your uptick in consumption!

[DaJMasta]

A little update concerning some technical hurdles now overcome:

Shortly after the last update, I looked in my algae scrubber to find the lights pretty dim, one maybe out, and basically no growth.  I checked out the electrical side and basically the LEDs seemed to act normal except that they had a really high resistance when turned on, so the current through them was almost nothing.  I contacted Santa Monica Filtration as I had it for less than a year, and they offered to just send a replacement - it arrived about a week ago and is gradually growing in again, but I was quite pleased with the support they offered and hope that it can get back to work soon.

A few days after finding the scrubber not working, I took apart my powerheads to clean them and found one of the RP-Ms had rust on a portion of the impeller magnet.  So again, I went to contact the relevant support, sent them a picture, and they sent two replacements and a tiny packet of skittles!  While I'd always prefer the thing that just works well the first time, I was pretty impressed with the support offered from both companies.

In any case, neither failure and replacement has really negatively effected things, and it's been somewhat more stable and growing in.  I started seeing my calcium levels drop, so now my daily dosing is 20mL soda ash, 20mL calcium chloride, and 500mL kalkwasser.  I am seeing growth, though maybe not massive over a few weeks, and generally good color on things, but again not hugely different from before.

Not representative of the growth rate of everything, those zoas I like and pictured in the last update seem to be really growing fast!  These pictures are only three weeks apart:

 

 

Otherwise things are going well, but I should have had an overnight package arrive today which is now coming tomorrow, and the one year anniversary for the tank is less than 2 weeks away, so I'll leave the more comprehensive pictures until then.

[YHSublime]

2 hours ago, DaJMasta said:

A little update concerning some technical hurdles now overcome:

Shortly after the last update, I looked in my algae scrubber to find the lights pretty dim, one maybe out, and basically no growth.  I checked out the electrical side and basically the LEDs seemed to act normal except that they had a really high resistance when turned on, so the current through them was almost nothing.  I contacted Santa Monica Filtration as I had it for less than a year, and they offered to just send a replacement - it arrived about a week ago and is gradually growing in again, but I was quite pleased with the support they offered and hope that it can get back to work soon.

A few days after finding the scrubber not working, I took apart my powerheads to clean them and found one of the RP-Ms had rust on a portion of the impeller magnet.  So again, I went to contact the relevant support, sent them a picture, and they sent two replacements and a tiny packet of skittles!  While I'd always prefer the thing that just works well the first time, I was pretty impressed with the support offered from both companies.

In any case, neither failure and replacement has really negatively effected things, and it's been somewhat more stable and growing in.  I started seeing my calcium levels drop, so now my daily dosing is 20mL soda ash, 20mL calcium chloride, and 500mL kalkwasser.  I am seeing growth, though maybe not massive over a few weeks, and generally good color on things, but again not hugely different from before.

Not representative of the growth rate of everything, those zoas I like and pictured in the last update seem to be really growing fast!  These pictures are only three weeks apart:

 

 

Otherwise things are going well, but I should have had an overnight package arrive today which is now coming tomorrow, and the one year anniversary for the tank is less than 2 weeks away, so I'll leave the more comprehensive pictures until then.

love to see and hear it

[roni]

Good to see that you figured those out.   Good support and a good reminder to check things out periodically to make sure things are going well.  Being detail oriented definitely pays off in reef keeping... What are you getting in?

[DaJMasta]

Derasa clam, two flame scallops (mine is still going strong!), tiger tail cucumber, hector's goby (hopefully a mate for one of the ones i've already got) and a tailspot blenny for the fry grow out system.

Looks like they are coming tomorrow, but I don't think anything is particularly fragile in shipping, so I'm hoping for the best.  Gonna have a lot of bivalves in here...

[roni]

On 3/25/2022 at 10:27 PM, DaJMasta said:

Derasa clam, two flame scallops (mine is still going strong!), tiger tail cucumber, hector's goby (hopefully a mate for one of the ones i've already got) and a tailspot blenny for the fry grow out system.

Looks like they are coming tomorrow, but I don't think anything is particularly fragile in shipping, so I'm hoping for the best.  Gonna have a lot of bivalves in here...

Hope everything came in well.   Shipping this last few months has been interesting to say the least

[DaJMasta]

Well... it ended up being pretty "interesting" this time around.  Delayed the first day, arrived at Dulles late on Friday, arrived in Rockville Saturday morning, claimed Saturday delivery, even when called, didn't.  When I called in the evening they said they were already closed for pickup, but made arrangements for them to call me early in the day to confirm pickup on Sunday.  Turned out this was just false and the pickup point was never open on Sunday, so after another call I told them to deliver it Monday.............. they made me pick it up, but at least it was Monday morning.

I was expecting a complete loss, and while neither of the fish made it, unfortunately, everything else did.  So I've got a couple new little scallops which seemed no worse for wear when I got them, a derasa which is coloring up in the tank but which had gotten pretty pale, and a cucumber that was expelling some of its guts in acclimation, but which seems to have recovered.

Not the experience I was hoping to have, but I was surprised at what could make it and I appreciate the efforts the seller (Blue Zoo Aquatics) went to to try and get things delivered, and then to give credit for the losses.

In addition to that nonsense.... I somehow managed to dose Soda Ash instead of Kalkwasser one night to the tank, probably Thursday or Friday of last week.  The next day I didn't really notice anything amiss, and while one acro that seems to have a little patch on it that goes pale when things aren't optimal (the canary of the tank, apparently) showed that paleness... there was polyp extension, normal coloration, and normal activity all around the following day.  When I actually measured alkalinity, I was up from 8.0dKH as I was dialing in my two part dosing to 14.4dKH!!!  My salinity was even slightly elevated because of the extra stuff dissolved in the tank.

 

So I stopped dosing!  I've been dropping 1-1.5dKH per day and two nights ago I gave it a little bit of actual Kalkwasser (and I've wrote it on the cap of the jug too, now).  Will probably do the same tonight after another test, then maybe start calcium on its own tomorrow to make sure it doesn't drop while letting the alkalinity slowly reset.  Happy to see that things really took my mismanagement in stride, but a reminder that even manual dosing can hit a snag sometimes!


In any case, things have been happy.  The only notable thing since the misdosing has been a bit of extra cyano/dinos, but even that's subsiding.  Maybe growth was a bit stunted from the parameter shift, but they look good and the creatures are acting normal.  I got my first fire cleaner shrimp spawn a few nights ago, and it was a BIG one.

 

Since they're closely related to the skunk cleaners that were already spawning before and I had been refining my feeding methods with the mandarins spawning too, I dropped them into the kreisel to see what I could keep, and 2.5 days in there's still a cloud of them and some are onto the Z2 zoea stage (where the eyes diverge and get much wider).  I've even got a bit of video of one catching an artemia nauplii in a petri dish, and you can pretty easily tell which ones have fed as they hold the morsel of food below them in legs that are all but invisible when you look at them even under magnification.

In the next couple of days I've gotta catch the male cardinal so he can spit out the babies in a breeder box, and then for the one year anniversary of the tank, I want to take some pictures of things.

[YHSublime]

Bummer about the delivery, but sounds like the vendor took great care of you. 

 

While you may not see a reaction right now, I'd keep my fingers crossed for another two weeks. I've found that when I have dosing mistakes or crazy levels, it takes weeks to show the results. Awesome to hear about the fire shrimp. It's pretty amazing all the things you've accomplished with this tank and less than a year under it's belt! 

[roni]

Man, I'm really sorry to hear about the delivery issues.  I had one really bad experience this year and the company did not take care of it so at least in that way you are lucky.  However, always disappointing when animals die, especially in something like shipping.  Glad most of the shipment made it.  Fingers crossed for the dosing mishap.  I actually think human error is generally more common then machine error, at least when the human is me so my routine is to automate but do a manual testing/maintenance regimen.  It's worked better for me in general but I know lots of people that do either all manual or all automated without issues.  

 

Congrats on the spawns.  If you ever get your mandarins big enough please put me down for one.. I had a pair of biota but I believe only one made it

Edited April 2, 2022 by roni

[DaJMasta]

A little update now that the tank's more than a year old:

Got another few corals and swapped in a sharknose goby to get the two to pair up!  Did some cleaning and some general maintenance stuff, and the alkalinity has stabilized again and things seem to be progressing normally.  New FTS for the month, but I also decided to make a time lapse video of a day.  This was yesterday in the tank, one image every 5 seconds starting from 7:45am to 10:30pm, and while the camera placement could maybe use a tweak, it's neat to see everything moving around!

 

 

Since the last update I've gotten 16 more banggai fry and they just spawned again (though this time with a week and change from the previous one for the male to recover), another fire cleaner shrimp spawn, a few mandarin spawns, a mystery spawn I couldn't identify but which I still have larvae going from a few days ago so maybe I will eventually know, an egg spawn of tiny eggs that looked like a streak of bubbles (collected, then accidentally submerged and floated off into who knows where), and likely a few other spawns which I simply didn't catch.  Had some issues with my isochrysis cultures, but production is back up and going and the regular heavy doses of phyto have resumed.

 

 

[howaboutme]

looks great! i was fascinated by the snail (or hermit) more than anything else. almost mesmerizing!

[DaJMasta]

They move around a surprising amount!  I like the mandarins just scooting around too, though they tend to be fast enough for the movement not to be so smooth at this speed.