soooo its been more than a month since any updates, reason being an out of country trip.
the tank is still doing ok as you can see
i had my friend come over to take care of the tank for the 1 month i was gone. He had less than 0 experience with this stuff, never even had a guppy before, however with 3 weeks of "training" he was able to do almost everything i do as maintenance weekly. all in all he did a great job being someone completely unfamiliar with fishkeeping and i have to thank him deeply.
i made a 32G brute bucket of saltwater for the weekly water change, and another brute bucket if RODI for top off. food was prepared as frozen cubes with the 2ml daily amount of phytoplankton i feed my feather dusters, 5-7 pellets that my small clown loves, with a bit of frozen mysis that the royal gramma loves. this was fed daily by my family that stayed behind in Canada.
i set up a Jebao doser for Alk and Cal before i left and unfortunately it was not very accurate given how little i needed to dose for such a small tank. upon checking the values, my Alk was 12.1 and Cal was 471
fortunately i think the change was slow over 1 month and nothing really died except for half of a polyp of 1 Acan. the higher Alk and Cal seems to have accelerated the growth of my stony sticks and coraline algae. the green acropora in the middle was just starting to base out before i left, and is growing multiple mini sticks from the base now. my birdsnests are really branching out like actual birdsnests. my montiporas are all attached to the rockwork now. pink coraline had covered the back of the tank, but i scraped it all off as i prefer the look of a clean back.
1 funny thing that happened was the addition of the anemone shrimp before i left had ticked off my anemone, and it had started to wander around before i left. a couple of weeks before i left the anemone had completely disappeared, and i presumed it to be dead. upon returning it had turned up on the opposite side of the tank and my clownfish which had no interest in it were both being hosted by that same anemone
on the front of the white spots problem i had with my zoas, it seems that cutting off most of the Constellation colony that was the cause has fixed the issue completely. all of my zoas and palys are open and happy looking, although none seem to have grown any more polyps. the only one that was a problem was the Orange Rainbow, which has completely disappeared without a trace.
