3 Month Old Red Sea Reefer

[madducks42]

We never did a build thread but I thought I'd post some pictures of our tank. Still figuring out how to take good pictures of the tank and all it's inhabitants. Somewhere in the house we have a tripod but I couldn't find it tonight.

The tank is a Red Sea Reefer 425XL. It's been up and running for almost 3 months now. Currently we have two ocellaris clownfish, royal gramma, 1 fire blood shrimp, 2 scarlet skunk cleaner shrimp, 1 peppermint shrimp, purple sebae anemone (I know we should have waited, I might have impulse problems but it's doing well), branching hammer coral, orange/green polyps.

 

[Maritimer]

Tank ... and the 'nem! ... are looking pretty sweet!

~Bruce

 

[Blue Spot Octopus]

Nice tank, what lighting are you using?

 

[spiraling]

What is the green on the rocks? My reefer is about 5 months old and I have brown (diatoms, cyano) everywhere.

 

[madducks42]

Nice tank, what lighting are you using?

We have two Hydra52's. Still fine tuning the schedule but I think we mostly have it setup in a way that makes us and everything in the tank happy. I might up the percentages a little bit more in a couple weeks. Currently the lights come on around 10am, just blue and ramp up to 60% blue and 60% white by 3pm, then start to taper off. By 8pm they're at 30% white and 30% blue and at 10pm it switches over to just 10% blue and then completely off at midnight. We setup the light schedule to start a little later in the day because we view the tank the most after work so still wanted it to be fairly bright for us to view everything.

 

[madducks42]

What is the green on the rocks? My reefer is about 5 months old and I have brown (diatoms, cyano) everywhere.

I actually asked that question here a few weeks ago, lol. The consensus seems to be that it's green coralline algae. I'm hoping it starts to turn purple but it's showing no signs of that currently.

 

[Maritimer]

I think more likely that it's green film / micro algae. Have you introduced any coralline algae into the tank? With a frag or hermit crab, perhaps?

Coralline takes a while to grow, and needs a decent amount of calcium to do it.

~Bruce

 

[USMC 4 LIFE]

Looks like mine when it was 3 months

My CA and ALK was a little low. A week after I started dosing CA and AlK my tank literally turned pink purple in about three months.

 

[madducks42]

I think more likely that it's green film / micro algae. Have you introduced any coralline algae into the tank? With a frag or hermit crab, perhaps?

Coralline takes a while to grow, and needs a decent amount of calcium to do it.

~Bruce

When I posted here I assumed people would say it was green film algae but everyone who commented on the post said it sounded like green coralline. I thought it was odd it would appear in the tank so early but it doesn't come off, it's my understanding that you can scratch film algae off with your nail or a toothbrush. This stuff doesn't come off at all. It appeared in the tank before we had any frags in it. We did get about a dozen hermit crabs as part of the CUC and it showed up shortly after that if I remember correctly. We had a lot of brown algae when we got the CUC, I think this green stuff started to appear a couple of weeks after that. Our calcium was always pretty high, when we tested about a month ago it was at 460ppm and that was before we introduced any coral frags. we only started dosing for Ca and Alk in the last few weeks because of the coral we introduced.

My Ca and Alk was a little low. A week after I started dosing CA and AlK my tank literally turned pink purple in about three months.

Nice! We just started dosing for Ca and Alk in the last few weeks. The Ca levels in the tank were always high but the Alk was a little on the low side so we've been working on increasing that and keeping it steady. I figure if this is indeed coralline algae we'll start to see some pink and purple in a few months : )