garybigley
New Member
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2020
- Messages
- 15
- Reaction score
- 30
- Location
- Plymouth
- What state or country do you live in
- Massachusetts
Ok, so David from R2R sent an email when I signed up saying to introduce myself, so here goes. I had salt water fish tanks about 30 years ago. I had always wanted to get back into it, so last year I dusted off the wallet and splurged on a Red Sea Reefer 350. It's been quite a journey with great initial success, and then boom - dinoflagellates. I of course mis-diagnosed it as cyano and began a Chemiclean treatment. Called Boyds and they were really helpful, they looked at my pictures and helped me correctly diagnose the issue. It's taken a bit, and some black-outs, but I think I have that one pretty much solved. Several fish and a few corals later I've learned quite a lot. So what exactly have been the big lessons?
- A good RODI doesn't really cost that much, relatively speaking. Don't try this hobby without one.
- Don't forget to put the screen back on the tank before going to bed. Not because the wife is worried about the cat exploring the new tank and falling in, but rather finding a beautiful little DaVinci Clown (the male from my pair) on the floor the next morning.
- Thinking that little anemone that came in with a coral was cool. It was aiptasia.
- I will now dip my corals.
- I know what aiptasia looks like.
- I know I can get rid of a small one from a rock using bone cutters.
- Letting the colony polyp take over an entire large rock.
- Berghia nudibranchs are cool little creatures. They wiped out all of the small aiptasia that were starting to spread. All that was left were ta few monsters on the rock with the polyp. I'm not sure if the berghia would have been able to get those as they had gotten really big. Given I didn't want the colony polyp to move to the next rock and I wanted the space for something more challenging, it was an easy choice to just eat the cost of the rock and dump it with the polyp (and the aiptasia).
- Don't just check if something is reef safe. An established powder brown tang isn't going to let me add a smaller yellow tang into the mix.
