Fishfreak2009's 75 Gallon Mixed Reef

[Fishfreak2009]

Picked up some awesome corals from a local reefer today! Same person the RBTA came from. Really nice frags for a great price.

Also decided to move the Sargassum out of this system. It keeps coming loose, and either clogs the overflow or shades the acros. Going to move it into an evo, and see how it does under an AI Prime 16HD.

Got a green slimer acro, a blue tort acro, an ORA Hawkins echinata acro, a red digi monti, pink tipped green octospawn, and a gold hammer! Now just have to figure out where to mount some of them.

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Just a couple tank pics

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Wife played around with the camera settings on her phone tonight.

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Wife stopped at the LFS for some snails and hermits for her nano today and came home with some beautiful fish for this tank! She surprised me with a black bar Lubbock's fairy wrasse and a group of 5 lyretail anthias! The largest anthias looks like it's already starting to turn male. Into quarantine they went, and they're already eating greedily.

No pics of the wrasse unfortunately. Also got a pic of the pencil urchin today. Normally he's buried way down in the rockwork, but today he's right up front.

 

[XtraKargo]

Wife stopped at the LFS for some snails and hermits for her nano today and came home with some beautiful fish for this tank! She surprised me with a black bar Lubbock's fairy wrasse and a group of 5 lyretail anthias! The largest anthias looks like it's already starting to turn male. Into quarantine they went, and they're already eating greedily.

No pics of the wrasse unfortunately. Also got a pic of the pencil urchin today. Normally he's buried way down in the rockwork, but today he's right up front.

My first tank had a pencil urchin in it. One of my favorite things to watch. You have to have your rock scape pretty secure, cause they are surprisingly strong! Good luck with your new additions.

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Update: All 5 anthias were randomly dead in quarantine, no idea why. No signs of parasites, no wounds or nipped fins. No measurable ammonia.

And a couple quick pics from the display:

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Corals are doing really well!

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Couple pics from the last day or so

 

[Fishfreak2009]

The female clarkii finally let the male join her in the bubbletip! And even though we are currently dealing with dinoflagellates (Ostreopsis spp.), the corals, fish, and inverts continue to thrive. All the acros are encrusting nicely and showing excellent growth, as well as coloring up. Even the freebie brown acro frag we received from @AquaSD has doubled in size and developed a beautiful purple color.

Coralline algae is also starting to grow, we just knock the dinos off the rocks with a turkey baster once daily to keep it from being smothered. Micro Lords are developing new polyps, as is the sun coral. It now opens daily about 2 hours after the fish get their afternoon pellets, which is when we feed mysis to the fish, so it gets fed mysis soaked in selcon and vita-chem daily as well. And the blue ridge coral is finally coming around! After not opening its polyps since the first week of January, it's now starting to open them (especially at night), and seems to be adjusting to the higher par. Gonioporas look pretty awful, but I had almost written them off for dead after they sat in 45 degree water for 3 days when they were in our evo during the November power outage. Haven't gotten any worse, but haven't really gotten any better either.

Once the tax refund comes, we will be investing in a UV sterilizer for the tank, to hopefully wipe out the dinoflagellates for good.

 

[Mav88]

Sorry about the anthias. Jealous of the rock work I prefer lots of rock unfortunately my wife likes minimalistic. One day I’ll just surprise her….

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Sorry about the anthias. Jealous of the rock work I prefer lots of rock unfortunately my wife likes minimalistic. One day I’ll just surprise her….

Normally I go with a little less rock than this, but I had it all and wanted to use all the nice pieces so rock wall it became. Besides, more biological filtration space, and more hiding spots for the fish, and coral mounting spots.

As for the anthias, we figured out the powerhead in the quarantine tank stopped working, so that in combination with the 5 fish in the evo at once and the praziquantel treatment must have meant too little oxygen for them at night I feel really bad about it, and we have now replaced the pump. Twice daily pump checks are now on the list of chores for this tank, the quarantine, and my wife's Evo display tank.

 

[Mastiffsrule]

Some great pics. Nice build. Keep the updates coming.

 

[Fishfreak2009]

We did a water test today after the water change today so I could post the numbers on here. I guess I understand why the corals are growing so fast. Also explains the dinoflagellates. We expected some levels luke alk to be high since we use reef crystals and we use our well water instead of RODI. Going to work on elevating nitrate by adding more fish. Already feeding plenty. Apparently the skimmer and refugium are more than keeping up with the current fish and 3-4x daily heavy feedings, plus live phyto and coral food dosing.

Salinity: 1.026
pH 8.3
Nitrate: 2.0
Phosphate: 0.5
Alk: 12.5
Magnesium: 1485
Calcium: 435

You can see how well the corals are growing. This Favites looked like bare coral skeleton and the Favia only had a tiny bit of flesh in the middle of each polyp back in November when we lost power for 3 days and our Evo hit 45 degrees. I almost threw them in the sump rubble pile. Favites is steadily gaining flesh back and the Favia looks like nothing ever happened.

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Moved another 3 green chromis out of quarantine to bring my group to 5. And added 3 orange line chromis (Acanthochromis polyacanthus) to the quarantine, along with a yellow tailed damsel (Pomacentrus coelestis).

The clarkii clowns have also started digging a pit in the sand under the anemone, and cleaning the rock around its foot. Looks like they are getting ready to spawn.

Here are some pics from today.

 

[Crabby48]

Wrasse, puppy’s I’ll definitely follow! Glance really quick and you have a great tank. Looking forward catching up and following your journey

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Wrasse, puppy’s I’ll definitely follow! Glance really quick and you have a great tank. Looking forward catching up and following your journey

Thanks! I'm trying to keep all the things I like the most that'll fit in here, instead of following whatever is the latest trend. I've done that over the years and was never happy with my tanks.

As I've kept reefs and saltwater tanks longer (figured out the other day I've been keeping saltwater fish for 18 years now) I just stick with what I like, hence lots of little fish, and a mix of acros, gorgonians, and various LPS and softies in here. And I'm definitely overstocking this little tank, but hey, I'm struggling to keep nitrates up anyways, even feeding 4+× per day, so the more fish the merrier.

Wife and I plan on upgrading this to an 8' reef (hopefully 8'x4'x2') when I graduate in spring of 2025, but I keep trying to convince her to let me do it sooner. Main challenge is that she is taking care of both reefs, our collection of reptiles, the parrot, the dogs, the cats, and the orchard I planted (and keep ordering more trees for even when I'm not there to plant them) while I'm in St Kitts for vet school.

Random animal pics from some of our other critters to fluff this post

 

[ninjamyst]

Love the updates! Looks like you got a full house!

For your qt tank, do you apply medication or just observe?

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Love the updates! Looks like you got a full house!

For your qt tank, do you apply medication or just observe?

Everyone gets cupramine and 2 rounds of prazipro. The sand for bottom dwellers (fiji pink from Carib Sea doesn't seem to absorb any cupramine, though I wouldn't put inverts in a tank with it. We test the copper level twice daily when it's in the system. I used to prophylactically dip in 37% formalin before entry to quarantine, but stopped since I'm not home to do it currently and didn't want the wife to have to deal with it.

In my wife's evo, she added 2 firefish in with her clown pair without quarantine, and now the clowns are starting to show signs of brook. So we are setting up another fish quarantine and bathing them in ruby reef rally for 90 minutes before moving them into that quarantine. From there they will sit in that tank for a full 6 weeks while her Evo display sits fallow. So we will probably do ruby reef rally baths on all new fish from here on out, especially because we've seen a bunch of fish with Brooklynella at more than 1 LFS recently.

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Wife's clowns and firefish from the evo are doing way better after a 90 minute bath in ruby reef rally pro. Now they're in quarantine with praziquantel as we found flukes on the firefish that has been hiding.

Here are some pics of from the 75 gallon tonight

 

[Fishfreak2009]

Participated in the @AquaSD ebay auctions last night after the wife told me I should look at some of the acro frags up for auction. Ended up really getting into the spirit of it and winning more than I thought I would. I'm going to set up a fluval evo just for the maxi mini nems, the rest of these will probably be going in this tank somewhere, just not sure where yet