Wow it’s been quite some time since I updated my thread!! I’ve had some ups and downs along the way, so I’ll share those with you and then show you some pics [emoji16]
Fish wise I’ve had some losses [emoji17] firstly after the video in the above post, my Feminus wrasse shortly after went into hiding for a couple of days, which I feared the worst of - 3days later, she turns up practically dead and within literally a couple of hours, she stopped breathing [emoji1304] not sure what happened, because I had her for well over a year - the only thing I can think of is she went through loads of different meds when my tank was fallow, which I feared might have caused internal damage (she never lost her appetite though and was always fat).
Then last week, my twistti wrasse did something very similar - I got home from work one night and noticed she looked very dopey and wasn’t eating (which was most unusual!). The next day, dead [emoji24] no marks or loss of appetite leading up to it, so I can only assume the same as the Feminus - twistti wrasse are known for being difficult to keep alive and mine was well over a year old and a substantial size, so felt like a massive loss to me [emoji1304]
On the plus side though, I bought some fish at the start of June which I’m over the moon with and some others back in May, which feels like a lifetime ago now! The new additions include:
Flame wrasse (purchased as a female and now male)
Tiger goby
2x Orange spot gobies
Pair of lineatus wrasse
Diamond wrasse
Trio of png China wrasse (which look incredible together)
Tiny baby yellow tail wrasse (which has a huge appetite)
Cleaner wrasse
On the coral side of things, growth still remains slow mainly due to my stupidly high nutrients. I had an eye opener when visiting Matt Leighton’s low nutrient system and decided I needed to make a change. My No3 was at 25 and Po4 0.25. To sort it, I used the new Tropic Marin Synbiotic salt to do a decent amount of water changes - the macro algae additives in ingredients of the salt kicked my cheato into gear (literally in days of using it) and now I have a huge fuge area, which over time has dropped my No3 down to 5 and I’ve pulled the Po4 down to suit (now sitting at 0.03) using biophos. I’ve seen huge benefits of this and also believe that my new slow flow reactor is helping too - see pic of how my sump looks now
Before the changes, the high nutrients were having a bad long term effect on my corals, which I can only describe as causing them to look powdery and bubble looking. I had enough, so did an N-DOC test and spoke with Vincent at Aquariums Connections who advised me around how to manage my excessive organic carbon levels, which the biopellets weren’t helping. So over time as the nutrients came I slowly took handfuls of the biopellets out until a couple of weeks ago I finally shut the reactor down for good (thank god for that, I hated the bloody thing - chucked out loads of crap in my sump and clogged my pumps up!).
With the reduced nutrients, my algae issues have also cleaned right up, which I’m over the moon about, because my rock was starting to look crap! Now my rock work is squeaky clean. My SPS has also started to improve too - the coral are starting to get their shiny hard look back, but there’s still some way to go (I noticed they looked even better tonight since how they looked at the weekend when I took the pics below).
Finally, since the removal of my BTA I’d started to pack out the far right rock work boulder area with nice acros, however these weren’t getting decent enough par, because they were so low in the water column - so with that I purchased some more real reef rock (which I soaked for 2weeks in RO first) to lift the boulder up a bit, which you’ll see from the pics (i much prefer it now and have more room for more coral and possibly some more rock at some point).
Anyway, enough jabber, here’s some recent pics of how the tank is looking now and a quick 30second video (open in YouTube and select 720p else the quality will be awful I suspect).
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