Amazing result in such a short time! I have been out of the hobby for a long time and my last tank start (and all before) was live rock. However, this time dry rock and aquascaping.
Given you started with essentially dry rock, I would be interrested in seeing a recap of steps (and timing) you think have given you the biodiversity/success. Certainly some of this came from your previous tank, but any insight would be helpful. For example, your fairly early entry with corals probably helped as well right?
Thank you. I'll recap the timing and share some of the things I've found helpful. I never transferred any actual rock from the old tank, but certainly some of the corals and plugs from the other system have helped seed some biodiversity.
June 2020 tank ordered
June - August 2020 collected rock, dried, and built rock structures. I think that using actual live rock, although dried, may have benefit due to porosity and other factors that may be difficult to measure
August - November 2020 cycled rocks in water. Ocean water from Scripps Institute, San Diego. May have added some pelagic microbial fauna. Added some microfauna and used live mud from florida keys to help seed some microbiologic diversity
November 16 tank delivered, initial water and live sand in system
November 20 water moving through sump
November 27 First fish, pair of 1-2 " purple tangs. They got along at first, now I have one in each of my tanks after an unsuccessful attempt to reintroduce the second purple tang
December 2020 (Month 1) Added tangs, school of cardinal fish, then anthias. Of the dozen purple queen anthias that survived my initial 24 hours, ten have remained alive and healthy to date. I wanted to add my shy fish earlier prior to adding more active swimmers like wrasse that I was concerned may produce stress for the anthias.
Added primarily LPS during this time.
January 2021 (Month 2) noted pH was 7.8-8 on apex probe and decided to use a CO2 scrubber to bump up pH. Since then pH has been 8-8.2. In my opinion, this helped a lot. Perhaps not the most effective or efficient way to boost pH, but has helped speed the rate of calciferous algae and calcification the acros in the system. I suspect low pH is an under appreciated contributor to why tanks are slow to mature and corals may not do well in tanks early in many instances.
January 2021 started continous water change in the midst of my ugly stage. Progressively bumped up clean up crew. Sand conchs, turbo snails, trochus snails, ceriths, nassarius, margaritas, ninja star astreas, hermit crabs, amphipods. The continuous water change has been very helpful in maintaining consistency for the system, and made maintenance fairly hassle free.
Early February 2021 (Month 3)
Started adding acropora
2/07/21
April 25, 2021
Regarding acropora success early in the tank's life, in addition to pH I have maintained the alkalinity consistently around 7.8. For me, the trident has been very helpful. I have never tested my alkalinity this consistently for my prior system, and I've found it helpful to have this information consistently available to me.
I added a doser to maintain the chemistry. I do have a calcium reactor but have not brought it on line yet mainly because I don't want to drop the pH in the system and start chasing it with other methods. Once I have enough coral in the system, the amount of photosynthesis should increase the CO2 consumption and drive up pH. At that point, I'll feel more comfortable bringing it on line. So far all of the sps frags and lps have survived being in the new system and appear to be growing.
The flow in the system is high. I think an important factor for flow is the rock structure. Aquascaping plays an important role in the free movement of water around corals. Building the rock structures in advance gave me some additional options for the form of the aquascape and I had flow in mind when building the structures off of the sand bed. Despite high flow, no issues with the sand bed that helps with the microbiome and I enjoy aesthetically. I was curious and used a turkey baster on the rocks the other day, and was happy to find no accumulation of detritus.
March 2021 (Month 4)
Cyano was winning and I hit reboot with chemiclean and other minor changes. Youth of the tank played a large role in the cyano I believe.
February/ March 2021 added live sponges, gorgonians, sea whips so far these are all alive and doing well. I feed the tank small amounts 6-9 times / day and I was simply thinking the frequent feeding may support filter feeding organisms and these organisms may also benefit the system by cleaning the water column.
I'm not confident about long term success with the blueberry gorgonian and sea whips, and I'm aware how difficult long term survival can be, but they still look good currently. I had a pair of flame scallops that did not survive much beyond a month. So far the sponges all seem to be doing well, and the yellow ball sponge seems to have grown.
Regarding microbiologic diversity, corals certainly add some diversity. Live mud for cycling the rocks helped. The live mud and sand I recently added from indopacific sea farms has helped as well. The porosity of the rock and the live sand have helped.
I sent a sample to Aquabiomics on 2/22/2021 to test the success of my cycling method and get some objective data on the microbiome. This was prior to adding the live sand / mud from IPSF. The results are all relative to mature systems, and it would be helpful if I could normalize the data for a younger system to have a better sense of what it means.
Here were my results:
Microbiome was low in diversity
Balance score was low, demonstrating an atypical microbiome relative to most established reefs
Community composition also demonstrated atypical community composition and low balance. My tank is the bar on the left versus typical reef tank on the right. Interestingly, they were able to determine I was running a UV due to the low numbers of pelagibacteraceae. The significance for the health of the reef isn't known. No known coral or fish pathogens were identified.
I don't think it's surprising that a young tank has an imbalanced microbiome or different composition than a mature reef and I intend to recheck after a year, but it's helpful to have some baseline data to put the progress or lack of progress in context.
Thanks for your question.
