The long road to recovering a reef.

Breadman03 · Dec 9, 2016

Long story, not so long:

Poor husbandry and a long time in a Rubbermaid with poor filtration led to nutrient soaked rock and a sod farm in a 150 gallon glass box. I tried to gently correct it, but a tank crash allowed me to hammer my rock with lanthanum chloride, 2200ppm magnesium with Tech M, hydrogen peroxide and manual scrubbing, then heavy carbon dosing to address my nutrient/bryopsis issues. I had a pair of G2 Radions over the tank, but fired up a 400 watt halide over my tank for and I and saw nice results. I got bit by the G4 Pro release and am now seeing some lovelies and am coming to y'all for some confirmation as to what I've got going on.

I believe that I've got a bit of purple/red cyano on my rocks, some bubble algae, some diatoms on my sand, and some turf algae on my rock. There is also what I think may be hydroids, the little green things in my one rock. Oh, and that's excluding my aptasia collection, which will be addressed by a filefish. I had one that died in my tank crash, and one that recently died in QT.

I've had my big three stable for about two months after getting my calcium reactor running with alk at 7dkh, cal at 385, mag is falling from bryopsis levels slowly and is now at 1700ppm. Salinity was at 37ppt per calibrated refractometer, though I'll be checking it today. My Apex probe has been stable, so I'm confident it hasn't wavered.

Ah, but nitrate and phosphate.... My phosphate has been between 0 and 0.08 per Hanna ULR and I get very consistent readings with it, though my reagent did just expire. Nitrate has been below 2ppm, excluding a reading of 20 a day after I fed very heavily. I've been dosing potassium nitrate to keep it detectable per @mdbannister's thread. I only have two fish in my tank right now, and believe that I need to increase my bioload in order to keep some more nutrients in the tank without dosing.

Anyhow, my planned treatment is to continue using the baster to remove the cyano and be more diligent about managing nitrate near 4-5. I also have a kole tang that will be entering the tank after TTM is complete.

Does anyone have suggestions to get a thriving reef?

acropora4u · Dec 9, 2016

filefish will be a good start- water changes and stability -

Breadman03 · Dec 9, 2016

deansreef said:
filefish will be a good start- water changes and stability -

That's pretty much what I figure at this point. The algae seems to be just a few spots, and the cyano and diatoms should self-resolve. The aptasia seems to be last plague.

But just for fun, here is a shopped pic of those acans.

saltyfilmfolks · Dec 9, 2016

I'd say just keep doing what your doing.

Salty1962 · Dec 9, 2016

A file fish and peppermint shrimp for aptasia and you can try Vibrant for your algae issues. It's knocked out almost all of my algae issues, GHA, Bryopsis and Bubble algae.

Breadman03 · Dec 10, 2016

I actually had about 15 peppermints in there, but they didn't make a dent. I think I'm down to 2-3 of them.

SteveSTL · Dec 10, 2016

I had literally hundreds of aiptasia and tried everything. The last one was lye which temporarily wiped them out along with all my snails (and a huge gorilla crab I could never catch). However, they came back with a vengeance because I believe while the lye destroyed most of them, the parts that it didn't ejected themselves into the water column and recolonized.

Finally I bought 6 peppermint shrimp from one source and 8 more from another a week apart. After 3 weeks, I am down to 5 or 6 big aiptasia that I can either wait for the shrimp to take care of or just make a kalk paste and destroy. Mind you, I only have a 27 gallon tank.

The one thing to keep in mind when you're using peppermints is that you have to basically starve your tank. Peppermints will feed on whatever is easiest to find so if you overfeed, they will get used to eating the fish food. I dropped pellets in 3 or 4 at a time 2x a week. As soon as they hit the water, the peppermints came out but the fish got them first.

Breadman03 · Dec 11, 2016

Okay, so I'm going to limit my feedings from pellets once daily and frozen about weekly to pellets twice weekly and start spreading out the frozen.

I believe my Apex code for my AFS will work. Can someone confirm?