WarEagle88's Evo 13.5

[WarEaglesReef]

heard Nest is coming out with a newer camera within the next month.

Saw specs of it in an article this week. Looks really sweet! Might have to add one to my home security system when they come out (especially if I'm using my main one to watch the tank when I'm gone.)

 

[WarEaglesReef]

Back at home!! The tank is GROSS. Glass needed some serious scraping, and of course when I leave my xenia decides to shed like 8 different arms all over the tank. Luckily none of them permanently fixed onto anything, so removal was pretty easy. All of my euphyllia corals are suuuuuper irritated and closed up and the zoas are both unhappy, but everyone else seems to be in good spirits despite the week of neglect. Hollywood stunner chalice grew a TON while I was gone as well as my micro/acan lords. Interesting how different species have reacted to the lack of care for a week. Thought for sure the acans would be super distressed with sand from the goby covering them all week, but they look awesome.

Just got done with a 5 gallon water change, and put in a DIY supplemental mechanical filter to help pull out all the extra gunk that accumulated. It's working amazingly well and the tank looks worlds better than it did an hour ago. Happy to be home! Here's my little filter in action:

 

[reef-rc]

That's pretty creative there with the filter pads and pump

Definitely tough when away and someone else or no one is watching or doing maintenance based on what's happening with the tank

 

[WarEaglesReef]

That's pretty creative there with the filter pads and pump

Definitely tough when away and someone else or no one is watching or doing maintenance based on what's happening with the tank

It worked really well! Saw it in one of Joey Mullen's King of DIY YouTube videos and figured this was the perfect opportunity to try it out. Might pop it in after my water changes in the future since it helped clear the water back up super fast. And it's nice to immediately remove a bunch of those extra nutrients floating around in the water column rather than let them settle until the next water change.

Tank looks much better this morning. Looks like it will take a while for the euphyllias to bounce back though.

 

[WarEaglesReef]

Switched to a little bit different lighting schedule and I've noticed my green micro lords start to have this little pinkish orange speckling around the edges. Really cool looking!

Also, looks like the red ones I picked up at the same time may be Tiffany Rings. They've got gorgeous light blue coloring coming in. Striped on the full grown heads, but full rings on all the new baby heads.

I think my original light schedule that I chose was a bit strong for some of the corals as they got a bit grumpy once my acclimation mode period had finished and they had been on full power for a couple weeks. Switched to David Saxby's Hydra 26 schedule that was posted in the AI Prime Facebook group and tweaked a few of the settings to my liking...this ones got a bit less whites and a cloud pattern during the peak lighting hours to give the corals a bit of relief off and on. Only been a couple days on the new schedule and a couple of the grumpy ones are showing improvement. It's a bit bluer than I'm used to, but if it makes the corals happy, I'm happy.

 

[WarEaglesReef]

Look at this daredevil! Went to feed my fish this evening and caught this guy alllll the way at the water's surface hanging out on my heater. NO idea how he managed that. Super impressed.

Dealing with some gnarly gunk that the algae forum seems to think is dinoflagellates. I'll blow it all off my coral and it will be back in a matter of minutes. Very frustrating. Did a big water change and dosed a small amount of peroxide and I'm already seeing a bit of improvement with how fast it grows back. Hoping to get a handle on it soon...looks awful and all of my corals except my acans and leathers are super irritated by it. They get covered and seem totally unphased. The others are all closed up in protest.

 

[reef-rc]

Seems tank is making up for you going on vacation it seems ....jk

I was actually getting some RnR myself in Florida and came back with a relatively stable system with one exception. The unglued butternut stylophora coral feel and landed on one of the acan and half of one branch lost it's polyps. Luckily they're fast grower so I am looking for it to grow back in no time.

 

[WarEaglesReef]

Seems tank is making up for you going on vacation it seems ....jk

I was actually getting some RnR myself in Florida and came back with a relatively stable system with one exception. The unglued butternut stylophora coral feel and landed on one of the acan and half of one branch lost it's polyps. Luckily they're fast grower so I am looking for it to grow back in no time.

Haha, looks to be that way. I've definitely had to give it some extra TLC since I've been back. Hoping everything balances out soon. Bummer about your stylophora! Glad it grows back fast though. I had my urchin rearrange a bunch of frags, but luckily he didn't decide to drop any on top of each other.

 

[reef-rc]

here's a shot of it today (glued onto the rocks now so it's not moving). Noticed the completely white section. Funny part was nothing happened to the acan which it felled on.

 

[WarEaglesReef]

here's a shot of it today (glued onto the rocks now so it's not moving). Noticed the completely white section. Funny part was nothing happened to the acan which it felled on.

Yeah, I've heard acans have a nasty sting that will beat out most other corals. Thankfully it only looks like a small bit of receding tissue for you. Hopefully it bounces back fast! Love the coloration it has.

 

[WarEaglesReef]

I'm thinking my next reefing purchase will be a doser so that I can start dosing alkalinity at night and calcium/magnesium during the day. I've got two reasons. First, the growth of my stony corals seems to be slowly but surely out pacing my water changes and I've seen calcium drop a bit from being consistently around 460 to now reading closer to 420-430. Second reason (and really the more important one) is that while following the advice from the algae forum on how to treat the dinos in my tank someone suggested I check my pH swing to see what that looks like. I usually do all my water testing mid-afternoon after the lights have been on for a good 4-5 hours, so my pH testing has pretty much always read 8.2. Tested both yesterday morning and this morning and both results came back on the low end off the charts of my test kit (I'm guessing somewhere near 7.2-7.4) I know that some pH swing is normal, but that seems a bit drastic. So I'd like to be able to dose alkalinity at night to reduce that swing a bit. Other option to solve that issue would be to figure out some way to set up a refugium with an opposite lighting schedule, but with a nano and already limited space that could be really hard to do logistically. I'll have to do a bit of research to see what would work best on such a small tank (and on my bank account). ;Blackeye

 

[WarEaglesReef]

Spent the day going to visit some of the reef shops in my area. Added to my clean up crew with two scarlet hermits (we've named them Johansson and O'Hara) and two blue leg hermits (names pending) from Elite Reef (so excited to see their new location when they move in a few weeks), and an emerald crab (Ozzy) from Aquatic Art. Came so close to picking up a little tailspot blenny at Murmann's Reef, but I used those powers of self control and decided I'd rather wait until I can properly quarantine to do that.

Talked with one of the guys at Aquatic Art who thinks for my pH swing to have those numbers that I have to have a faulty test kit since pH that low would cause my stony corals skeletons to break down and I'm not currently seeing that. So I was happy to hear that.

Last but not least, I picked up this little frag of stylophora to fill the empty spot left behind from me moving my purple monti to a different location. So far it seems to be settling in well!

While acclimating all the new arrivals I took the opportunity to take out my return pump and clean it and siphon out all the back chambers. So much gunk back there! Got new carbon and GFO going, and so far after two days of minimal peroxide dosing 99% of the dinoflagellates are gone. Patiently waiting for my moody euphyllias quit being grumpy. Everything else is no longer irritated.

 

[reef-rc]

nice frag! I like stylophora as they give a tank a little more dimension and height to the landscape.

 

[WarEaglesReef]

nice frag! I like stylophora as they give a tank a little more dimension and height to the landscape.

I'm excited to see how well it does. Owner of the store said they're pretty easy in terms of SPS and that they grow pretty fast. And I'm happy to be slowly balancing out all of the green coral in my tank with other colors.

 

[WarEaglesReef]

Tank update! After several weeks, my euphyllias are all happy again. I'm thinking perhaps they weren't angry, but rather closed up while in the process of splitting into new heads. The torch split out into three heads and got some really interesting green streaking in it, the hammer now has two distinct heads instead of one elongated one, and the frogspawn seems all scrunched up in a few spots like it will separate into three by the time it's done. Glad to see them all open and happy again.

SOMEONE (lookin' at you emerald crab) has been munching on the stalk of my green toadstool leather. :mad: I haven't seen the culprit at work, but I suspect it's the new emerald crab as this started after adding him and the scarlet hermits, and the scarlets are always in the sand. Thankfully the base is thick enough that it hasn't caused any real problems other than cosmetic, but I'm not looking forward to trying to catch him if this continues.

New stylophora continues to do really great. The base has even grown off a tiny bit from the frag plug it was on (on the bottom right), so it should be affixed to my rock work pretty soon. And for some reason the little brittle starfish I hitchhiker I added to the tank is super in love with this coral. He is pretty much always right underneath it with his arms out whereas I used to practically never see him. The zoas you can see on the left of the photo echo the main frags they came off of...after about 2 months of being completely closed up, all of the zoas are now open and growing again. Not sure what ticked them off, or what I did to remedy that situation, but I'm happy to have them back adding color to the tank.

My duncan coral now has EIGHT little baby heads all around the bases of the larger two heads. So in a few months it looks like I will have eleven full heads of duncan quickly taking over my tank. Beyond exponential growth that I almost certainly attribute to adding the PrimeHD light to my tank.

Had a trochus snail die in the tank last week. Not sure if it was related to the peroxide dosing for the dinos or just old age since it was by far the largest of the snails in the tank. But I was happy to see that even after leaving the body in for all the other inverts to have at (I swear, it was like watching a nature documentary all day in the tank with them all showing up in shifts to chow down) I didn't have any measurable change in ammonia or nitrite, so I'm glad my bacterial filtration seems to be on point and functioning at 100%.

Still mad in love with this new hobby and quickly outgrowing my little nano. Looking forward to being done with home repair bills so that I can start saving up for something a bit bigger!!

Here's a nice full tank shot for good measure. Got tired of the urchin always knocking the xenia off the frag rack in the back (you can see him chillin' on it in the pic...with a bit of xenia worn as a hat), so it's on the sand in the back where you can't see it...but still growing like a weed!! Today is water change day. Currently heating up my water to temp and getting ready to scrape the gunk off the glass so pardon the fuzzy glass in places.

 

[reef-rc]

Looks like things are going well and looking good. That's awesome.

 

[WarEaglesReef]

Looks like things are going well and looking good. That's awesome.

All except for that pesky emerald crab! Haha. I see him out and about tonight. Would catch him if I had somewhere to put him until I could take him back to the store. But maybe this was a one time deal and I won't have to go through the trouble. Have a feeling it won't be though...that hole in the side of my leather looks like multiple days worth of mischief. -_-

 

[reef-rc]

All except for that pesky emerald crab! Haha. I see him out and about tonight. Would catch him if I had somewhere to put him until I could take him back to the store. But maybe this was a one time deal and I won't have to go through the trouble. Have a feeling it won't be though...that hole in the side of my leather looks like multiple days worth of mischief. -_-

I don't know if u do this...I feed my emeral crab if he comes out during fish feeding. Usually he does so I do make an effort to drop a few small Extreme alage pellets i feed the fish with so he's satisfy. Similarly for the shrimp...I actually try to feed him first while feeding the fish so he doesn't go around bothering all the corals or try taking away any coral feeding I may have done. Shrimp goes crazy during feeding time.

 

[LoneStarReef]

Thanks! It's been awesome so far to be able to check on the tank whenever I want. I hop on to watch when their automatic feeder goes off to make sure they're getting fed. Only downside to the NestCam is it will send a push notification when it recognizes significant movement, so the fish set that off numerous times a day, and the shrimp sets it off at night when he's cruising around the tank and the camera's infrared sensors are on. Hahaha

Fantastic tank!! Great job. I am hopefully going to be starting mine one of these days. And just wanted to say "War Eagle!!" Great to see some other Auburn folks here. Looking forward to seeing how we do this next season. Stidham has a ton of potential and the defense is looking better.

 

[WarEaglesReef]

I don't know if u do this...I feed my emeral crab if he comes out during fish feeding. Usually he does so I do make an effort to drop a few small Extreme alage pellets i feed the fish with so he's satisfy. Similarly for the shrimp...I actually try to feed him first while feeding the fish so he doesn't go around bothering all the corals or try taking away any coral feeding I may have done. Shrimp goes crazy during feeding time.

Interesting! I never see him during the day, but if I spot him at night I might have to try to give him some algae and see if he'll take it. He was chilling out behind my ricordea last night and it looks ok today, so maybe there's hope for him yet. Haha