250 Gallon room-divider project log

[jeffbrig]

More ich spots appeared on a couple of the tangs yesterday. We'll have to wait and see how quickly they disappear this time around...

[Dholmblad]

Okay, Im going to be completly honest. I just spent the last 2.5 hours at work reading all 87 pages of your thread. I envy your fish, can I come live in your tank?

This is what I would love to do someday

[ufchristyb]

That depends, how brightly colored are you?

[Dholmblad]

Well today I wore a blue shirt... But you might have to tear down and upgrade to that much needed 1000g display. I am a tad bit bigger then that clam.

[FB]

I am assuming that all the fish that were in QT are still in QT.

Have you come up with a plan yet.

FB

[jeffbrig]

Yes, our recent fish purchases are still in QT, and we are going to start taking them out of hypo this weekend.

As for the main tank, seeing a second outbreak just 9-10 days after the first is a bit disconcerting. I don't know if the UV had long enough to be effective on this round of it, so we're still waiting to see what happens. Interestingly, the acute ich grains that I saw on the achilles yesterday were gone this morning, leaving small light patches just like last time.

Fortunately, these minor outbreaks don't seem to be causing any real harm to the fish, but we're still not comfortable seeing it so frequently. If this trend continues, we will end up pulling the fish and putting them through hypo while the tank sits fallow. The fish currently in the 55 will not get added until we decide which direction we're going.

[maxxII]

Originally posted by maxxII
Christy,
I think you guys are going to see a smaller outbreak, maybe another one after that, and it'll be done.

You will most likely see a small outbreak again when you add fish or stress things out severely.

I think their quite capable of fighting this off. You guys have busted your butts to create a healthy and stable environment for these guys. Why are you suprised when it pays off???



Nick

Patience Jeff.....this too will pass.



Nick

[jeffbrig]

We're trying, Nick, honest.

The ich that I thought was gone today wasn't. I only got a quick look this morning under actinics, when I came home spots were still there.

[maxxII]

You guys are doing great, and the tank is doing well. Keep paying attention to the fish, they will let you know if you need to pull them from the tank and put them QT.

Nick

[abark]

I have followed this build thread since the start and it is by far my favorite since that time.

I will say that I have never QT'd any of my fish and I have only lost one which I attribute to cyanide collection.

When I added my kole tang last year after I upgraded my tank it exploded with ich. It got so bad that my clowns were covered in spots and my tang looked like a gonner as the spots were very close to the gills. I fed heavily with garlic extract and selcon while I bought equipment for a permanent QT based on your inspiration.

By the time I was done getting equipment ready to transfer the fish they were free of ich. At that point I was still ready to get the fish out of there and go through the full ich treatment, but then I realized that since they made it through, it would be more stress on the fish than it was worth. I have added and subtracted a few fish since then and I have seen one small flare up, but nothing alarming. I have not seen anything for at least six months and I don't expect anything.

The point is that we all hear all these horror stories of some sick fish wiping out an entire tank . Is Ich a black plague situation? No, we we as humans all survive influenza and other sicknesses through proper nutrition and our own immune system counteracting the virus. How are fish any different in the wild than we are with the flu here on land? If Ich were a plague then we would have a very limited selection of fish. What you are seeing is your fish's immune system fighting off an illness and they are winning. Feed well and try your best to not introduce anything new too suddenly to stress an already stressed population. Add one fish a week and let it run its course. You have provided a healthy envirnment as possible....use that to your advantage.

I still want to add more fish to my tank but don't want to add the stress to the tank to possibly induce another outbreak so I am sticking with what I have until an interruptus comes along.

Love the tank and hope to have a tank of that size some day.

[jeffbrig]

Hey everybody, don't forget to vote in this month's photo contest.


http://archive.reefcentral.com/forum...readid=1081759

[paulmac54]

i thought i would post this here. according to steven pro and what happened with me, i would remove all your fish and put them in a QT right away. i thought it would just clear up but i lost hundreds of dollars of fish. more importantly i lost some of my "children". i posted this on CMAS earlier tonight. this happend to me this past week.

One word of advice and I hate to say this.....I don't think you can completely trust club members. Here is the story:

First and foremost, my tank has been disease free since its beginning 2 years ago. I have never placed a diseased fish in the tank, and I quarantine all new fish for at least 5 weeks to assure that they are disease free. I know that some people believe that ich is always present in a tank just waiting to get a chance to infect. I do not believe this. After talking to Steven Pro about it, he informed me that all types of things can hitchhike in on a frag and that anything "wet" needs to be QTed.

About 3-4 weeks or so ago I acquired a few frags from some members of WAMAS. In the 1-2 weeks following my Yellow Belly Hippo tang, Powder Blue tang, and Emperor Angel began to show a mild sign of Ich. Within a day or two the symptoms vanished. This is unfortnately the typical life cycle of the parasite, as it drops off appearing to dissappear, then within a day it is back even stronger than before. Unfortunately my wife and I were leaving for a cruise on the 16th, so I knew that I couldn't move the fish and begin a copper treatment for the person that I was leaving in charge new nothing about fish care and was only simply going to feed the fish while I was gone. The ich would show signs during the day and at night my cleaner shrimp would do a pretty good job of cleaning them up. I decided to leave the fish in the display and hope that the shrimp would keep them alive until I got back. Unfortunately throughout the cruise I was preparing myself to come home to some type of loss.

When I returned home this past sunday i found a note on the table from my friend that read...."Paul, when I came over Friday, this guy was dead. I promise I didn't kill him. The big one isn't looking to well either." It was my powderblue! I glanced over to the tank, only to find my emperor laying lifeless in the front corner with what appeared to look more like velvet than ich. I was up until 3 AM Monday morning removing all of my live rock in order to catch the remaining fish. I FW dipped them and moved them to my 55 gallon QT and began a copper Tx. I spoke with my friend and he said that Saturday when he came over, the emperor was still alive and eating like a mad man. So, he must have died Sunday before I got home. Tuesday I came home to find the male of my Clown pair dead against a powerhead. I removed him and watched in agony as the female appeared to be swimming around in circles looking for him. Luckly today the remaining three fish appear to be doing better. The Yellow belly is actually swimming around like he used to and not just laying on the bottom. The yellow tang is getting his color back and the clown still seems sad but is more lively. I will continue a FW dip of about 30 mins everyday for the next week and the fish will remain in the QT for about 6-7 more weeks.

Moral to the story.....from now on it looks like I will be QTing all frags. You would think that someone would let you know if they have a spell of Ich or velvet in their tank when they sell you a frag, but I quess some people are more interested in making a buck. I will leave you with one last pic of my beauty......RIP King Kong.

[jeffbrig]

Paul,

Thanks for sharing your experience. We are so sorry for your loss, your fish looked magnificent.

We decided this evening to pull all the fish and put them into a hospital tank. Our achilles is now showing his worst breakout of ich yet (the third wave in 2 wks). He is still eating well and acting mean, so we know he is not in the danger zone yet, but, we want to nip this thing early. A friend of ours is lending us a fish trap (thanks bureau13) and we will start trapping and moving tomorrow.

We are also going to build a shallow frag quarantine tank so that nothing ever goes in our tank again without the requisite waiting period. We are thinking like a 24x24x12 with a halide pendant so we can keep acros alive for 4-6 weeks. Steven Pro is absolutely right - we are 99% certain the ich hitchhiked in on the base of an acro colony.

On another note, we just installed the new phoenix 14ks over the tank, and the color looks great. The old 10k ushios had turned very yellow recently, so we decided to go up in color.

We will use the time while the tank is fallow to do some much needed upgrading of the lights, finalization of the calc reactor, coral fragging, aquascaping, etc.

-Jeff and Christy

[ufchristyb]

Hi All,

This month's photo contest has become a bit of a sham. Some dude in Colorado posted a bunch of threads in local CO state club forums asking people to vote for his pic, and as a result pic no. 20 gained 35+ votes yesterday. The sad thing is that there are several photos that are wayyyyyy better than it, and it is now leading the contest.

So, everyone please go check out the contest (linked below), and vote for the pic you think is best.

http://archive.reefcentral.com/forum...readid=1081759

--Christy

[bureau13]

20 is pretty good, but not the best one. I'm surprised this kind of thing hasn't happened before (or maybe it has and I didn't notice).

Personally, I thought 04 was absolutely stunning!

Originally posted by ufchristyb
Hi All,

This month's photo contest has become a bit of a sham. Some dude in Colorado posted a bunch of threads in local CO state club forums asking people to vote for his pic, and as a result pic no. 20 gained 35+ votes yesterday. The sad thing is that there are several photos that are wayyyyyy better than it, and it is now leading the contest.

So, everyone please go check out the contest (linked below), and vote for the pic you think is best.

http://archive.reefcentral.com/forum...readid=1081759

--Christy

[jeffbrig]

I'm done with worrying about that photo contest. At first, I was really excited about the photo I had, but all of the crap since then is really sucking the fun out of it. Regardless of who ultimately wins, this month's vote is tainted. Time to move on and talk about something else...

Like those Phoenix 14k bulbs. Wow, wish I'd bought these a while back. I don't know what happned with the Ushios, but they seemed downright yellow lately - perhaps from age. I had some concerns that the Phoenix might be too blue, but running on our icecaps it's just a nice cool blue. We'll see if that changes any as the bulbs burn in.

I'm not looking forward to catching all of our fish, but we do what we must. While the other fish are doing fine, the achilles just seems to be too susceptible to it. I guess we're starting to see firsthand why these have a reputation for being hard to keep. It's a shame too, because ours had been healthy for so long since he made it into the main tank.

So, my tasks for the weekend are to set up the 12g nano, and move some QTing corals to it (where they'll remain fishless for another few weeks). Then, we're going to move the fish currently in the 55g over to the 10g, and start bringing them out of hypo. The 55g will get refilled with water from the 250, and then we'll go fishing. As soon as we get all of them in there, we'll start dropping the salinity again. 6 weeks in hypo, then we'll try again in the main tank.

The reproductive rate of this strain of ich seems to be on the fast side. We've seen waves of outbreaks every 7-9 days since the first one. I think this is actually going to be advantageous for us, since the major concern is not keeping the tank fallow long enough to make sure all of the ich hatches and does.

As Christy mentioned last night, we're going to build up a frag tank that can hold acros, and we're going to start to QT every coral we buy for 4 weeks or longer. At a recent FMAS meeting, we had a presentation from 2 guys who work with acrylic, and I even got some hands-on instruction at gluing acrylic pieces with weld-on. It was fairly straightforward, and I made a pretty good seam. So, we're going to tackle building the frag tank ourselves, and do it with 3/8" or 1/2" acrylic.

Lighting over the frag tank will be one of our PFO/icecap setups from the main tank. We've reduced our lighting from 3 to 2 pendants because we discovered that was plenty to give us good coverage over the areas of the tank where corals are mounted. I'm just hoping heat won't be a problem, but we could probably go down to a 150 if need be.

Jeff

[ufchristyb]

Originally posted by bureau13
20 is pretty good, but not the best one. I'm surprised this kind of thing hasn't happened before (or maybe it has and I didn't notice).

Personally, I thought 04 was absolutely stunning!

I liked 04! I think you should keep at it. I also liked 9, 24, 25, 26 and 33 a whole bunch. The things that bugged me about 20 were the obvious flash/lighting defect in the upper right corner and the fact that the focal point of the pic (the most in focus part) was not in the center of the frame. It was an alright pic, but honestly it could have been a lot better and it cannot compare to many of the others in the contest.

--Christy

[jeffbrig]

Operation Fallow has begun.

We set up my nano cube and moved the corals that were being QTd in the 10 gallon into there. On a side note, I am really pleased with the color of the nano lights, some green zoos we have are really popping flourescent. And the tahitian black sand looks awesome!

The skunk clowns, chromis, and Tomini that were in the 55gallon have been transferred over to the 10 gallon, and we have begun pulling them out of hypo. They will remain in the 10gallon until the display has run fallow for 6-8 weeks and then all of our fish will be reintroduced.

We have emptied and cleaned the 55gallon and are starting to refill it, and tonight we will go fish trapping. We are going to put all of our display fish into the 55gallon for now and see how that goes. If WWIII breaks out, we will buy a bigger hospital tank. Wish us luck.

--Christy (too lazy to switch accounts)

[wastwage]

What Jeff no pics???

[jeffbrig]

Tired from carrying buckets of water. Maybe later.

[wastwage]

Ok I will keep watchn for them

[jeffbrig]

So tomorrow we will be emptying our fishtank of all liverock and coral.

The fish were wise to the trap. Wouldn't go anywhere near it.

At least we get to do some aquascaping.

--Christy

[paulmac54]

one way to catch them is to wait until they "go to sleep". after the lights have been off for several hours, they seem to become a little blind and slow. you can try this if you dont want to have to take out all of your rock.

update on my fish. i lost the male of my clown pair last tuesday. it was sad watching the female swim around looking for him. i have FW dipped the three remaing fish every day for the last week and have kept the copper level up in the QT and they are looking so much better. my yellow belly hippo is back to swimming all over the place and looks happy as ever.

good luck,
paul

[gkarshens]

Aren't you worried about a Tomini being in a 10g tank for that long?

[zemuron114]

jeff/christy - sorry to hear about the ich (its a PITA!)

Do you know what brought it on? If your tank temp. fluctuates more then 4 degrees in a 12 hour period it causes enough "stress" to cause an outbreak (assuming ich is present)
Temp fluctuations is probably the main reason for outbreaks (and the most overlooked)

good luck in the QT process!