250 Gallon room-divider project log

[jeffbrig]

Hi All,

Things are still looking A-OK in QT. No further spots have appeared on the tangs. If all goes well, we should be putting them back in the display this weekend or early next week. That would be 21 days in copper and 7+ weeks for letting the display sit fallow.

The mandarin, yellow tang, and PBT all look a little bit skinnier, but nothing that shouldn't disappear after a week or so in the display, which now has a smorgasboard of green algaes and pods for the fish to feast on.

I am very pleased with the way the Cupramine treatment has gone. The fish seem decently unaffected by it. Our Achilles, who typically is a canary in the coal mine, has come through it like a champ. His color is very dark and he has been eating like a pig. Much better than some of the issues he has had in both of the hyposalinity treatments (initially and recently). And for those of you who think it can't be done - yes, it is possible to bring a Mandarin through a podless QT tank with copper if you have the right level of care.

I know Jeff and I are both rethinking our quarantining practices at this point. We will have to give some serious thought as to whether we will be using hypo or copper on our next go round of tangs (hopefully a purple, chevron, and possibly a kole).

--Christy (still too lazy to log out)

[Hop]

I'm right there with you. I had an entire tank taken out by one tang that I failed to quarantine. Since then it's six weeks in the q-tank for everybody before they get to swim in the big pool.

[jeffbrig]

Beware. QTing just fish is not necessarily good enough. We QTd all of our fish in hyposalinity for 6 weeks prior to introduction into our display and our tank was ich free, until recently when we believe the parasite hitchiked in on the base of a coral.

We are now setting up a coral QT system so that this does not happen again. Basically nothing will be going into our display without spending time in QT.

--Christy

[jlunde]

Been reading this all day. Subscribed now. Glad to hear things are looking better. Good luck and hope you get rid of the ich!

[jeffbrig]

I've really had acros on the brain lately. Everything has been doing very well while the tank is fishless. I had the camera out today, so I had to take a few shots.

Here's the purple acro w/green polyps. Unfortunately, the higher light it's getting seems to have made the purple fade except for the extreme tips. I'm going to move this down a bit and see if it returns. This piece is descended from a Garf colony, and may be the Purple Bonsai, which tends to color up better in low light.


Here's my old blue tenuis, darker than it's been in a while. It was a little pale before I replaced my bulbs last month.


This ORA pink mille frag browned out for a while, but has come back very strong in the past few weeks. I just love this color! Note the growth on the tips, which have just exploded recently.


This is probably one of my favorite pieces in the tank, and I have no idea what species of acro it is. It's a Bali aquaculture piece - dense bushy growth form, fuzzy cream-colored polyps and deep blue tips.


And a closer view

[jeffbrig]

We have fish again....well, 1 fish at least. Christy and I put the mandarin back in the tank last night. Unfortunately, I needed to work most of the holiday weekend, so we didn't have time to handle all of the fish. The mandarin has looked a bit skinny, and needed to get back in there to feast on some pods, so he went first.

Overall, the tank was fallow for about 7 weeks, and the fish with ich spend about 3 weeks in cupramine (copper) treatment. Fingers are crossed that we don't see another outbreak.

We also netted the cleaner shrimp that's been picking at our big derasa. He's been banished to the nano cube for now, we might swap him out for another shrimp in the future.

[ThomasinKind]

Very good to hear that everyone went well in QT.

Update when you can about your new procedure for corals. I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to do it.

[jeffbrig]

Thomas...not much has changed yet. We're not buying any more corals until we set up a proper coral QT - probably another month or so before we have that up and running. Then, we'll continue the same procedure we have now (interceptor, FWE, iodine), then put the corals in the separate system for 30 days just to be safe. I might also start treating acros with fluke tabs, they're supposed to help rid a coral of AEFW.

For the coral QT, we're planning a roughly 30x20x12 tank that will double as a frag grow-out (which is why we'll still pre-treat corals before they go in there). Keeping the tank fishless will ensure that ich can't survive. The tank will have a 250w MH pendant as its sole lighting. I've already picked up an octopus skimmer for the tank, and an MJ-mod for flow. Just need to build the stand and the tank.

[Bebo77]

Jeff do you have a new fts?

[jeffbrig]

Better yet, all of the fish are now back in the 250g. Achilles hasn't looked twice at the tomini tang, but he's still harassing the PBT pretty regularly. Today I finished the last of the aquascaping, now we're just pegging and re-arranging corals (which is another chore in itself). I'm very happy with the amount of space we've created with the aquascaping. Now it's just a matter of figuring out what works where, and making it look neat.

The flame hawk rode the magic slide down to the sump today. Apparently he took advantage of a small gap in the gutter guard protecting the overflow. Christy was starting to worry when we didn't see him at dinnertime, and when I opened the stand, there he was. I just finished redoing the gutter guard to protect completely, and then tried to net the fish from the return compartment. He freaked out at the sight of the net, swam backwards through the bubble traps, and is cowering under one of the skimmer pumps. Guess I'll have to try again tomorrow....

Pics and more tomorrow, I'm going to bed...

[jeffbrig]

Originally posted by Bebo77
Jeff do you have a new fts?

I will post some tomorrow, but a quality fts may be coming later this week. I'm renting a couple of SLR lenses to take on vacation, and one is a 10-22 super wide angle. Should be great for a FTS.

[Bebo77]

nice... i am looking for a nice lens for macro and fts... dont know how to photoshop 2 or 3 pics together to make 1 pic yet...

[zemuron114]

glad to hear hypo went well! hope they stay ich free!

[jeffbrig]

As promised, here are some new fts, taken with a canon EF-S 10-22. Great lens, btw, I'm standing between 3-4' from the tank, and capturing the entire 6' length. It has some distortion in the corners, but that's expected at 10mm wide.

Living room side


End view


Dining room side



And a few closeups,

Our new tomini tang (w/motion blur, best shot I have of him so far)


Acro garden - most of my colorful acros ended up on this rock structure while we were moving things around. Might as well catch them all in a shot before they get distributed around the tank.



The next few were taken with the Canon 24-105 F4L.

pink mille, growing like a weed just recently


purple acro - remember, this was just 3 twigs 6 months ago.


anthia

[jeffbrig]

Okay, now for the bad news.

Take a close look at the side of the achilles tang.


Nope, those aren't bubbles.

So, after tearing the tank apart, hyposalinity, then copper, and letting the tank sit fallow for a full 8 weeks, we still have ich. The achilles started to show spots just 2.5 days after reintroduction. Kinda blows that "2 months fallow" treatment out of the water, eh? I can't tell you how frustrating this is to see firsthand...

The good thing is, he's fat and healthy, so this isn't really a threat to him. At this point, we have no real options other that to just try to maintain the best conditions possible and let the fish fend it off themselves. I just can't help thinking about all the time and effort we wasted with a quarantine that was completely ineffective at ridding ourselves of this problem.
ich



The next piece of bad news is that achilles' aggression towards the PBT has gone from bad to worse (although he shows zero interest in the new tomini). For the last day or so, PBT hasn't been able to leave the safety of the rocks. Achilles spends all day going from one side of the rock to the other, backing in scalpel first, hounding the PBT mercifully. Unfortunately, PBT wasn't in great shape coming out of QT, and was looking very thin. Now he's being hounded around the clock and not getting much (if anything) to eat.

At lunchtime I found him with a nice cut on one side, but couldn't catch him with a net before he ran back to the rocks. Tonight, he ventured out in the open, with achilles on the attack, and was very lethargic swimming. I was able to net him this time, and he had a very deep cut on his other side. It's almost as if achilles senses the PBT's weakness and is going for the kill.

Tonight, I was able to catch him, and moved him to the safety of the refugium. We're going to hold him in there and let him (hopefully) recover, then try to find a safe home for him. It's very sad, he's been such a docile fish, and pbt's are typically known for aggression.


Over the weekend, I finally set up my litermeter, and started using the DIY kalk reactor. A recirculating MJ 900 pump runs for 1 minute twice a day to mix the kalk. The litermeter is currently set to dose 2 liters per day, which I'll adjust upwards in the coming days once I'm comfortable with the pH changing effects. The CO2 reactor is on hold until we get back from vacation.

That's about it for now.

[FB]

Well that just sucks.

[bureau13]

Any chance its not really ich, just some particulate that is on the Achilles' side? I see that sometime...I realize you're running with no sand, but still.

Surprising about the tang aggression. I would have thought after all the rearranging it would have almost been like starting over, with no "king of the tank syndrome."

jds

[jeffreylam1132]

What a beautiful tank. Thanks for all the great ideas I have acquired from your thread.

[jeffbrig]

Hi everyone, haven't posted in quite a while, but everything is going well.

Christy and I enjoyed a nice cruise vacation on the Mediterranean, and the tank did just fine while we were gone. Our good friend Darcy (45commando) looked in on the tank a few times, and our regular house/pet sitter handled the rest of the daily feeding.

I think the corals actually grew quite well in our absence. Colors are still great. I intentionally elevated calcium levels a little before we left, and mixed up the alkalinity half of 2 part for our pet sitter to dose. Alkalinity never got depleted, and calcium fell back to ~400. Since we got back, I've finally started mixing 2 part at RHF's recommended strength, and I've been dosing daily. I need to do more testing to dial in my dosage rate. Right now I've been doing about 100mL/day of each, which is probably on the low side. At my previous measured consumption of .8dKH/day, I would need about 185mL/day.

The flame hawk managed to get into the overflow again while we were gone, and I have yet to fish him out. I'm still trying to decide if I want to pull the drain pipe and send him down to the sump, or try a small fish hook.

The tank still has ich, no real surprise there. Only the achilles and pbt show any signs of it, though it doesn't seem to be affecting their overall health. Our pbt is still living in the refugium, and putting on a little weight. He's had something weird with his right side that I can't identify, and without a picture it's very difficult to describe. Sometimes it's looked like something erupted, other times like a cut with a weird skin flap. I'll have to get a picture and see if anyone has seen anything like this.

[kipher]

Jeff,
Can you post a picture of whatever it is that is growing on the side of that Giant Clam please? I tried to save the picture and zoom in, but it just gets blurrier the more I zoom in. It looks very similar to the Algae in my tank that is spreading like the plague and that I am not seeming to get rid of. I would hate to see this stuff get out of control in your tank. Have you seen your tangs eating the stuff?

Here is a picture of what I'm talking about in case it is easier to identify on your end. I hope this isn't what you have there, and I don't mean to alarm you if I'm wrong here. As I said, from the picks you posted I can't see the stuff well enough.


http://www.saltcorner.com/sections/g...Ddichotoma.htm

[jeffbrig]

Yes, it is dicthyota, a common macroalgae in the keys/caribbean. Since my LR was aquacultured in the keys, it came with some of this algae.

My tangs don't touch it, and there's not much that will because it's not particularly good tasting. I was just discussing this with Julian Sprung at a local club meeting this weekend. He told me it prefers low nitrates and good iodine levels. Basically, good water that your corals would like is what this algae likes. There are some short spine caribbean urchins that will eat it, sort of, but they also break it up and move it around....not a great solution.

The good thing is, it's not really a plague algae like some of them. It grows in tight clumps that are pretty easy to suck out while syphoning the tank. In small amounts, it's not unattractive, you just have to prune it a little before it gets way out of control.

Here's an old picture of some of it in my tank:


I was down in the keys recently, and one of the pictures I took on a reef shows the same algae surrounding a brain coral. I'll see if I can post that later.

[kipher]

It’s good that you are aware of what you are dealing with. It is a pain once it spreads around. I have it on almost every rock in my tank now. Someday soon I am going to have to remove all of the LR in my tank and scrape as much of this stuff off as I can. (Rinsing the rocks well before putting them back in my system)Unfortunately I kinda predict that scraping the rocks will become an every 6 month maintenance routine for me.

You seem to be well aware, but what ever you do try not letting a loose clump of this stuff drift about in you tank. When it eventually settles on rock it will attach itself.

Thanks for the info on the urchin. I didn't know about that. Word from others is that rabbitfish/foxface will sometimes eat the stuff. Another RC member is attempting elevated Mg levels in his tank. Just like the popular thread for solving bryopsis and is getting positive initial results.

BTW, I've read your entire thread and absolutely love your tank.

[jeffbrig]

When we did our reaquascaping and fallow period back in April, all the rock was removed, scrubbed and rinsed prior to returning it to the tank, and the dichthyota still came back. You can try it, but it wasn't that effective. We keep it at bay by regular pruning and siphoning out. I actually think its pretty in small areas - kind of irridescent. Of all the algae plagues, its one of the least offensive IMO.

--Christy

[kipher]

Yeah. I kinda liked it at first, when like in your case it was confined to a few locations.

Actually, I read the TOTM-August article last night and he said in his article that the rabbitfish/foxface isn't really a good idea. He said that it ate all of his zoos and shrooms and didn't do much on the Algae. What he did report was that the Blond Naso Tang ate it up for him. I actually prefer a Blond Naso over a Foxface. However my tank is only a 75g and I'm not sure either would live a happy life in my tank. You should go read his article if you haven't already.

[bureau13]

Some rabbitfish do nip at corals, but many do not. They seem to be pretty hit-and-miss, more risky than tangs but probably less than most angels. I've never seen my Doliatus touch anything I want left alone, but he's still relatively small, so we'll see what happens.

jds