Gf: What’s this white stuff on the corals?

Me: no idea

Gf: it looks like what was on my hands yesterday before they swelled up

Me as I bolt excitedly to the other room: I’LL GET THE SLIDES AND THE MICROSCOPE!

SNAILS! Not sure exactly what kind as gf got a free snail from work that no one could identify, but I’m 90% certain it’s some kind of nerite snail. Unfortunately he’s laying eggs on the duncans. Definitely not ideal!

Pico ja-tank? I still love the jar, but it’s so hard to scape! The 1 gallon has better dimensions, but is such a small volume of water that I really didn’t want to try it, but the 2.5 gallon was ridiculously tall and it’s hard to place corals on a completely vertical rock structure. Remember that my gf works at a saltwater store? She was able to snag this discontinued 4 gallon waterbox. Literally has almost the same dimensions as the jar, but because it’s a box, a lot easier to scape and get hands in and out of. We made a lid out of acrylic we had and my gf added silicone to create a lip for the lid to stay in place.

It’s still going to be a zoanthid/rock nem tank and it’s only other inhabits are a scarlet hermit, 2 bumblebee snails, 6 pom pom crabs and a porcelain anemone crab (who seems to hate anemones because he won’t stay near any of the 3 that are in there). The rock is a mixture of live rock from the invert QT and some dry rock.

Love photographing this trachyphyllia. It’s got such an intense feeding response. Check out how the mouth actually appears to have lips. We’ve had 4 trachys and none of the other 3 ever came close to this.

Pico jar! The first resident was added yesterday, it’s a blue banded coral shrimp. His name is Terry 2 because Terry 1 was killed by the six line (we think). Unfortunately, he molted this AM, lost both of his big claws and somehow landed onto the new rock anemone. I didn’t even notice when I was taking the picture, but quickly tried to save him and am now floating in into the coral QT where he can hopefully bounce back.

I messed with the scape quite a bit after adding the new residents today and I think from the first to the last photo, it looks better. New residents are a bumble bee snail, 3 Mexican cerith snails, a scarlet hermit crab, 3 rock flower anemones, a pom pom crab and a porcelain anemone crab! I will probably add the zoas tomorrow and do a water change…and leave the jar behind for a pico tank, the jar is already a pain in the ass! In the meantime, enjoy some back and front views of the soon to be over reef jar.

Major Tank Updates

Folks, the time has come. I made this post on my mobile and accidentally deleted what took 2-3 hrs to do on the phone. In any case, now I can give a more complete update. It’s going to be long and there’s lots of pics, so I’m putting this one under a cut. 

The main display has been sitting relatively empty in terms of invert life. The display wasn’t receiving the love it deserved and we lost all of our corals except for a rhodactis mushroom that is THRIVING. It’s the biggest rhodactis I’ve ever seen and it’s gorgeous, I’m glad it’s been so resilient. The rocks have been overtaken by nuisance algae and our meager clean up crew was just too small. Despite the display not looking so great, lots of corals were on standby in the coral QT. 

So for coral QT, everything gets dipped and then everything lives in this tank for a minimum of 45 days, but usually for a full 72 because those are the respective life cycles of velvet and the most resilient type of ich. If you want to know more about that, ask me and I’ll do a post about it. Where was I? Oh yeah, so QT was obviously pretty stacked at this point some of these corals had been in there since November. The obvious solution is to move the corals into the DT, but what about all that nuisance algae? Well, a new CUC was thrown into a separate QT. The new CUC was made up of nassarius and turban snails, and halloween and red scarlet hermits. Originally they were up with the corals, but they pushed lots of corals around and into each other, so they were put into their own 10 gallon QT. Unfortunately, a lot of them didn’t make it through the QT despite our efforts to keep them fed. Not sure if this was because they came to us in poor condition (totally possible) or if they starved even though we were feeding daily. 

While the CUC was in QT, there was lots of debate and studying on how we were going to tackle this algae issue. 

This picture actually doesn’t capture it, but every exposed surface of rock had algae on it and this is after trying a regimen of Dr. Tim’s Re-Fresh and Waste-Away. The other issue that you may or may not have been able to discern is that this rock work would not have supported all of those corals sitting in QT. We loved the look of this scape, but to accommodate all of our lower light corals, we needed to adjust the rocks. Thus beginning the great re-scape project. My gf and I were up until 5 in the morning, catching fish and placing them in a cooler, removing rock and putting them in bins of water, scrubbing them down and finally re-scaping the tank. 

Even though we liked the old scape better, these new shelves and overhangs allow us a lot more room for our lower light corals and will make it easier to place corals pretty much anywhere without too much effort. The following day, I got to acclimate the new CUC and put them in the tank. 

An unexpected side effect of this change in rock work is that some of our fish that were limited to a specific area of the tank or were more hidden, have come out more! It’s pretty great to see that the fish are also benefiting from this big change. Then the super exciting part came, corals were dipped and then moved into the DT!

Gf was able to procure a few other pieces of rock that were also added, mainly the shelf in the middle and another rock on the top left corner.