Before & After - A 35 Week Retrospective

It seems like it's been forever. Roughly thirty-five weeks have gone by since I filled my tank with sand and water. This is my first reef, and the maturation/cycling process is far more intricate and varied than a freshwater setup. All sorts of critters have begun to reproduce in the tank... copepods and amphipods, various algae and diatom blooms... the rise and fall of these population explosions is frequently observed in new tanks and referred to as "New Tank Syndrome" (usually only when things go badly, though).

Seeing my first 'pod crawling around on the glass oh so many months ago was an exciting moment. Eventually coralline algae started spreading all over the rock and walls of the tank. Pink, violet, purple, and maroon colored splotches that cover everything but the corals and sand. My tank is still far from being "mature", but it has certainly gotten part of the way there.

Over time I have discovered many more interesting creatures in my tank, none of which I purchased or acquired on purpose. Stomatella snails, vermetid snails, spirorbid worms, hair worms, bristle worms, miniature sea stars, miniature brittle stars, unidentifiable polychaete worms, sponges, sea squirts, and tiny white snails to name a few. Most of these "hitchhikers" are either beneficial or at worst, harmless. In just 29 gallons of water and about 570 square inches of sand, a whole teeming ecosystem has formed and is reaching a careful balance. The coralline algae is encrusting all of my rocks, and water parameters are within range and steady.

I thought it would be interesting to do a before and after post, where I compare my earliest photos of some of these corals with the latest ones to compare size and coloration. I've also gotten quite a bit better with the camera, so forgive some of the early blurry shots. :)

Green Star Polyps
The first corals I bought, I've been careful to segregate this colony of GSP (Green Star Polyps) from the rest of my main rock structure. It grows so quickly and overwhelmingly that once it is on a rock, it is difficult to remove and will literally take over. This colony quickly covered the small rock that it came on. I later broke up this colony for project that I will hopefully post about sometime next week. There are some spoilers in some of the pics later...

Zoas
My Zoanthid colonies have taken off. There are already polyps budding off of the main colonies and spreading around the adjacent rock surface. I want to angle this rock to give the front face more light; you can tell a huge difference in the growth rate of the polyps on the top of the rock (facing the light) than on the face that only receives glancing, limited lighting.

Dendros
The Dendrophyllia are extremely slow to grow and reproduce, especially with a more relaxed feeding regimen. They are not photosynthetic and rely on food for all of their nutrients, so feeding more often will spur growth. The two babies near the base of the main polyp are significantly larger than when I got them, but I recently saw a couple Dendros the size of a golf ball in another person's tank. I'm wondering how long it takes for them to get to that size. Years, I would imagine.

Hyacinth Bird's Nest
Don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't grow SPS under the stock lighting on a Biocube 29! It may not be ideal PAR and/or spectrum, but this colony is flourishing and has branched out quite a bit from the small twig that I first introduced. You can see the Neon Bird's Nest in some of these shots.

Neon Bird's Nest
These two frags are from different colonies and at first had a different appearance, but they have more or less converged in coloration and polyp extension. They have almost tripled in size.

Acanthastrea
This coral looked nice when I bought it, and then had some sort of (possibly shrimp-related) problem and began to deteriorate. After a couple of weeks I thought I'd lose the whole thing, but the tissue death stopped and it has since regrown with many more young polyps growing where the original had some tissue necrosis.

 

Montipora Capricornis
At first it isn't obvious but the Monti has grown about a centimeter in radius. I found a nudibranch in my tank that was munching on the Montipora digitata, and I'm hoping that the little bastard didn't lay eggs or something. They can wreak havoc on Monti corals and usually start at the base where they are difficult to find.

Torch
My Euphyllia glabrescens appears to love its perch high up on the glass. It's much closer to the light and receives far more photosynthetically active radiation at that position than it would near the sand. The flow appears to be ideal as well. It has grown a LOT since I got it. Tentacles on one of the polyps extend four inches or more, waving around in the current. Easily one of the more beautiful corals in the tank right now.

Duncan
The Duncanopsammia axifuga was originally three main polyps with a few babies at the base. It's now grown into a colony of several polyps, each facing a different direction. This colony will continue to grow and eventually will need to be fragged.

Meteor Shower
A very fast grower, this Cyphastrea (aka Meteor Shower) has grown over the glue fastening it to a rock and is already spreading rapidly with new polyps appearing both along the edge of growth as well as within the existing tissue of the coral. It is easily out competing the small purple cloves. This is one of my favorite corals in the tank because of it's unique look and the rock it is growing on really showcases its texture and color.

Purple Cloves
These "cheap" coral are small and easy to take care of. They've already spread in one place in the tank (next to the Cyphastrea) and I moved the originating rock to the other side of the tank to have them grow there as well. You can see how much they've spread over the rock in the picture above. They'll soon be overgrown by the Cyphastrea.

Christmas Favia
There was a portion of the skeleton that had been stung in the previous owner's tank, and the colony had receded from that area. Within the time that it has been in my tank, the two or three nearest polyps split and spread into this area, repopulating the preexisting skeleton. There are some pictures below, both before and after. It's really cool to see this process unfold over time, and a sign that the  coral is healthy and happy. I left it in the same place in my tank for so long that it has begun to grow on to the adjacent rock.

Green Palythoas
I got this rock on a bargain and wanted to see how quickly this coral grew. It's an extremely hungry coral and can put away quite a bit of food- it's especially good at catching particles because of the way the nematocysts are positioned and sized. The polyps have shrunk a bit in size and increased greatly in number.

Neon Green Toadstool
This isn't actually my coral; I am "borrowing" it from my friend to let it grow out in my tank. They're slow growers, but in the time that has passed since I added it it has more than tripled in overall size. These can get quite large and look really nice under ideal lighting- the tips of each tentacle fluoresce bright green.

There are many other corals in the tank that have grown and change but this is already too many pictures. My Lobophyllia open brain coral in particular is much larger than it used to be and has a couple of new mouths.

This hobby can very rewarding with time, patience, and diligence. It can be equally devastating (and costly) if you don't keep at least minimal tabs on what is going on within the closed system of the aquarium. Parameters can spiral out of control within hours, heaters can fail, poor plumbing can suddenly leak, and it all crashes down. Here's hoping these essentially immortal creatures don't come to some unlucky fate on my watch. :)

Back from Whence You Came, and How Light Isn't Always Just Light

I "donated" my Montipora digitata to my local fish store this past weekend. There were a couple of reasons. First, I'm just running out of room and frankly it wasn't a superb specimen to begin with. That may be partially due to reason number two: it didn't appear to be doing as well as the other Small Polyp Stony corals in my tank. I didn't have a high enough position for it and higher position = more light = happier (photosynthetic) coral, generally speaking.

This reminds me of something I have heard online, and recently from a fish store employee who asked me directly - "what's your watts per gallon?" It's been a long-standing practice for people to judge their aquarium lighting by the nebulous value 'watts per gallon'. This is one of those Bad Ideas... almost as bad as the trusty old 'one inch of fish per gallon' rule-of-thumb that has undoubtedly ended the lives of countless pets over the years.

Watts-per-gallon has no specific bearing on how much light, or what type of light, a coral is bound to receive in your tank. It's just a rough estimate, and a poor one at that. Just because someone has X watts per gallon over his or her tank doesn't mean it's a proper setup. People like me with stock lighting on All-in-One aquariums like the Biocube are frequently advised not to attempt to keep SPS coral because our "watts per gallon" is too low. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have more lighting and the stock PC bulbs on the BioCube are woefully inadequate for demanding species of corals and clams, but there's a reason why this is a silly measurement to use as a measure of how effectively your reef is lit.

Many people will tell you that light intensity diminishes with distance squared; and they are right. Some amount of emitted electromagnetic radiation (which we call Radiant Intensity) over a tank that is two feet deep is not going to have the same effect over a tank that is only ten inches deep, even if the volume of the tank is the same. The key here is how this emitted light is diminished and interpreted as Irradiance where we're really concerned about it- within the coral tissue itself. Irradiance is the measure of how much incident light hits a surface in watts per square meter.

Furthermore, not all light is created equal; corals (actually, symbiotic algae called zooxanthellae) prefer a specific spectrum of light to really thrive: between 550 and 700 nanometers is the sweet spot (peaks around the yellow bands). In the hobby, the spectral character of a bulb is described by it's "heat", and you'll see bulbs advertised as 6500K (yellow-ish) all the way up to 20000K (blue-ish). The reason people pick the blue light is because it typically makes the corals look much prettier due to the fluorescence from UV bands within these bulbs. But I digress...

Advanced reef keepers often own and/or share what is called a PAR meter. PAR stands for Photosynthetically Active Radiation, a measure of Lux, or Lumens per square meter. Lumens are a photometric unit of measurement, and the value is in context of specific spectral character; not normalized across the whole electromagnetic spectrum. Lux is very closely related to the aforementioned Irradiance, however.

PAR meters are used to measure the incident light that is most beneficial to photosynthetic growth; that means it is the closest true-to-life evaluation of how effective the lighting is at any point within the tank- wherever you place the sensor. This is why the tool is so valuable to hobbyists, as evidenced in this 2009 thread on the Michigan Reefer's forum. These meters are frequently traded around at club events since once you've used one, you don't need it again until your lighting changes.

Phew. Long story short, you can indeed keep SPS that are more demanding than many LPS corals in terms of lighting, but they should be kept higher in the tank if you are like me and have poor or moderate lighting. My Seriatopora sp and Montipora capricornis are doing splendidly and have tripled in size.... about 5 inches below the surface of the water. They don't look as good and their colors don't "pop" like they would under proper lighting, but full polyp extension and steady growth are the signs of a happy coral.

Reef Video Tour

I took this brief video a month or two ago. It's a bit grainy and low-res for my taste (especially after uploading to YouTube), but it'll have to do.

I plan on taking much nicer videos but as penance for not updating in so long, here you go!

We've Got a Jumper!

Well, it was going to happen eventually. My female McCosker's Wrasse jumped up over the barrier in the back of the tank and landed in the filter area, where there was not enough water for her to survive. I found her last night.

Apart from not have too many fish in my tank, I'm wondering what I could have done to prevent the loss. This the firstsecond death I've had (not a bad track record), and I take these things as a lesson about what I could be doing or not doing to make the process smoother.

I could have improved the protective barrier to make it even less likely that she could wriggle by. As it stands, a small fish has to launch itself with high velocity at the perfect angle just to get back there, so it's dubious how much more protection I could provide. The older versions of the Biocube 29 had no raised wall above the false back/overflow, and that led to many fish deaths. The wall on my version is a few inches above water level and has less than a 1 inch gap between it and the back of the light cover.

Less fish would certainly make for less stress, especially for her. She suffered the brunt of the aggression from my territorial pair of clowns, and less frequently from the male McCosker's Wrasse who chases females as a natural part of his behavior. Less chasing means less jumping. That said, these wrasses are very well-known to be jumpers and my friend who maintains an open-top with a very healthy community plan still loses fish (especially wrasses) on a semi-regular basis.

I'm sad for the loss and regret that I wasn't able to provide a better home for this animal. In the future I will definitely lean towards understocking despite my excitement about new animals. As someone who has kept fish for a long time, I should have known better.

The silver lining here is that there is a bit less pooping now, but I will still have a nutrient issue until I address it by halving my fish load or working on a high rate of nutrient export via macro algae growth in my future above-tank refugium project.

Lack of updates

I have two updates that have been stewing for a long time. By "stewing" I mean I've been really lazy about updating this thing. They're even written already- I just haven't gotten pictures together. Life has presented other worthy investments of my after-work hours!

Fortunately both updates will benefit from the additional time that has passed since I wrote them, in the form of photos of progress.


To briefly mention a few interesting things:

I removed the skimmer that had been working (dubiously) in chamber two for several months and gave it back to its owner. Even though the skimmer didn't seem to be removing much gunk, taking it out of the picture has corresponded with a rise in nitrates and phosphates and I now have a mild cyanobacteria problem on the sand bed and glass.

The phosphates and nitrates would be at acceptable levels if my tank wasn't so overpopulated. I will probably end up trading in my female McCosker's Wrasse, who has suffered a little bit at the hands of the clownfish. It's just a question of catching her... she's very wily.

I've added another fish inhabitant since my last update that I'll write about separately.

I have a plan for a major addition to the aquarium system that may or may not go forward. I'll spoil the surprise- I'm looking into an acrylic 5-20 gallon aquarium that I can elevate (probably on a stand or shelf) above the main tank. Baffles in the tank will separate it into three chambers, the middle of which will be 100% dedicated to growing a relatively large amount of Chaetomorpha on a reverse-daylight cycle. This is called a refugium, and they're usually found below the tank. I want mine to be above the tank, specifically so that the gentle overflow of water into my display will carry little critters like amphipods and copepods which reproduce like mad in bunches of Chaetomorpha. With enough light and algae, I should remove the nuisance algae problem altogether and provide an environment for natural sources of fish food to procreate. Furthermore, the pump supplying water up to this refugium will be in chamber two and the overflow return will be to the display; this effectively doubles the water volume passing through my filter floss and will remove particulate much faster.

Buying more snails or growing more Chaetomorpha is a band-aid solution to this nutrient problem. The real issue is reducing poop-generating biomass from the equation; in other words, less fish.

I hate to say I've learned a lesson here because I already knew better... but overstocked anyway. Fact is, understocking a tank is the single best habit you can have in this hobby. It might not be as much fun and you don't get the gee-whiz novelty feeling of adding new and interesting specimens all the time, but you're rewarded in the long term by having a more stable, cleaner system. Two small clownfish would have been perfect.

Meet the McCoskers

I just added two fish that I had my eye on for some time before purchasing:

2x Paracheilinus mccoskeri (McCosker's Flasher Wrasse, Male/Female Pair) new

Female above, Male below

These wrasses grow to about 3.5". They are haremic and prefer to be kept in groups of females to one male. If there are only females present, one of them will become dominant and change into a male. Fascinating. Flasher wrasses and related fish have brilliant coloration and the males do displays for the females that consist of flaring their fins and darting up into the water column. These displays are more readily seen in a larger tank than mine, and with more females.

Two early shots of the male. You can see some fin damage, probably from handling or from an aggressive tank mate in transit.

A somewhat blurry shot of the Female. I'm still pretty bad at photographing fish.

Unfortunately, because I can't fit too many fish in this tank I only have one female. This has presented a bit of a problem- the first real fish issue that I need to deal with or worry about. With only one female to handle the aggressive pursuit of a male that is typically associated with a harem, there is too much attention for her to get any rest at all. Ideally I'd have 4-5 females for this male and the chasing and intimidation that the male uses to maintain dominance would be distributed, but my female has had a bit of an uneasy time between the pair of territorial Ocellaris clowns and an overbearing male. That said, I've had them for several weeks now and she is still feeding and quite active, but has clearly relegated herself to a corner of the aquarium. She is eating well and does not appear ill or injured. I hope things settle down for the foreseeable future until I can afford a larger tank one day.

Two recent shots of the male. His fin is healing nicely.

As usual I had these fish in quarantine for about a week before they were introduced into the main tank, and treated for fin rot just in case the male's injury became infected. Special thanks to my friend Line for taking some great pictures.

An Overdue Update

It's been a while since I posted anything; that is because for a while there wasn't much to write about- not as much as in the first few months. I have a few projects in the works and I am done with the planning phase on a pump retrofit, but have held back on expenditures for the time being. The pump modification will probably happen in the next few weeks, and a DIY LED lighting upgrade is on the horizon. I also have a few ideas for some topical posts in the near future so stay tuned.

By now my livestock list has grown pretty big for a 29 gallon, so here's a recap. The corals are listed roughly in the order that they were added to the tank. Refreshing this list is something I needed to do anyway, so here goes... if anyone knows the species of one of these that I'm missing, let me know.

Coral:

• Clavularia sp. (Purple "Snowflake" Cloves)
• Zoanthus sp. (Zoas, several species)
• Pachyclavularia violacea (Green Star Polyps)
• Dendrophyllia fistula (Dendros)
• Ricordea florida (Pink/Purple Ricordea)
• Euphyllia divisia (Frogspawn)
• Lobophyllia sp. (Lobed Brain)
• Sarcophyton sp. (Neon Green Toadstool)
• Duncanopsammia axifuga (Duncans)
• Seriatopora hystrix (Hyacinth Bird's Nest)
• Cyphastrea ocellina (Meteor Shower)
• Seriatopora guttatus (Neon Green Bird's Nest)
• Montipora capricornis (Orange/Red Monti)
• Acanthastrea sp. (Acan)
• Euphyllia glabrescens (Torch)
• Xenia umbellata (Pulsing Xenia)
• Favia sp. (Christmas Favia)
• Montipora digitata (Red Digi) new
• Ricordea yuma (Yuma) new
• Palythoa sp. (Brown w/ Green, Striped) new

Fish:

• 2x Amphiprion ocellaris (Ocellaris Clownfish, "False Percula", Black, Male/Female Pair)

Invertebrates:

• 4x Thor amboinensis (Sexy/Anemone Shrimp)
• 1x Lysmata amboinensis (Skunk Cleaner Shrimp)
• 2x Pusiostoma mendicaria (Bumblebee Snail)
• 3x Turbo fluctuosa (Mexican turbo snails)
• 6x Cerithium altratum (Cerith snails)
• 4x Nassarius distortus (Nassarius snails, "Super Tongan") new
• 4x Trochus sp. (Trochus snails) new

Phew, that's a lot of different animals. Admittedly I am at the upper limit for my tank, especially with the corals. As they grow they will definitely begin to encroach on each other. Some of these species would eventually completely outgrow the tank, even if they were the only animal in it (the Euphyllia species and the Montipora capricornis come to mind. All this really means is that fragging will be a necessity, and I'll trade in or sell parts of these creatures to my local fish store or fellow enthusiasts.

I haven't written about or photographed a couple of these new additions as of a few weeks ago. The Ricordea yuma is a about dime-sized specimen and is a brilliant, translucent neon-orange. It does eat and has grown a bit since I got it, so I try to feed it often. Feeding is difficult because of the marauding band of Nassarius snails, shrimp, and crabs, which have the audacity to clamber all over any coral and steal food right out of the mouths. The yuma is related to the Ricordea florida, and large specimens can fetch a pretty penny.

The Montipora digitata is related to the capricornis but instead of forming plates of skeleton, it forms knobby "fingers", hence its name. The fingers are not as delicate and thin as bird's nest coral, and are covered in tiny reddish orange polyps that collectively disappear within the calcareous skeleton from time to time. It does encrust a bit as you can see in the picture. A bit of bad news- I had this piece wedged into the main rockwork of the tank, where it had been stable for some time. A few nights ago, one of my beastly turbo snails rammed the Monti off of the rock... I found it the next morning. It had landed upside down, right on the Lobophyllia brain coral. Below are pics of the aftermath.

This is a prime example of why corals should generally never come into contact with one another in your aquarium. I like to think of these conflicts as historic naval battles. Two vessels bristling with cannons pull up and broadside each other with stinging cells. Unfortunately for the digitata, the brain coral had it both out-armored and out-gunned. The result was the carnage evident above... I'm hoping for a full recovery but it will take time. The Lobophyllia was unaffected.

The brown and green Palythoa was a bit of an impulse buy. I knew their requirements but I didn't go to the store to buy it specifically- I just happened upon it and thought it had a striking color and pattern. It's related to the Zoas, and the rock that it came on had a couple of cool critters including another micro brittle star.

Four Trochus snails were a great find. My LFS finally had them in stock. These snails are one of the better algae eaters that you can find. They're larger than the Cerith snails and thus consume more (and faster) and if they fall on their backs they can right themselves without issue. Their shells are unique and attractive, and the shape makes it difficult for hermit crabs to kill them. I picked up four of these and they've been busy cleaning my glass and rock ever since. These snails are somewhere in between the Cerith and Turbos in terms of size and capacity for eating algae.

Nassarius snails are sand-burrowing detritivores that I originally bought for janitor duty, but quickly found that they took upon themselves the role of food bandits. They lay buried in the sand all day with their siphons poking out and at the faintest smell of food, they come bursting from the substrate like something out of a scifi movie:

I bought four of these but found that I did not want or need that many. Even though they 'stir' the sand and keep it somewhat aerated as they burrow and surface, they aren't worth the headache when it is feeding time and I have to babysit corals to make sure that these snails don't climb up on top of the coral and steal the food. They're so aggressive with food that they'll even drive away hermit crabs. I ended up trading two of these in. I don't have a good picture of these snails for some reason; I'll try and get one soon.

My two clowns got sick again. I'm not sure what the cause was this time. The larger of the two, apparently the female, began to show signs of finrot on the front of her dorsal fin. Finrot usually occurs because of stress or injury from some other source. It's a bacteria infection that quickly eats away at the fin material, right down to the base of the fin, and eventually causes death. I managed to get them into the hospital tank and treated the finrot with Maracyn Two, an effective gram-negative antibacterial/antibiotic medication. After the five day treatment, the finrot subsided and it is already growing back.

My water tested fine and it's hard to identify the root cause of this disease. The bacteria are always present in the water, but only become a problem in a fish that is somehow weakened. It might be from trying to host in the Torch coral, which has a potent sting and sharp internal skeleton. I'm hoping not to have to catch these little fish again, as this is their second time in the hospital tank for treatment. It is hard to describe how difficult it is to remove them from the tank without total live rock and coral upheaval, and they aren't even in the running for most difficult aquarium fish to catch... many an aquarist has cursed a damselfish or wrasse that simply refused to be caught without being literally the only thing remaining in the tank aside from water. I wonder if sport fisherman would get the same "rush" out of trying to catch a damsel with a net that they get fighting a marlin with a sea rod. I'd say the damselfish is probably a bigger challenge.

More bad news, this time on the Acanthastrea front. Something caused some tissue damage and the whole colony began to progressively deteriorate. One of the polyps is almost gone and has receded away to reveal the skeleton underneath. I'm really hoping for a recovery as this was not only a somewhat expensive coral, but was attractive and a lot of fun to feed. I have yet to lose a coral and this would be my first... a failure in my eyes, especially since it had been thriving up until the last week. All clues pointed towards the sexy shrimp as culprits. I had noticed them sitting on the Acan from time to time, and assumed that they were only lightly picking at it as they do on the Lobophyllia, or eating mucus that the corals sometimes secrete... one day, however, I saw a shrimp violently tearing tissue from the outer ring of flesh, so it was at least contributing to the coral's problems.

This incident prompt me to build a makeshift prison in the tank. I poked several holes in one of the little plastic containers that you use for salsa at a Mexican restaurant, and in one evening caught two shrimp in the act. Since they've been incarcerated in my makeshift underwater prison, I have yet to see a sexy shrimp on the Acan. Perhaps it was only those two shrimp who had a taste for coral, or maybe the other two have learned by example. The two guilty parties were locked up for a few days and the coral immediately appeared to be doing a little better. They were converted into store credit on my next LFS visit.

That's all for now. I didn't mention the coolest news because I'm saving that for its own post in a few days. With one sick coral, two recovering fish, and a Montipora colony that is a barren skeleton on one side it seems like a lot of trouble but really... it isn't that bad. These types of problems are all par for the course in this hobby.