More Magnetism, and My Father Comes to the Rescue

A couple months ago, I decided to go forward with an idea that I had been contemplating for some time. Until that point, the back wall of the tank above my live rock was relatively barren except for coralline algae- it seemed to be a prime spot for something new, and I thought Aqua-Mags might be the right tool for the job.

I wasn't sure which coral to mount, nor how to mount it, and entertained several ideas before settling on my Green Star Polyps. GSP is a very cheap, very common, and very hardy coral that grows quickly and encrusts over anything, including glass. It will even form a mat across sand. The small colony that I had originally purchased as one of my first specimens had already completely covered the rock that it came on and was trying desperately to find somewhere to continue growing. Many people warn against letting GSP grow unchecked on rock because it multiplies so fast that it becomes a nuisance. I wasn't afraid of handling or cutting up the colony for this project.

Another decision was what, exactly, I would put these polyps on. I settled on some thick branched dead coral skeleton from my LFS. My reasoning was that once the GSP encrusts it would look interesting and provide depth on that side of the tank. I bought four or five fragments of different sizes and shapes and rearranged them until I was satisfied. Using some cyanoacrylate glue and a healthy lump of reef-safe two-part epoxy, I put together the dry liverock over several days and attached one magnet near the base.

Before gluing...

Epoxy drying, piece by piece.

Almost done - just a couple of small pieces left.

Using only one magnet was wishful thinking at best, but I wanted to experiment with how well (or poorly) a single magnet could hold this structure taking into consideration the buoyancy from immersion in saltwater. It was a lot heavier than I anticipated. After fiddling around for a while I concluded that there was no way that one magnet would hold the structure upright on the wall. Another magnet was needed for friction- to provide an additional point of contact that would prevent the whole thing from spinning due to torque from gravity. This introduced the same problem that I had tackled with my first magnet-mounted liverock. The two magnets have to be perfectly flush, their surfaces coplanar, to maximize the hold. Bad news... I didn't do a great job on the second magnet, and it wasn't close to flush. The result was two magnets that did no better a job than a single one because only one at a time was fully pressed against the wall.

All finished, with second magnet. Bummer.

My disappointment with this setback (and lack of precision and foresight on my part) caused me a few days of annoyed brainstorming on how to salvage the project. It certainly wasn't going work work as intended and I had no more magnets to start over. My only recourse seemed to be to saw through the epoxy holding the magnets onto the liverock, break the magnet pair apart, re-epoxy them on a small piece of glass so that they set and dried flush, and then reattach them to my liverock. That seemed like a huge pain in the ass... and it would have been, if it wasn't for my father.

Enter my dad- a precision machinist by trade and overall bad-ass handyman by reputation. He took one look at the piece and mumbled something about one side being "a couple ten-thousandths high". After I explained my solution which involved a Saturday afternoon chock full of sawing and regluing, he thought for a moment and left the room. When he came back he had a large sized piece of almost perfectly flat granite that was lying around in the tool shed and some fine grit sandpaper. Using the sandpaper and the flat surface of the granite, we lapped the plastic surfaces of the Aqua-Mags by maintaining even pressure and slowly grinding the plastic casing in smooth figure eight patterns. After about twenty minutes of this, I gave the magnets a shot on a glass window and they were completely coplanar. The project was saved - I would never have thought of that on my own. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the process.

All fixed! Here I am figuring out final placement. Note the Koralia-1 powerhead... Hideous.

Next was the last and probably simplest task of breaking apart my colony of Green Star Polyps. It was actually a tremendous mess; I used pliers to shatter and break apart the dead coral on which the GSP was growing, and discovered several critters living inside. I avoided (purely by luck) touching either of the two bristleworms with my bare hands. The needle-like bristles which line their body can cause irritation if they touch skin. Critters having been returned to the tank, I glued the fragments of GSP all over this structure over the course of a few minutes and left one small portion of it on the original rock to regrow.

Gluing pieces of coral.

After a couple weeks. Not much growth. Also note the replacement to my Koralia-1, a Vortech MP10.

Rampant growth after a couple of months.

One issue this project raised was my Koralia powerhead. I was happy with its performance but it became an eyesore once this coral was in place. I needed something slimmer, more powerful, and way sleeker... a Vortech MP10 fit the bill perfectly! I'm sure I can use the Koralia later on.

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.