Cali Kid Corals

40g ADA move and upgrade

The Fuel is mostly for the corals and your macro uptakes more iron than iodine. If the macro aren't fading in colors or slowly disintegrating, then I wouldn't worry about it.

As for the monti, they will turn orange/pink if they're bleach or if you're running a low nutrient system.

Lastly, rock flower anemones do walk as well. I placed a cluster of 5 together on the sandbed huddled around some rubble and only 2 of them have stayed put. One has move 5" onto the rockwork (and took out a Tyree pink lemonade where it settled near), another has moved 16 inches away to the back left corner, and the most recent walkabout involved one that moved around 12" up onto the rockwork.
 
Maybe all anemones are bad for reefs then. My RBTA has been parked in its current spot for a few weeks now. Clownfish alternate between hosting the frogspawn and RBTA in any given day and sometimes they even split up and sleep in different hosts at night!
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I'm starting to get why people keep acro. It doesn't spread all over rocks and try to kill everything in its path. It just grows out into the empty water space where it is easy to prune back. Frogspawn and some LPS are probably similar in that way.

Here is an acro I picked up at the frag swap from @anathema, starting to open up. It was under MHs and now let's see what happens under my Kessils!
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Clown fish do not host. It's the anemone that does the hosting. Semantics, I know but kind of a pet peeve of mine. No offense.

Sps will encrust onto the rock and spread. So make sure you leave room between frags or you end up with them trying to grow over each other.

Like in my 40b that was supposed to be a temp tank but the 190 is taking longer than planned to get ready.

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I don't know if some anemones are more dangerous than others but in my 30 gallon my RBTA and blue digitata grew to the point where the tentacles would touch the digi and I never saw any damage. When I put the RBTA in the new tank it walked and settled in a spot where it can reach my forest fire and I've been watching that situation carefully but again haven't seen any damage yet.
 
The issue is partly the tentacles, but more importantly the foot. RBTAs will move over time and if it plants the foot down right on top of the sps or in between the branches of one, it's basically game over.
 
Tonight my clownfish laid eggs under the RBTA, even through they spend half their time in their original host, a frogspawn coral. That anemone has stayed put for some time now and hopefully will stay put. After the lights went out the female went back to the coral host while the male stayed behind in the anemone. Does anyone else have clownfish with multiple hosts?

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In other news, I decided to retire my innovative marine nanoskimmer. After my first pump broke (I never cleaned it and it was gunked up, but it didn't last 2 years) I ordered a replacement from IM. On the second pump, I managed to break the nozzle to the intake where you plug in the air hose, so I've been running the air hose directly into the pump intake the past few months. It sort of worked but made the already difficult skimmer adjustment even more annoying (jiggle the hose, adjust the outlet sponge and skimmer height and then adjust the air intake while swearing - the swearing seemed to help). also didn't like that there was no cover over the pump so I couldn't place it in my algae scrubber, for example.

I bought a Tunze 9004 DOC (DC pump) new on sale. It should be compact enough for my space saving sump. I'm curious if the DC pump will make adjustments easier and since the intake is through a surface skimmer grating I should be able to place it directly in the refugium, or a DT/QT/frag tank if ever needed.

Old skimmer:
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New skimmer arriving this week, I'll update the installation. I am also ordering a potassium test kit. I already added 2ml of the Coral Colors K but am going to wait to add more. It does seem like my peach monti is more orange but haven't observed things getting much more red yet.



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The Tunze skimmer arrived today and was easy to install. The only issue I ran into was one of the two holder magnets ends up between the bottom cross-brace of my stand and my sump, so that one was harder to position. Adjusting the skim level is straightforward with one DC pump control dial. Besides making it look like Lego-Darth Vader, the tinted cup makes it hard to see where the skim height is without removing the lid.
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I placed it into the algae scrubber area to hopefully get more water circulation in there, and give me more space in the first chamber to get the filter sock in and out without hitting the heater. I was also paranoid that the new heater would drift over to the skimmer power cord and melt through it, since my new heater came with really pathetic suction cups.
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Noticed the Utter Chaos zoas had 2 or 3 babies since coming home from the frag swap!
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The acro from the frag swap is doing OK - polyps look right - but I have no idea how much light it's getting. I didn't have any acro before the swap so this is very much an experiment...
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Meteor shower looks happy:
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I'm unable to frag any frogspawn corals because the flesh is still all connected at the base, even on the larger one, like this:
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I started my war on bubble algae today. Here is the battle plan:

1. Check if there is a simple antidote I can drip into my tank, as is proposed for byropsis (fluconazole) or hair algae (peroxide).
2. Give my sump refugium algae an advantage over display tank algae by replacing my 6W LED with a Kessil H80 and increasing the flow through my sump.
3. Remove all the bubble algae. Have an army of snails ready to nip any new growths (I've heard they can eat the really new, small growths before they turn into larger bubbles).

For #1, there doesn't seem to be any chemical solution to bubble algae, besides maybe maintaining high Mg. So I've raised my Mg from ~1300 to ~1400. Actually seems to have stabilized the alk and has not hurt the corals.

2. I installed a Kessil H80 today and increased the sump photoperiod from counter-cycle to overlap during the day too, so it's only off 6 hours per day.
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Next, I need to focus my refugium on chaeto since it's supposed to be the best at removing phosphates and nitrates quickly. I watched the BRS special on algae growth lamps and it suggested that chaeto is capable of maintaining such low nutrients that a protein skimmer might not even be necessary. I kind of observed this in my holding tank when only my rocks, livestock and chaeto were in a tank for 2 months with no other filtration.


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To help with Bubble Algae, I highly recommend Emerald Crabs. They absolutely destroy the stuff. I used to have it really bad in a few tanks. After adding the crabs it basically disappeared after a few weeks.


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Paratore said:
To help with Bubble Algae, I highly recommend Emerald Crabs. They absolutely destroy the stuff. I used to have it really bad in a few tanks. After adding the crabs it basically disappeared after a few weeks.


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Yea I am desperate enough to try emerald crabs again. I would have to get my macro algae out of the display and deprive my Pygmy angel of her salad. I had three emeralds before and finally got rid of them because they didn't make much of a dent and killed anemones by going after the shrimp the anemones just ate. I could stop feeding my anemone if I can't find a new home for it.


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Emerald crabs will eat up the bubble algae. You don't have to feed your anemones at all if the lighting is strong enough.


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Algaefix works for bubble algae. Instructions call for 1mL/10 gallons, but I just double it. Just make sure that you treat in a separate tank if you want to keep any of the macro algae alive in your main tank.

Also, for reference, here's the names of the frags:
Pavona sp. (chip looking like thing on the rock; came in as a hitchhiker)
Morph of vampire zoas (not sure which ones specifically; you can probably get a better idea under your blues)
Sunset acropora
BC (Battlecorals) Spainbow
 
I finished stage three of the bubble algae war. I scraped all the bubble algae off every rock using a dental tool kit from Amazon (those things dentists use to clean your teeth with are also super for getting those last star polyps hiding in the cracks!) it was way more work than I thought it would be and I was unhappy to disturb my corals, but the rocks look good again and there is room to glue coral frags. I also gave in to emerald crabs because as much as I hate crabs in my tank, I don't want to dismantle my reef again. I hope four small ones will handle any remaining or new algae. Does that seem like enough for a 40gal?

Here is a bubble algae infested Rick before scraping:
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Here are the new emerald crabs. One managed to squeeze under a zoa colony and start walking it across the tank - I thought "here we go again" and started regretting letting crabs back in the tank. But they quickly redeemed themselves by finding and eating some remaining bubble algae, and also macro algae. I ended up having to remove all but two types of macro algae (I have a hard red one and a sprig of halimeda that they won't eat).

Crabs will be crabs:
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Eating bubbles and macro algae before I had to move the macro algae to the sump:
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Started a "chalice corner" with some nice frags from Neptunes. The bubble algae is starting to reappear in a few spots so I'm going to add a couple more emerald crabs this weekend. Otherwise, no visible nuisance algae... what a nice change!
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All the types of macro algae are growing under the Kessil H80 and none have singed due to the sudden light change. Gracilaria is doing really well under the H80. In fact in the photo the gracilaria is blocking the view of the few golf ball sized chaetos I kept. I am running the H80 on half power (~7W) now and will slowly increase it as the algae grows out.
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With the bubble algae out of the way I finished cementing most new frags to the rocks. @Ibn the Spainbows and sunset are looking good despite my clumsy gluing.
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