Reef nutrition

BleepBloop’s 73 Gallon

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I did switch to rowaphos for my po4 media and did not realize how fast it depletes so my phosphates were at 0.15 recently, I went back to regular GFO media. My nitrates also had hovered around 10 ppm for a while and were now at 25 ppm which may be due to me not emptying my algae reactor often enough, it grows so fast! I did a slightly bigger water change than normal last week, probably about 15 gallons instead of my usual 5 so maybe things will balance out a bit, but I have been keeping a close eye. When I get a little free time I might try and see if maybe there is a leak somewhere along the line for my co2 reactor
 
I also bought @jhuynh 3 leftover working Radion G3’s and bought an mp40 from I think @H2OPlayar. The radions are great but the spread is a whole lot different than it was before so I sort of overblasted some coral and got a lot of bleaching, but I also got tons of growth. Some coral struggle a bit, some did amazing and maybe one or two frags died, but I’m not sure that was just from light. I’ve got to get the par meter again to measure and adjust. The mp40 is fantastic, I love the flow it makes, I am buying a second and will take out both my gyres and just have the mp40s as flow. I also did a 40ish% water change a while ago when Things weren’t looking too hot and took out some more sand, and added another shelf for more space for frags cause things were getting cramped
 
Those last pictures were from a couple weeks ago I will add more recent ones soon. The one thing that has not been doing well at all are my acans. A couple have BJDed and the rest just are basically always closed with the exception of maybe one colony
 
Seems like a lot has changed in my tank and nothing has changed since the last update. A few major things that happened was I had one fish jump out through my lid (pintail wrasse RIP), my chaeto stopped growing even though my po4 and no3 was plenty high for it to grow, bubble algae has really taken over some of my tank, my trident took a dump, and I for the life of my still cannot figure out why some coral grow fine, and others just do not.

Tank has gone through a couple up and down phases the 6-9 months, overall things are more stable and less maintenance than ever, but that’s also maybe just because I am less likely to jump in and tweak something right away if I see a coral start to bleach and just try and let it be. The hardest coral deaths to take were a trachy that died. I seem to not have good luck with them, my first one did great for a long time until it didn’t (it is now living it’s best life in @jhuynh tank) and the few others I was given have been doing mediocre as well.

As for the chaeto I remember someone once saying it could have been due to iron deficiency and have slowly been dosing that which seems to have helped the growth for a little while, although I was out of town for a couple weeks and didn’t dose and when I got back it had gotten pretty mushy. What I can’t figure out is why I didn’t have to dose any for almost a year and now all of a sudden I seem to have to.

One of my XR15s died and so I got a gen 3 XR30 for a total of two XR15s and one XR30 which seems to be doing pretty well. I got rid of the gyres and now have two MP40s, one on each side of the tank.

Some of my coral have grown into colonies, others seem to barely move a millimeter, the mystery continues but after a period of despair around it acceptance has kicked in and I’m glad at least whenever a coral is alive.

Unfortunately my hard working peppermint shrimp died and as a result I’m slowly seeing more and more aptiasia pop up. It hasn’t ruined anything yet, but sooner rather than later I’ll have to do something about it.

Something I was warned about and didn’t see coming was how people said you will eventually run out of room as things grow, which is hard to imagine when all you have is small frags but it’s definitely happening! I haven’t bought any new coral in almost a year now and I’m still running out of room! Plus I missed the last frag swaps and was unable to unload them but looking forward to the upcoming one to do some trimming and rearranging.
 
Some random pics of various things in my tank:

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Trachys, the receding one has since died the middle one now showing signs of receding too

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Duncan colony growing ever bigger. Little upset it’s next to that frogspawn

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DBTC Sunkist bounce mushroom getting so big and not seeming to split! But it’s almost there, seems it’s splitting into three

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My biggest torch spawn baby doing great! Note the death tissue overgrown with algae on the miyagi tort behind it, not sure what happened seemed to die right away instead of bleach slowly. Seeing that on a few sticks.
 
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This acan colony almost died maybe 6 months ago, but it still hasn’t died and even grew more polyps, the only thing is the polyps have never ever fully extended again, you can see in some of my earlier tank journal posts what it used to look like.



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Another torch baby there, plus some really fast growing montis which is a delight to see after dealing with MENB last year

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