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.