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Crabby's "Elite210" tank at the Romberg Tiburon Center

As those of you who have read this thread know, this tank is a public display tank at my lab in Tiburon. I, however, live in Berkeley (home to my favorite LFS, Green Marine). Getting frags to and from BAR meetings or Green Marine has been a PITA as I have to take them all the way to or from Tiburon. Motivated by upcoming BAR frag swap and increasing frequency of getting frags from other club members and Green Marine, I decided to set up a frag tank at home.

The tank is a basic 30G Nalgene Box, a small euroreef skimmer, a heater, a 250W 14K DE pendant, a tunze 6201 powerhead, and a chunk of live rock from my 12G Nano (formerly my only home tank). Here is a photo - notice those those brown blurs? They are the frags generously donated yesterday by Thales (Thanks!) and Bookfish (Thanks!). I am going to add a basic auto-topoff, a timer on the light, and will use 2-part for alk/Ca. Hope now it'll be easy for me to stage the corals for BAR swaps!





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OK - moved most of the frags to the display tank. Here are some pics I took today using the photo-tube that Sergio gave me (Thanks!). Can you spot the frags you donated (or sold me Jim)? I adjusted the color balance in iPhoto because all my photos were blued out.

Two weeks ago I was thinking that the corals looked good, but after seeing the color of the corals in Thales' tank, I now think many of these corals are at least partially bleached. Perhaps they are not getting adequate PAR. I tried using a PAR meter today but the meter was giving unreliable results. Will try again in a few days.





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I've had trouble with bleaching in the past in low light ultra low nutrient situations, that is the only conceivable way that can happen, not enough food for the zoax to keep up with photosynthesis, otherwise your corals would brown out if you didn't have enough light and adequate nutrient levels.
 
tuberider said:
I've had trouble with bleaching in the past in low light ultra low nutrient situations, that is the only conceivable way that can happen, not enough food for the zoax to keep up with photosynthesis, otherwise your corals would brown out if you didn't have enough light and adequate nutrient levels.
Click to expand...

I feed rotifers and phytoplankton 2-3 times/week and cyclopeeze 4-5 times/week. Plus mysis (PE and hikari), pellets and nori. But, nutrient levels in the water are v.low and I have been running GFO for the past 4-5 months, plus massive cheato growth in the sump. Maybe I'll shut off the GFO reactor for a while and take out most of the cheato and see what happens...
 
No, no, no, PO4 is not the answer, it will only cause algae growth.

I'm no scientist, so forgive my layman style of reefing, please.

It is really about nutrient availability IME, yes feeding the tank is good and so is nutrient export, tons of both even better. As you know organic compounds eventually break down and become homogenized into undesirable compounds (NO3, PO4), there's a sweet spot in between that eventual breakdown where you have a variety of lipids and simple to complex protein strands (long and short) that are available nutrients. Take Montipora for example, Montis (AFA we know) consume bacterial matter, not larger particles, if you have no bacteria breaking down that matter or the matter comes in pulses then Montis potentially can go hungry.

Corals need food to be distributed over the course of time, not in pulses. Think about reefs, they are considered by many to be nutrient devoid, but if you really look into it there is a trace amount of food available on a consistent basis, albeit at a low level, however, corals are designed to consume small quantities over a period of time.
 
Got it - you are talking about increasing availability of "nutrition" (=food) and keeping "nutrients" (NO3, PO4) low. I've thought about a drip feed system for phytoplankton and zooplankton so that the tank can have a more constant stream of coral food. Maybe most importantly, the tank doesn't ever get fed at night, which is when many of these corals eat. I think now is the time for me to get that system online.

And we're all scientists in some way. Plus, you're a fine teacher!
 
You got it.

I think it would be pretty easy to use something that you would place in a freezer to chill then pull it out to feed, perhaps insulating it to keep the chill for several hours and running a drip. At this point though I feed a lot of Reef Nutrition stuff so the shutting down of the skimmer tends to keep the food in the water column for quite a while.
 
I'm thinking about putting the food in a fridge and using a peristaltic pump for delivery or making a small cooler with an ice-probe chiller to keep the water cool.
 
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