Cali Kid Corals

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FullerReef

FullerReef

Supporting Member
BARcard
Hello Everyone,

I finally wanted to start a tank journal. Most of the coral in the tank tank came from BAR members, either through swaps or the market. I will try to tag everyone who has something in this tank at the end.

Equipment:
Innovative Marine 50 AIO
Kessil AP9X
AI Nero 3
Tunze 3155 ATO
IM Chaeto LED

Growing up we kept a FOWLR tank, so I felt I had most of the saltwater basics down, and decided to try to dip my toes into an LPS tank, so I started the tank in January 2022.

I'm not much into writing things out, but I do love pictures. I hope that will make for a good tank journal.

Here is my first wet test/cleaning fill.
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Here is my tank helper Barney helping me stack rocks. Barney does not like that the tank takes attention away from him.
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Final Rock layout done, the sand is blowing a little more than I had hoped, but it eventually settled out. It is so white and pristine in these first pics haha
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First fish addition was a pair of clown. I was still doing a dark period, but cut lights on for photos.
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Next we added our Purple Firefish, fire scrimp, and Royal Gramma. I got everyone hoping they were peaceful, but our Royal Gramma is a Royal Dick. I guess he keeps the tank in line, there has never been any major bullying issues. He is was one of 2 fish that we named, and his name is Asshole.
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The last of the livestock was from BIOTA, I always wanted a Coral Beauty Angelfish since I was a kid, and we also got a court jester goby (2nd named fish, Gooby the Goby). They both came in so small. Apologies for the blue, I didn't have my filter yet and didn't want to mess with the lights.
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At the end of April I cut on the lights and began the uglies, that really weren't that bad. Here is the worst of the hair algae phase, Gooby loved the hair algae.
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After things settled in the ugly stage, I started off with my first four corals. 2 Acans, a hammer, and a Zoa.
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I am at my photo limit so I will continue this below.
 
In July I noticed a ton of tiny white specks, turns out our trochus snails had babies, hundreds of babies... There have been at least 3 hatches since July, I have given literally hundreds to BAR members. I have no idea how many are currently in the tank, ~50 maybe.
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Then came a new reefers Christmas, the frag swap at 7 stills. Everyone was super generous, especially @IOnceWasLegend for donating the frags to enter into the swap. I didn't realize until I got home, but like half my frags happened to come from @Finnaddict, so thank you finn.
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Here is a full shot of the tank post swap.
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I will add the good and the bad to the story for sure. Things were going great, but suddenly the green and purple tip frogspawn started having issues. One day it was fine, then it was looking sad, and by next morning I pulled it. All my other Euphyllia looked great though. Unfortunately this theme will come up a little later as well
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Like I said, everyone else was looking pretty good.
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Here are some mushrooms that @IOnceWasLegend gave to me when I bought one of the gold hammers from him, these might be my favorite corals in the tank, they really look wicked.
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Jumped in with both feet on torches, and got this beautiful Cotton Candy and NY Knicks torch from @Holly94583. The Cotton Candy was way bigger than I thought and I ended up needing to move a bunch of corals around.
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Any lastly, I bought this Dragon Soul from @Hella_Salty650. It is doing great and has split from 1 to 3 heads already.
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In the beginning of October I got sick with Covid, and during that time something bad happening to the tank. It was quite a helpless feeling, I was trying to isolate from my wife away from the tank and things just kept going south. My first and oldest hammer died, seemed fine one day, then the next day it looked sad, and then it was pulled. I did chip off the baby polyps and stuck them to a plug, maybe it'll live on.
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Same week, another hammer I got from the CFM died in the same way. That was 2 in a week... what was happening and was it going to stop! Everything I tested seemed within normal range. I heard on legend's thread that people thought the Red Sea Reef Pro salt might be the issue. I was using that and have since switched to TMP. Luckily things seems to have stopped dying (knock on wood).

The week that I stopped quarantine I noticed that I hadn't seen Gooby the Goby in a while, Wife couldn't remember the last time she had seen him either. No body to be found but at this point but he was so tiny he might be a crab snack. It's been a month at this point and he was usually always out and pecking at the sand. He quickly became one of our favorite fish, always hanging out in the tank next to the couch. He was hilarious when he was ripping hair algae out of the rocks. RIP Gooby :(

So that was three pretty big hits while I felt like I just couldn't watch over the tank for 2 weeks. Again it was quite a helpless feeling. Also, is this mysterious Euphyllia killer going to make it to my other euphyllia?!?

Things have settled down since then, here are some recent pictures. Everyone is doing well, except for the poor purple firefish. I came home today, and it looked like he was thrown into a cactus. I think he had a run in with a bristleworm in one of his holes. If anyone has dealt with a bristleworm "attack", let me know.

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Acans had to be moved from the rock because the torch was starting to reach it, they have not been very happy since moving.
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Mushrooms dropping babies as it moves along the rock.
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The view from the couch, which is probably the most viewed side:
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Was much Fuller pre hammer deaths.
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Tank looks awesome for only 10 months so far, plus you've had very few losses for a "new" reefer and better than my record the past year! Really big growth on the frags you've gotten from the Seven Stills swap. The Scolymia (Homophyllia) looks great in there as contrast too.

With all the caves you have, I'm wondering what other types of fish you can have in there. I remember seeing these upside-down Priolepis nocturna gobies years ago but don't see many people talking about them lately. Maybe some of the fish pros know more? https://reefkeeping.com/issues/2008-08/fish/index.php

Not sure what else will co-exist well with a-hole the royal gramma.
 
Got the results of my ICP tests to see what could be going on with the euphyllia and the biggest surprise was my salt was showing 32ppt. After comparing my refractometer juice from BRS to others, it was coming up around 2ppt low.... I am slowly bumping this up by adding salt water to top off. Unfortunately if this is the issue, I may have caught it too late, the cotton candy torch has 2 heads that are showing the same issue. They have been looking sad the last 3 days with gaping mouths. And today it is dying away and chunks of flesh peeling away from the center of the mouths. What should I do? Frag it away?
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Yes. Feel free to throw more than that thread says. I’ve thrown 1750mg a day for 5 days in a 60 gallons of volume with no I’ll effects (250mg per 10 gallons).

If you didn’t want to make the mixture, you could just throw in one tablet.
 
RandyC said:
Yes. Feel free to throw more than that thread says. I’ve thrown 1750mg a day for 5 days in a 60 gallons of volume with no I’ll effects (250mg per 10 gallons).

If you didn’t want to make the mixture, you could just throw in one tablet.
Click to expand...
Did you have better results with a higher dose? What made you increase the dose?
 
FullerReef said:
Gotcha, I believe he tried to tow the line to not kill as much beneficial bacteria. Gonna start there and up it if I feel it's needed.
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I agree he started off slowly, but I’ve done that dose daily for 7 days before without water changes and no addition of bacteria multiple times. I know others that have as well. I’m not suggesting that you go ballistic and use my dosage, I’m just reassuring you overdosing and killing your beneficial bacteria is not likely unless you dump the whole bottle in.
 
RandyC said:
I agree he started off slowly, but I’ve done that dose daily for 7 days before without water changes and no addition of bacteria multiple times. I know others that have as well. I’m not suggesting that you go ballistic and use my dosage, I’m just reassuring you overdosing and killing your beneficial bacteria is not likely unless you dump the whole bottle in.
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I'm guessing since you have used this multiple times you have seen good results? I'm really ready for things to stop dying.
 
FullerReef said:
I'm guessing since you have used this multiple times you have seen good results? I'm really ready for things to stop dying.
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I’ve done it for things other than Euphyllia. When you’re at wits end and water parameters look fine, you can’t find any pests and icp is says everything is okay and there’s nothing else to try…….

I’ve also used Erythromycin and Cipro at the same time.
 
FullerReef said:
In July I noticed a ton of tiny white specks, turns out our trochus snails had babies, hundreds of babies... There have been at least 3 hatches since July, I have given literally hundreds to BAR members. I have no idea how many are currently in the tank, ~50 maybe.
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Congrats on the trochus babies! So rad!
I'm working on a trochus larval rearing project at the moment and am curious about a few things if you don't mind sharing the info:

Do you have filter pads/floss/socks in the overflow chambers of your 50?

How much flow do you have going through the AIO chambers in the back? At ~78F they are likely in the larval veliger swimming stage for 3.5-4 days at a minimum so it's interesting to see them surviving to settlement in any appreciable number.

Do you have a skimmer, and did you notice any sort of cloudy bacterial bloom in the month before first noticing the snails on the glass?
It seems likely that there is either a zone somewhere in your display where free-swimming larvae can remain in suspension for days without being sucked into the filtration... or they are going into the filtration chambers, bypassing filter socks somehow, and remaining in suspension back there for some reason.

At 1-2 days post-hatch the veliger larva are around 150 microns so they "should" be getting caught/killed in filter socks if you have them, though they also may be remaining in suspension inside of the socks, settling in them, and then crawling out into the main tank.
 
Sounds like a cool project. I'll try to answer as much as I can to help out.

I have filter pads that I cut to the size of the IM caddy, I keep one on each side and try to change those one a week. No skimmer.

I have pretty good flow in the back, I have the return pump that comes with the tank at full speed all the time, I think it is 512GPH. I have marine pure bio balls in the back for surface area, they are stacked up in the bottom and in one of the "chambers" so maybe the ones in the bottom create a low flow area they could have settled out there.

Never saw any bacterial blooms, but after the fist set of babies started showing up, I did catch a spawning event one morning. Noticed what looked like microbubbles in the tank, but traced it back to the snails just shooting rails into the water. I saw this multiple times, always in the morning right after the lights cut on. The star of the spawning event seemed to be a big trochus that had a crack/deformation in his shell. I have since lost almost all of the big snails, I think it ran out of food in the tank to support so many sails, so I haven't had a spawn in a couple months.

Not sure what else is noteworthy, I had a hair algae outbreak as part of new tank uglies, and that is why I got the snails in the first place, so there was a ton of food for them. Also later learned my tank was running at low salt (~32).
 
FullerReef said:
Sounds like a cool project. I'll try to answer as much as I can to help out.

I have filter pads that I cut to the size of the IM caddy, I keep one on each side and try to change those one a week. No skimmer.

I have pretty good flow in the back, I have the return pump that comes with the tank at full speed all the time, I think it is 512GPH. I have marine pure bio balls in the back for surface area, they are stacked up in the bottom and in one of the "chambers" so maybe the ones in the bottom create a low flow area they could have settled out there.

Never saw any bacterial blooms, but after the fist set of babies started showing up, I did catch a spawning event one morning. Noticed what looked like microbubbles in the tank, but traced it back to the snails just shooting rails into the water. I saw this multiple times, always in the morning right after the lights cut on. The star of the spawning event seemed to be a big trochus that had a crack/deformation in his shell. I have since lost almost all of the big snails, I think it ran out of food in the tank to support so many sails, so I haven't had a spawn in a couple months.

Not sure what else is noteworthy, I had a hair algae outbreak as part of new tank uglies, and that is why I got the snails in the first place, so there was a ton of food for them. Also later learned my tank was running at low salt (~32).
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Sweet. Thanks for all the info! I'm guessing the larvae is getting through the filter pads and floating in one of the back chambers. That being said, if they're staying in your tank and settling that way, they do have swimming cilia until day ~4 when they settle onto the substrate so they are able to propel themselves around a bit.

I've usually seen them spawn in my tanks early in the morning too which is kind of interesting because from my understanding in the wild they usually spawn a few hours after sunset (9PM-midnight)

In trochus hatchery production the babies consume film algae so quickly that they quickly run out of food if in high numbers, so they fertilize the water to encourage algae growth.
If the shell crack in the male was causing stress maybe it triggered a stress-spawn? They can be artificially induced to spawn with heat stress (transferring into water that is 83-85F-ish) and other stressors (like hydrogen peroxide). Either way, cool! Thanks again.
 
I often see trochus spawn within an hour after adding them to the tank.

I have had huge blooms of babies (trochus and stomatella) that die off due to lack of food. So much that I get piles of tiny empty shells.

I run really low flow through my sump, maybe 2x turnover a day.
 
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