Cali Kid Corals

Josh and Tiffany's RSR 250

Still waiting on the cycle. Ammonia's zeroed out, nitrites are between 2 and 5 ppm, but (qualitatively) look lower than they did last night. I'm hopeful that my cycle will complete in the next 48 to 72 hours, and we can start the process of adding fish.

Speaking of, after thinking on it for a while, my wife and I have settled on a tentative stocking list for fish:

1x Firefish
1x Yellow watchman goby + shrimp pair,
1x Midas blenny
1x Lyretail anthias
1x Lawnmower blenny
1x Sixline wrasse
1x Bluestreak cleaner (looking for advice on this; have gotten mixed information from most sites on whether a RSR 250 would be of suitable size)

Potential 'problem children':

1x Orchid dottyback (my wife *really* likes this one)
1x Valenti puffer (we both really like this one; still on the fence, but recognize whether we're happy with it or not will largely depend on the individual fish)
 
Nitrites zeroed out. Cycle processed ammonia quickly. So we were good to go and started adding fish!

In an effort to avoid our previous issues of being nutrient-limited and predisposing the tank to dinos, we opted to stock a little heavier than usual in the beginning. We added a yellow watchman goby and a firefish the first day, then a melanurus wrasse over the weekend, and a royal gramma yesterday.

We opted for the melanurus since it eats pests both in the tank and off fish, and avoids us having to have both a six line and a bluestreak cleaner wrasse.

We also decided on getting a royal gramma instead of the orchid dottyback since it turns out we'd had a miscommunication over which fish my wife didn't like (she didn't like the bicolor dottyback; I'd thought she didn't like the royal gramma). I also learned that, apparently, royal grammas frequently swim on their side/upside down.

Diatom bloom is starting, so here come the uglies. Hope it doesn't last long.
 

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Rundown of the last month, with pictures to come shortly:

  • Diatoms came. Boo!
  • Diatoms cleared. Woo!
  • Added more fish: a lawnmower blenny, a midas blenny, and a mandarin (thanks, @Danhsj !) as well as the first coral. Woo!
  • Uglies came back in the form of diatoms. Boo!
  • Got refugium up and running. Woo!
  • Uglies stayed. Boo!
  • Built out my CUC. Woo!
  • ...uglies stayed. Shouldn't...diatoms have cleared up??? Boo!
  • .......uglies stayed. What the hell?
I took my normal approach (taking a sample and analyzing it under a microscope) and, AWESOME, turns out I am now 3 for 3 on dinoflagellates in the first 6 months of starting my tanks. 20g had prorocentrum dinos, 50g frag tank had ostreopsis, and this one had...drumroll please...small-cell amphidinium.
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The bright spot is that all of these dino species go into the water column at night, meaning they're susceptible to UV, so I am also now 3 for 3 on beating dinoflagellates in the first 6 months of starting my tanks.

Lights are back on. Tank looks pretty. And, after the planned power outage this coming Wednesday, we'll start adding more coral to the tank since the first piece (purple-tip indo frogspawn) is thriving.
 
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Update, 11-10-21

A smattering of pictures I've taken of the tank. We're gonna start moving in more pieces (including some torches) in the next week or so, and it's finally coming together.

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Still battling cyano, but looking prettier. Added the Cali hurricane and dragon soul torches yesterday and they're doing well. Actually slightly too well, because the dragon soul torch is currently throwing out 7" long sweepers and coming very close to the gold hammer on the left.

FTS:

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Browned-out piece of beach bum that's starting to recover nicely:

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Ultron favia:

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Dragon soul torch (which also looks like hellfire, no idea how to tell the difference):


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Cali hurricane torch:
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Video of dragon soul in the flow: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dW3RksV52HhOXS9VVM-_eHzc7LDNlPqH/view?usp=sharing
 

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Update 12/12/21

After a few weeks of fighting microscope-verified cyano where I'd tried nutrient management, building out CUC, and manual removal, I finally bit the bullet and used Chemiclean. Chemical approaches are typically my last resort, but I just have to say...wow.

I followed the manufacturer's dosing instructions and ended up leaving the cup off my skimmer so that it would overflow and increase oxygenation. 72 hours after dosing (24 hours longer than recommended) my cyano was completely gone. I did a 25% water change, turned my skimmer on the lowest setting, and went through about two full cups of skimmate (on an RSK 300 skimmer) before the skimmer settled down to 'normal' levels. More than a week out and I've yet to see any negative effects on the tank: everything (including the acros) are happy.

After seeing @Danhsj 's torch garden in person again and chatting with him a bit, I've opted to try the Red Sea Coral AB+ additive. My plan is to start at about half the recommended dose every other day and 'ramp up' as needed. So far, though, everything's seemed really happy, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it impacts the tank.

Photo dump:

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I’m battling high phosphates and low nitrates too, a bit better now with .14 phosphates and 5.4 nitrates. I recommend feeding more frozen food and filtrate the water thaw with the frozen food to cut back phosphates. Pellets has too much phosphates. Frozen mysis produce more nitrates than pellets. That’s my experience. 2 days mysis then 1 day pellets. Repeat.
 
Update, 2/5/22

Phosphates have been brought under control. Feeding more frozen food and reducing the refugium photoperiod seem to have let my nitrates rise, which has balanced out the worst of my phosphates. I'm still using lanthanum chloride manually dosed every three or four days to keep phosphate under control (typically will be in the 0.1 to 0.2 range before dosing), but I'm planning on adding in a small GFO reactor when I have time.

I've been dosing AB+ every other day (or so) following the manufacturer's guidelines. Anecdotally I think I've seen slightly better coloration, but it could be my imagination and it hasn't been long enough to determine the impact on growth. So far so good, though: all the acros are coloring back up. Weirdly, my miyagi tort - which previously had blue polyps, blue tips, and yellow flesh - has now decided to have yellow polyps, blue tips, and blue flesh. It's honestly a little bizarre, but kind of cool seeing the various color profiles you can get under a variety of lighting and flow conditions.

What is not good, though, is that I found out our halloween crab was eating coral. Took me a week or two to realize why the ultron favia was losing bits of flesh in random places (sorry, @tankguy ), and I finally caught it in the act when it was gnawing on it. It has been banished.

Finally, we think we've reached the tentative final stages of our stock list. After conferring with @H2OPlayar a few months ago, we decided to go a bit heavier on the stocking than we'd initially anticipated. Our current stock consists of:

Melanurus wrasse
Yellow watchman goby + shrimp pair
Lawnmower blenny
Royal gramma
Midas blenny
Green mandarin
3x female lyretail anthias (with one, I'm pretty sure, becoming a male)
Foxface rabbitfish (temporary; a friend was rehoming it, I love their behavior, and it made short work of the hair algae)
4x vanderbilt chromis

So far everyone is coexisting perfectly, minus the "male" anthias getting irritable at the chromis once in a while. We're likely going to add in one more fish after the foxface is rehomed, but not quite sure what we're going to replace it with yet.

Pictures:

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IOnceWasLegend said:
Meant to ask, @Kensington Reefer : what issues have you had with vanderbilt chromis?
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In my experience they get to the wholesalers starving and in poor condition. They are then all lumped together and they beat on each other and are stressed to the point that they don’t eat. It’s downhill from there. I wish you luck with this beautiful species.
Have you had them long? I would offer generous servings of Cyclopes, daphnia and marine mysis with some crushed flake foods in between.
Hoping for successful long life, but not surprising if not.
 
Update, 2/21/22

Calibrate your Tridents, people. Swapped to a new bottle of alkalinity testing reagent and was surprised at the sudden, massive increase in alkalinity usage in the tank (dropped almost a full point of dkh over the course of 48 hours even after dosing more to compensate). Took a step back, though about my process, tested with an independent method (Hanna alkalinity checker), and realized there was a 0.7 dkh delta between the two. Calibrated, and now the results are bang on. Lesson learned.

Speaking of results being bang on: phosphates are under control. My phosphates had been rising an average of 0.08 ppm/day, and I'd been dosing lanthanum chloride every other day. Got sick of that, so I finally pulled the trigger and installed the GFO reactor @H2OPlayar loaned to me:

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I regret not having more room in my sump area given my use of a (much larger) aftermarket sump, but I like having a refugium and more room for equipment, so I'll live.

I started off with the reactor 2/3rds full. @Srt4eric pointed out that was WAY too much GFO and I realized I should've done the math. Added in 1 cup of GFO to start (1 tbsp/4 gallons * rounding to 80 gallons total water volume = 1.25 cups, so started lightly) and it exhausted within 48 hours (phosphates went from 0.06 to 0.24 in 48 hours). Dosed lanthanum chloride to remove exactly 0.24 ppm of phosphate and zero it out, let it run for a couple hours, then swapped out the exhausted GFO with 1.25 cups of fresh GFO.

Over the last three days the phosphates have been 0.07, 0.07, and 0.08. Calling this a success. Looking forward to (hopefully) receiving my Hanna HR nitrate checker tomorrow to get better resolution on those, since I've been relying on a nearly 2 year old API saltwater master test kit because, "Eh, good enough."

(Narrator: it was probably not good enough.)

My one point of frustration is that I've got what appears to be some type of green algae growing exclusively on the sand. It's been getting worse over the past week or so. I took my standard approach and examined it under my microscope and saw a bunch of copepods (woo!), a couple sparse helminth-ish flatworms (unfortunate, but not surprising since they've been in the chaeto in my sump for a while, and not enough to be a concern), and a couple small-cell amphidinium dinoflagellates (supporting my hypothesis they don't ever really go away, just lay in wait).

Nothing was present in sufficient quantities to explain the outbreak, but that might be because I didn't do a good job capturing the sand sample. Based on this thread I suspect it's either green cyano or spirulina (potentially spirulina, given how often I feed spirulina-enriched shrimp and pellet foods), so I'm going to try nutrient control for a while and do the peroxide test they suggested.

In the meantime, my wife and I purchased a pinkberry goni and a favia of the gods from the Cali Kids valentine's day live sale that I picked up today. Goni's still too pissy to take a good picture, but the favia's looking gorgeous (if I do say so myself).

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