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Ya sexxy shrimps are a must in there for sure. You already gotten so much lives in there. That’s cool!
Rick's 80 Gallon SCA (+40b)
- Thread starter skrappy
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You won’t even need to grow pods separately. 
2 year tank-iversary was first of this month. Things are going ok. I have lost a little bit of coloration with the addition of the frag/macro tank. Pretty quickly the nutrients hit 0/0 so I've been fighting to keep them up. My purple tang was a butt head and smacked my blotched anthias in the eye giving him pop-eye, its looking like its almost healed up now but it has been taking a while to do it, so the purple tang was re-homed to the frag tank. I got a tiny yellow tang to replace him in the main tank, as well as a red headed fairy wrasse. All of my fish look happier now and swim around much more, including my chicken shit melanurus wrasse. The purple tang hates it though, he sits against the side of the frag tank glaring at all the fish in the other tank, you can tell he wants to go beat them up, but they don't seem to pay him any attention. I did unfortunately loose a small handful of high end frags I was growing out. They were all on a section of the rack in the frag tank that was giving them good growth, but it was also growing the heck out of my CSB. With being busy, or perhaps just in my laziness, I didn't notice that the CSB anemone had grown large enough that it was now reaching them, when I was checking on the tank a week or so ago I noticed it had 2 tentacles dancing around between a nice group of now solid white skeletons 
I've now re-arranged that frag rack.
I've now re-arranged that frag rack. 
Wow. That is looking great. Not sure what color loss you are talking about though.
lol, thanks, we are usually our own harshest critics in this hobby right. My Stan Lee nub has become a muted grey/green, no longer blue and purple; my Walt Disney has become more green, the purples are just about all gone now and there is just some light pink in its place in a few areas; and my ASD rainbow milli has lost most of its pink and is looking mostly green and orange now. Pretty sure things will look good again in another 6 months once everything has settled in and I've gotten a nutrient addition sorted out. I think I was getting close then I got busy with work and stopped doing daily phosphorus and phosphate testing, and my feeding schedule went from being super meticulous to just tossing in a cube of something frozen a few times a day when I can. I have no clue what my numbers are right now, but I'm guessing they are probably 0/0 again.
Yes we are, nonetheless it’s looking good!
I forgot to mention, my WD has become more yellow and lost almost all its other colors. I wonder if it changes as the colony matures. Is the colony in the middle the WD?
It is the one in the middle. I am pretty convinced the color change is due to nutrient levels changing. I had high Nitrates(50-75+) and Phosphates(.2-.3) for over a year and the WD kept bright deep purples and pinks the whole time, it only started to loose the purples after the addition of the macro tank with the nutrients dropping to 0/0. With the other corals having similar color loss all at the same time, I'm pretty confident 0/0 nutrients are the problem. Hopefully I'll have the time over the next few months to get back on a good feeding and nutrient testing schedule, then we can see what happens, my fingers are crossed. All that being said about coloration, I did notice a few corals that had stagnant growth for a long time all the sudden took off when the nutrients dropped, the Tyree pink lemonade being one of the biggest transformations. I'm hoping I can find a good balance that gives me the best of both worlds, I'll be shooting for 10-15 nitrates and .06-.1 phosphates in the long run to see how that does for me. Admittedly it is proving challenging for me to keep the numbers consistent with a planted macro tank, I'll probably have to get on a daily macro trimming schedule also to try and keep it consistent; a lot different than just keeping a ball of one type of macro in sump.
I am currently at around 5-10ppm Nitrates and .01-.04ppm Phosphates. Honestly, I'm afraid to change it cause I have my routine that keeps it at this level. I do wonder how it would look if it were to be higher.
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I had similar incident about 8 month ago loosing most of all my coral’s fluorescent colors and still not recovered from it. I don’t know what else I can do but just let it be. You can see here on “yellow tip” where the yellow was all lost but on a new growth it has the”yellow tip”.
I guess my trace is okay seeing from the new growth. I’m also struggling with nutritions, I’ve taken the algae scrubber off line a month ago.
My nitrate is around 2-2.5 and phosphate is around .03-.05.
Photo of yellow tip. Can see the new growth. X.x
I guess my trace is okay seeing from the new growth. I’m also struggling with nutritions, I’ve taken the algae scrubber off line a month ago.
My nitrate is around 2-2.5 and phosphate is around .03-.05.
Photo of yellow tip. Can see the new growth. X.x
Your tank looks great, if it ain't broke don't fix it, right. Hard for me to encourage anyone to change something when it's on cruise control like yours is. Maybe your WD and Bill Murry get a little better coloration, or maybe it throws your stability out of wack and you give yourself headache after headache getting the tank happy again.
Corals loose color a lot faster than they gain it, lol. I've got a few pieces that have gone through some ups and downs, and the accent colors don't seem to come back very well except on new growth. In my cases so far I have just let them grow and eventually everything is new growth and they look right again. I would wait and let the new growth come in and fix it, and if the chunk that lost its color doesn't ever get new growths and it bothers you, then just hack that part off and new properly colored stuff will grow in there then. But I would refrain from chopping that whole chunk off until the new growth has really taken off; even if it doesn't have the yellow tips that whole chunk is still encouraging the new growth so if you chop it off now it may stunt all the rest of it sending you back to square one. Coloration fixes seem to take the longest, hence why in one of my above posts I said I would see how it looked in 6 months, I expect it will take at least that long to get the WD to color back up the way that I want it.
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I hope your corals make comeback faster than mine!!! lol…. Are you still dosing the dailies of reef moonshiner? I guess it won’t hurt? How often do you do ICP testing? Currently doing every 3 month for me.
Yep, still doing moonshiners, ICP once a month. I send in the ATI ICP test, get the results in about 2 weeks, corrective dosing for a week, wait a week and then send in another test. Rinse and repeat. And its a good thing I do because the new sandbed for the the grass is still soaking up a ton of fluoride and barium, and the macros/grass/mangrove are pulling out all my iodine, potassium, zinc, iron, and nickel, just to name a few. The tank looks ok, but the tests show that adding the 40b to the system was a pretty significant destabilizing event. On the plus side my aluminum levels have never been lower, lol. I hope to have it dialed back in and stable in another 2 or 3 months, but the perfect colors coming back will probably take much longer than that.
This update is a bag of mixed nuts.
Aiptasia is back, is what it is I guess. I'll let them spread a little bit before I dump the $300 on an order of berghia.
I bought the new trident NP, out of the box it didn't work. I contacted support and went through the steps, they were booked up for calls for the next 2 and a half weeks. I'm not very patient with stuff like that so I ripped it apart and fixed it myself. The problems were from being put together poorly from the factory, and zero quality control. Mechanically it is exactly the same as the other trident, so if you know how to fix one then you know how to fix them both. I am literally at 50% failure rate out of the box with Neptune equipment; that being said, I still think they offer the most versatile controller right now. Such a shame they can't have better quality control and component sourcing.
My water chemistry is about back to what it should be, most of my SPS that lost color are back to looking beautiful and growing, however the WD colony that lost the most color started to STN from the base up and didn't seem to want to heal up; so I took a pair of clippers to it and came out with 20 good size frags and one 2" frag plate that I covered in little nubs. all but 2 of the pieces I fragged instantly looked better and STN stopped.
My Colorado Sunburst that is in the frag tank has grown to 18" now! No signs of it having any desire to split. The CSB was being good and staying under the frag rack, but it seems that a week after I cut up the WD colony and put it on the frag rack the CSB decided it would open up above the frag rack instead of below it, so I lost about half of the SPS frags on the rack. Many of the WD frags are stung up but hanging on, and I lost a good handful of SPS that I only had the one frag of, everything that is left is shoved to the far side of the frag tank piled on top of each other. I'll raise the frag rack up higher in the tank this weekend when I have time and hopefully that will solve that problem for a while.
The blotched anthias that had the pop eye made a full recovery and was doing good, but a couple of weeks ago he disappeared during/after when I went in and blew off the rocks. I assume he died, maybe he got stuck in some rocks after being scared into a tight spot while working in the tank, I'm really not sure since I never found a body, I guess my clean up crew does their job; except for my emerald crabs, they stopped eating bubble algae a long time ago.
I've always had clownfish in my salt water tanks, but in all the years I've spent picking cool pairs of clownfish I've never had them lay eggs in my tanks, but last night I caught them in the act just a bit before lights out. As awesome as it was for me to watch, showing it to my wife and watching her jump up and down and squeal with excitement like a small child was even better. I did unfortunately disappoint her today when I explained to her that there was a 99.9% chance they would all get eaten in the tank if/when they hatch. I do wonder what the babies would look like if they got to grow up; black ice mixed with mocha-vinci gladiator, could be cool.
Aiptasia is back, is what it is I guess. I'll let them spread a little bit before I dump the $300 on an order of berghia.
I bought the new trident NP, out of the box it didn't work. I contacted support and went through the steps, they were booked up for calls for the next 2 and a half weeks. I'm not very patient with stuff like that so I ripped it apart and fixed it myself. The problems were from being put together poorly from the factory, and zero quality control. Mechanically it is exactly the same as the other trident, so if you know how to fix one then you know how to fix them both. I am literally at 50% failure rate out of the box with Neptune equipment; that being said, I still think they offer the most versatile controller right now. Such a shame they can't have better quality control and component sourcing.
My water chemistry is about back to what it should be, most of my SPS that lost color are back to looking beautiful and growing, however the WD colony that lost the most color started to STN from the base up and didn't seem to want to heal up; so I took a pair of clippers to it and came out with 20 good size frags and one 2" frag plate that I covered in little nubs. all but 2 of the pieces I fragged instantly looked better and STN stopped.
My Colorado Sunburst that is in the frag tank has grown to 18" now! No signs of it having any desire to split. The CSB was being good and staying under the frag rack, but it seems that a week after I cut up the WD colony and put it on the frag rack the CSB decided it would open up above the frag rack instead of below it, so I lost about half of the SPS frags on the rack. Many of the WD frags are stung up but hanging on, and I lost a good handful of SPS that I only had the one frag of, everything that is left is shoved to the far side of the frag tank piled on top of each other. I'll raise the frag rack up higher in the tank this weekend when I have time and hopefully that will solve that problem for a while.
The blotched anthias that had the pop eye made a full recovery and was doing good, but a couple of weeks ago he disappeared during/after when I went in and blew off the rocks. I assume he died, maybe he got stuck in some rocks after being scared into a tight spot while working in the tank, I'm really not sure since I never found a body, I guess my clean up crew does their job; except for my emerald crabs, they stopped eating bubble algae a long time ago.
I've always had clownfish in my salt water tanks, but in all the years I've spent picking cool pairs of clownfish I've never had them lay eggs in my tanks, but last night I caught them in the act just a bit before lights out. As awesome as it was for me to watch, showing it to my wife and watching her jump up and down and squeal with excitement like a small child was even better. I did unfortunately disappoint her today when I explained to her that there was a 99.9% chance they would all get eaten in the tank if/when they hatch. I do wonder what the babies would look like if they got to grow up; black ice mixed with mocha-vinci gladiator, could be cool.
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Those are some fluffy corals 
I put a clay pot bottom in the tank a few days ago in my clowns' little hammer nest, in the hope that the clowns would lay eggs on that instead of my hammers, but jokes on me... I borrowed a coral saw today so I could trim back my mystery machine chalice and a few of my hammer colonies, including the one the clowns laid their eggs on. I chopped everything up, got a ton of frags mounted to plugs and tiles, tossed a few hammers back in the display for the clowns, rearranged the frag tank, cleaned up the area; then, I look in the tank and see the clowns laying eggs on the hammer I just cut up! LOL, they wasted no time. I'll leave the clay pot bottom in the tank for now, hopefully they will get the hint, but I think I'll go ahead and move that one hammer after this clutch of eggs hatch. Also noticed that it looks like this egg clutch is twice the size of the last one. The picture isn't great because both clowns were busy at work, and with the lights on the tank going out it was impossible to get a better shot showing the whole clutch, maybe I'll take another tomorrow.
