Everyone should have a green birds nest. That is all.
I have found green birds nest's to be a good grower and over and over again it's told me when something was going wrong in my tank. I've heard this from a few different people and really do believe it to be true. I dealt with red bugs a few months ago. Treatment was pretty straightforward and they were easy enough to deal with. Killed all of my pods but I can replace those. A few weeks later, I noticed the green bird wasn't looking so great (not as brilliant color, polyps not fully extended) so I ran all of the usual tests, didn't find anything awry so I wrote it off to that particular coral having a bad day. As it continued to decline I reached for the Hanna checkers to confirm the Salifert test results and found that my PO4 was really high. On October 9th, it tested at 117 ppb or 0.359 ppm. Wow! After consulting with a friend that knows a LOT more about this hobby than I do (@Adam) I decided to treat with a lanthanum chloride product, Brightwell's Phosphate-E. Over the course of a month I brought it down to 0.181 ppm and the bird's nest is looking so much better. Mind you, this whole time, everything else looked just fine. I don't know what caused this but I'm guessing it had something to do with the red bug treatment.
Another example of Green Bird's nest saving the day was in my frag system. I had a few frags and they just started to die off. I was fighting low nutrients and just assumed that was the problem. Since everything else looked fine and I have a large colony of green bird's nest, I just got rid of them when they dies, not thinking much of it. When I got around to testing phosphate, I discovered the level were almost comically high. I mean, 0.522 ppm high. At the time I had a group of baby chicks in an open air brooder in the same room and they were kicking up a lot of dust. It sound ridiculous but I think the dust from their waste contributed to my issue. Quickly they were moved outside with the rest of the flock and the tank is running at 0.05 ppm after a few water changes. Did this have anything to do with the chicken? I don't really know but as soon as I moved them outside, the issue resolved pretty quickly with minimal effort on my part. The main point is that the green birds nest showed me something was wrong and I didn't pay any attention. In closing, if you don't have a green bird's nest, come and get a frag and let it function in your system as the old 'canary in a coal mine'.
I have found green birds nest's to be a good grower and over and over again it's told me when something was going wrong in my tank. I've heard this from a few different people and really do believe it to be true. I dealt with red bugs a few months ago. Treatment was pretty straightforward and they were easy enough to deal with. Killed all of my pods but I can replace those. A few weeks later, I noticed the green bird wasn't looking so great (not as brilliant color, polyps not fully extended) so I ran all of the usual tests, didn't find anything awry so I wrote it off to that particular coral having a bad day. As it continued to decline I reached for the Hanna checkers to confirm the Salifert test results and found that my PO4 was really high. On October 9th, it tested at 117 ppb or 0.359 ppm. Wow! After consulting with a friend that knows a LOT more about this hobby than I do (@Adam) I decided to treat with a lanthanum chloride product, Brightwell's Phosphate-E. Over the course of a month I brought it down to 0.181 ppm and the bird's nest is looking so much better. Mind you, this whole time, everything else looked just fine. I don't know what caused this but I'm guessing it had something to do with the red bug treatment.
Another example of Green Bird's nest saving the day was in my frag system. I had a few frags and they just started to die off. I was fighting low nutrients and just assumed that was the problem. Since everything else looked fine and I have a large colony of green bird's nest, I just got rid of them when they dies, not thinking much of it. When I got around to testing phosphate, I discovered the level were almost comically high. I mean, 0.522 ppm high. At the time I had a group of baby chicks in an open air brooder in the same room and they were kicking up a lot of dust. It sound ridiculous but I think the dust from their waste contributed to my issue. Quickly they were moved outside with the rest of the flock and the tank is running at 0.05 ppm after a few water changes. Did this have anything to do with the chicken? I don't really know but as soon as I moved them outside, the issue resolved pretty quickly with minimal effort on my part. The main point is that the green birds nest showed me something was wrong and I didn't pay any attention. In closing, if you don't have a green bird's nest, come and get a frag and let it function in your system as the old 'canary in a coal mine'.
