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pdxmonkeyboy

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Posts posted by pdxmonkeyboy

    Help on Keeping SPS corals

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Its_cchan said:

    This information was extremely helpful and insightful, thanks so much. Here are some answers to you questions. 

    1. I am currently on the wait-list to use the par meter, so once I get this, I should be able to understand the various par levels within my tank.   

    Cool. 

     

    1 hour ago, Its_cchan said:

    2. You are right on this, I intend to get either the Hanna or Salifer phosphate kit. Which do you recommend? 

    I use the milwaukie mi412 but it is expensive.  I would say hanna

    3. No outbreaks yet, I have noticed a couple spots on the rock work with Cyano and a bit of spots on the sand bed with Dinos. I attribute this to overfeeding the corals and the fish. I have reduced the feeding of the fish to smaller quantities once per day and target feed the corals once per week. 

    Both are usually caused by super low nutrient levels.  Ok, the jury is still out on what exactly causes them but the best thing that I read and that makes a lot of sense is that they are both extremely efficient at capturing nutrients are very low levels, like lower than other bacteria can.  Low levels can cause them to "get the upper hand" and populations to explode.  This is why reducing nutrients does not often work. 

    4. I have a 60 gallon tank w/ 10 gallon sump. I do a 10 gallon water change once a week. I do not test alkalinity of the new water going into the tank and I would need to. Good call on this. 

    No problem.  It is just a decent practice to get into.  BUY A HANNAH ALK METER. 

    5. I plan to check Alkalinity and Calcium everyday or every other day to make sure levels stay consistent and manually dose both if needed. I would like to go fully automatic with the dosing and keeping track of these parameters, but the equipment will be expensive. Eventually, I will save up some cash to set up an monitoring and dosing system. 

    Twice a week is plenty for testing.  You can hand dose once things start actually being consumed. 

    6. Yes, I test and keep track of my parameters at least twice per week. I know that I will probably need to do more frequent testing if I plan to keep SPS corals. 

    Again, twice a wee 

    1 hour ago, Its_cchan said:

    You are very right in saying that there are a lot of misinformation on google on how to keep SPS corals, which is why I decided to ask her first. Not only for the sake of the corals but also not to be throwing money away.

     

    Help on Keeping SPS corals

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Emeyer has hit the nail on the head.  There is no one thing that will make you successful, it is a combination of everything.  Everyone likes to throw the word stability out there but the definition of stability is somewhat left up tot he user.  OK, my alk has been stable for months... so I must have stability.  

    Your aquarium is basically one big balance scale... its kind of like one of those mobiles that you built in grade school with all these different elements balancing each other.  Moving one may have less affect on the overall balance than moving the other.  Corals are somewhat like plants.. their growth is a result of endothermic reactions that are based on the conditions surrounding them.  Having mature biota is paramount in keeping everything in balance.  You can think of your microbial populations as an example of the the artic hare/ fox population dynamic.  When there are lots of hares... the fox population rises, the number of hares falls, and then the foxes starve and the numbers decrease.   

    Your aquarium is the same way.  When you start an aquarium there is a boom of nutrients and a flush of biota explodes to process them.  Then the bacteria numbers shoot past available resources, their numbers crash, then nutrients spike, etc etc.  You can think of your tank nutrient processing as a sign wave and the frequency or oscillation of the wave form gets smaller and smaller over time as things stabilize.  Now, that waveform is subject to even more disruption with things such as light duration, temperature, adding fish, fish dying, salinity changes and water changes. In addition, the species that process different compounds grow at different rates, those that convert nitrate to nitrate gas being the slowest.  You never see a new aquarium owner saying "I can't keep nitrates up" while there are two year old tanks where people are dosing nitrates into them. 

    I realize that this may not be helpful in specific terms but it will be helpful in the long run in terms of understanding just how complex things are. 

    So, do I think your tank can grow SPS?  Maybe.. but if you walked up to me in the LFS and threw those numbers out at me my first repsonse would be...

    1. what lighting and par do you have? 

    2. you need a new phosphate test kit because if you really had zero phosphate , everything would be dead. 

    3. Have you had any major outbreaks of cyano or dino?  Both are tell tales signs of nutrient instability / flux. 

    4. How often do you do water changes?  Do you test alk before you add the new water to your tank? 

    5. What is your plan for adding cal and alk to your tank when the sps start to grow?  Water changes can work.. but you have to understand that water changes to supplement cal and alk are pretty much the antithesis of stability.  "Oh, I will just add high alk new water once a week to combat my dropping alk/cal in my tank"  #yoyo_numbers 

    6. Do you write down your measurements?  THIS IS PARAMOUNT.  What is killing your sps now is something that happened a week or three weeks ago... How would you know without a record of what things were and what you added or whatever. 

    I am not trying to discourage you from collecting SPS but like most things, you can google and find the answers that sound good to you like "I never test and things look great" but what you may not know is that that tank might be 4 years old and hasn't had a new fish or coral in a year plus.  It can be challenging but also very rewarding. And it can also be utterly devastating (to your wallet and feelings) to have things die when you don't know what is wrong. 

    This may all seem like overkill, maybe it is. But after watching my wallet turn into ashes I got serious about the whole thing.  Then things were going great and I got lax again... "this frag has been in QT for a week..I am sure its fine" and then I got burned again.  

     

    I hope this is helpful. 

     

     

     

     

    • Like 3
    • Thanks 1

    OMFG>> REALLY?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    So I had to pull up my BRS orders for an apex work order and I made the mistake of adding up everything I have spent over the last 3 years.  WOW.. Don't ever do that.  Does anyone else seriously cringe when they see these numbers?  I mean, I have a huge system.. but wow! this is only hardware! 

    • Like 1

    Do you have ich? Let's talk about that.

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    1 minute ago, Micah said:

    In the past, my quarantine method was to wait for things to go wrong and just assume I have ich/live with it.   Ich management.   Starting this new tank, however, I've decided to take it seriously and do the full quarantine/medicating/etc.  The humblefish method.   

     Then treated for 14-30 days on therapeutic levels of copper power (again, wrasses/other sensitive fish need more time to acclimate to copper)

     

    ask your doctor if chloroquine phosphate is right for you!  Seriously, copper is brutal on fish 😞 

    I also have a 20 gallon tank with Lid! free for anyone that wants it.  I posted it before and nobody was interested.  I took a 20 gallon long to the dump last weekend...

     

    Do you have ich? Let's talk about that.

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I have been through the ringer with "trying" to QT and then getting burned by a single slip up on my end.  "oh, this persons tank is clean". The reality is these days that it is safe to assume that EVERYTHING from a pet store has at least SOME kind of pest.  I mean the aquatic pet trade is basically one big whore house without even a baby wipe around.  They do there best to limit things and obviously CF is one of the cleanest outfits around but no pet store can QT everything. 

    Let's see the things I have had in my tanks.. ich..velvet..euronema,  aptasia,  AEFW, , fire worms, vermetid snails, and that algae you have to treat with fluconozole. I have not had bugs or acro spiders. The eggs and reproductive stages of these things are simply too small not to miss from time to time. 

    I got my tang collection ich free after two years, then added some anthias without a QT and velvet broke out.  I just put everything in my display tank and absolutely carpet bombed the tank with chloroquine phosphate.  So that will take care of ich, velvet, maybe the euronema, and every form of invertebrate. I set up a 40g breeder to QT all my corals and bought a desk top magnifying glass with led lights off of amazon to inspect the corals once a week.

     For the amount of money we spend on our tanks it just seems absolutely ridiculous not to QT everything.  The "observation" QT people are pretty dense in my book...oh, you have xray vision and can see a fishes gills?  I'm just being silly though, I'm sure ich wouldn't attach itself to a fishes gills...it's not like gills don't have a slime coat and water is constantly passing over them.

    If I had a small tank without much invested I would probably wouldn't take it as seriously.   But my DT is absurdly large and dealing with pests would be an epic nightmare. 

    Cheers. 

     

    • Like 1
    • Confused 1

    Dosing system recommendations

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    it is sound advice to just ignore your PH.  IT is a result of many complex things and not really worth chasing.  If I were you i would do 3 things first.

     

    1. buy a hannah alkalinity tester.

    2. test at the same time of the day/night every 2 days to see what your numbers are doing.  You can't effectively replace your alk amount with water changes when you have a lot of things consuming alk and cal.  

    3. WRITE ALL YOUR MEASUREMENTS DOWN!!  

    This can not be over emphasized and it is often not told to people enough.  Corals dying is often the result of what you did a week or two ago, not on the day that you see it and test the water.  It seems that almost every "my corals are dying" thread starts with..I checked my parameters, they are perfect.

     

    What you are effectively doing by dosing red sea pro.. VERY high alk, is yo-yoing your alk numbers.  It's not the end of the world, but when you start throwing money at acropora you may find yourself saying ... "no,no,no why is it receding? wait, no, [language filter] it, god [language filter] it".  

    Why are feedback threads being locked??

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I realize that recently someone was a bit agressive starting 3 seperate threads about a particular vendor... but now i went to see how things ended up and they are all locked? 

    Why are they locked?  It didn't seem to me that anything violated the terms of service.  This kind of thing happens in the business. Seemed like the vendor was doing his best to remedy the situation and the guy was being a bit unreasonable. 

    At any rate, it is valuable information.  Just seems odd that any negative or potentiality negative press for a sponsor results in a lock.  

    • Like 1
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