Another Rebirth?

Yesterday I tore my tank up.

I got a good 75-80% of my rockwork off the sand, I'm hoping for success keeping SPS. This would be a first.

For those who want the pics, just scroll down and view them. Of course, I love my storytelling and for both the sake of passing on some experience, and to outline the details for any interested, read on.

So I've received a few inquiries to fess up and show some pics lately, and I've been reluctant. I've been battling the reef demons trying to get a tank to look like some of the lovely ones I see here on 3reef. A "tank of the month" like you see out there wold be nice of course--but I just want sustained success. Somehow success has always eluded me.

I've thrown money at my tank for over a year with the same results. Pretty much everything stays alive but nothing thrives. Imagine my frustration as even the easiest to keep corals like buton polyps, yellow star polyps, green star polyps, xenia, and frogspawn slowly faded. They stay alive, but I've never had a euphylia branch another head, I've never had green star polyps grow like a mat of grass. Frowgpawn looked great in the store, and would retain that meaty healthy appearance for the first 3 weeks or so after becoming a resident in my tank, but invariably--over 6 months or more, the stalks, branches and hammers would individually lose inflation, and take on a sickly appearance. Color was ok, but growth halted.

I once though it was temp, so I got a chiller. Then I figured it was my skimmer, and got a pretty good one of those too. I faithfully replaced my lights on schedule with no real effect. My nitrates never change the color of my test kits (almost none detected), ammonia and nitrites were absent. Magnesium was at 1300-1350, Calcium was 440 or so, alkalinity was kept at about 9-10. I've heard from a few I trust, that an accurate enough phosphate test is almost unatainable, but let's say that my phos-reactor was reliably never more than 2 or 3 months old with carbon and 3 TBS of GFO. As for flow, I have a Vortech MP40 on reef crest mode, and 3 koralia's--a 2, 3, and a 4.

Fish have always done well, but corals--not so much.

I've always been at a loss for what I was doing wrong.

About 6 months ago, on an electrical job, I found about 3 pieces of coral rock in a man's backyard. Huge versions of what we call LR. The outsides were pretty clean, and the resident was appreciative of me taking them. The 3 totalled almost 90 pounds. I took them to a bay carwash, where they use RO/DI water to eliminate spotting (I know the owner, and I know he keeps up on the filters); and I sprayed them with the pressure cleaning attachment with no soap, allowed to dry, waited 2 or 3 weeks, repeated thusly for about 3 months. I let the rock dry in my back seat on a towel.

So--I've been battling this algae I'm going to call turf algae. My rocks have been clean, but not the sand. I don't know exactly what the algae is. It's maroon, covers the sand, looks like velvet, and readily comes off in sheets. It looks black, and appears thicker at night with the actinics on, but during the day, it just appears as a thin coating on much of my sandy bottom. It's not hard to remove, but due to my rockwork, I couldn't access about 40% of it.

So about a month ago, I picked 3 pieces of LR in my tank that would serve as "pedestals" and on the left side of the tank, I propped up one of these huge new pieces of LR. I noticed immediately that the new flow on the sand prevented the growth of this turf stuff. I think I learned here, that because of my poor LR placement, all my flow was only hitting the "wall" of rock I had.

Well, talk about timing. My friend Wally, who posted here once or twice some time ago, is now ready to tear down completely and start over. If you remember back to September of '08, his tank was thriving and he was doing seemingly nothing. I was jealous.

He told me that I'd be doing him a favor if I came over and took "whatever I wanted." (I need everyone's help in IDing what I got). I'm not too familiar with SPS. The pieces I got from him are magnificent.

So yesterday, visited Wally, and wiped him out. .

I took a cold chisel to the remaining rock I scored, and cut it into the two pieces you see perched on the right side of the tank. They have to be almost 25 pounds a piece. I spent about 5 hours removing some old rock, and replacing with the new. I felt I kept enough old to not jeopardize the biological filter. I removed by hand every speck of this algae and the sand is clean again. A good amount of my old LR is now in a tote, and will stay in darkness for a few months with an oxygenating powerhead, as the water gets changed until the rock is clean as a whistle. I don't know if I'll be able to use it, but that's for another thread.

Anyways, my hope is that the existence of this old turf algae was preventing me from having a decent reef tank. Currently my sand is looking very clean, and I can see that flow is hitting almost the entire tank for the first time.

I'd love to hear if anyone had a similar experience--failure for a year or two--until they discovered that one variable that they hadn't considered, that turned everything around.

I pray that my new flow pattern will change a lot. I've been ready to buy the APEX aquacontroller, but honestly decided to "man up." The controller is nice, but wouldn't solve my issues if I'm still missing this holy grail to my success. I decided not to buy the calculator until I could do the math by hand; so to speak. If I get 90 days of growth, I'll treat myself to a controller. If not, I'll simply jump off a bridge. No biggie.


Enjoy. Please, help me ID these corals, too if you recognize them. Lastly, I'm open to any hints, tales of similar experience, or words of encouragement. Everything with branches is new. The single hammer, the elegance, bubble, are mine and nearly two years old.

 

great story, Reef Sparky

great score also IMO
I cant ID SPS corals to save my life, LOL
but they do look pretty good to me

Steve

 

Well I see a montipora capricornis, the red plate, anf the rest are some sweet looking acros. I have a difficult time with the species because they can look so similar.

On your tank issue with lack of success. I had my tank going well then started having algae problems. It turns out that I had a serious amount of hydrogen sulfide in the sand and underneath some of the rock that was in the sand and even some that was not. I got frustrated while working on the algae issue and rearranging rock and stirred up the sand. This added another issue, dinos or something similar, this started to cause my growth to cease and in some cases started to kill off my corals near the sand.

I had been slowly working toward an upgrade which I completed the move on Memorial Day weekend. Already I can see the benefits of the change, the corals that were on the sand are now recovering and growing.

I did one thing different from you, no rock on the sand. I cut pieces of PVC into lengths and am using them as stands.

Great looking aquascape and corals.

 

Thanks, guys. I should have specified I was looking for ID on the acros and mille's. The monti caps are brand new. Unfortunately, the three frags you see, made it over as one, but it didn't end up that way. The green hairy item on the left side of the tank was a colony of 5 long fingers before I managed to break off 3 of them. :-/
If all goes well, in 6 months they'll be sizable colonies.

 

Im sure they will do well Reef Sparky.

+1 on these corals being fragile , never had one break in transit yet but did manage to snap of a nice blue tip on my Avatar coral ( Acro stag horn type thing) whilst doing the credit card cleaning of the front glass
cant find the bit that broke off , which is a double whammy IMO



Steve

 

I have a digi that broke into about 6 or 7 pieces when I was changing over tanks and dropped the rock it was attached to.

 

Moved some stuff around, took a FTS, yadda yadda.

 

the SPS are showing PE already, so thats a good sign IMO

Your Elegance and bubble are already looking recovered from the change around
nicely inflated

Steve

 

Thanks, Steve. I'm testing daily for right now to determine the depletion rate of calcium, alk, and magnesium.

 

your making me feel better
I was testing twice weekly for 4 weeks to work this all out
I know it varies , but the demand in my set up is not as great as my lack of experience expected it to be
you might not notice any change at all in 24 hours and very little change in 3 days ( I didnt)

Steve