I didn’t want to just leave it at the LFS… they have some spider sponges and nonphotosynthetic gorgonians they’ve had in stock for months that are slowly dying and I didn’t want to see that happen to this beautiful coral since there didn’t seem to be any other takers. They had relocated it to the emerald crab tank and two different times I went to the store there was an emerald crab on it, cleaning off algae. I had decided that it must be hardier than I had expected… the polyps stopped opening up over a month ago but it still looked like it was in nice shape. I loved it but I didn’t want to get a coral that would be too hard to keep and I didn’t have the tank ready yet so I just figured it wasn’t meant to be… I was sure someone would swoop it up before my tank would be ready for it.īut apparently it was meant to be… because no one else swooped it up… even though, in my opinion, it was the most beautiful coral in the store. It was glorious when they got it… its polyps were fully open for the first few weeks when I went to the store. They got it in about two to three months ago, right as I was getting ready to start this tank. Which brings me to my new addition… it’s a sea fan! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sea fan at any of my LFSs before… they have a reputation of being extremely difficult to keep. I also ended up deciding to take the pink birdsnest out of this tank because I didn’t really care for the coloration, and in addition I took out the neon green sinularia because I got my new coral I wanted to put in its place. I ended up losing the yellow anacropora (the yellow SPS coral next to the RFA in the pic above) that I had gotten from the local reefer with the 450 gallon tank, but I have another frag of it from him in my biocube 32, so hopefully I’ll be able to get a frag of it from my 32 once this tank is more stable and dino free. I usually do this because I figure there are a lot of things that can happen during shipping and storage of beneficial bacteria products that could potentially harm the bacteria (temperature extremes), so I like to have backup… plus I think different brands may use different strains of bacteria. Next time I will go back to using the Nutriseawater and a couple of brands of beneficial bacteria for good measure. I suspect the issue was that I just didn’t have the diversity of competing microorganisms that I usually have in a new tank to keep the dino in check. I usually use Caribsea Liferock and add numerous sources of beneficial bacteria to a new tank, but in this case I used the regular dry rock and wanted to find out how long the Reef Casa beneficial bacteria would take, so I didn’t add my usual mix of bacteria. ![]() I’m not totally sure why I got it so bad in this tank, but I did this start really differently than all my others. ![]() So it has taken about two weeks to clear up the dino. Thanks Deb, yes, two weeks!! We were really busy with house projects we were working on the week after Christmas, then my mom had to come stay with us for a couple days after she had major oral surgery, then assembling our generator, then working on the blog and dealing with the dino. In the meantime I have also started a blog… here’s a link if you want to check it out… hoping to post info that will be helpful to new reefers… it’s still a work in progress. ![]() ![]() I’ve been so stressed out about the dino that I haven’t been posting or taking many pics, but I’m hoping the tank is on a good trajectory now and hoping to have more time to take pics and post updates.Īlso, we took our generator (that we’ve had for a year or so) out of its box for the first time this past weekend and assembled it in case we need to fire it up for tank life support if we lose power… hopefully we won’t have to use it. The dino seems to be clearing up these past few days. Well let me just say dino sucks… it got pretty severe and hideous with long bubbly strands all over the corals, the rock, the sand, and even sticking to the walls of the tank, but thankfully I seemed to get a type that was not toxic to fish so Hank and Marshall (the possum wrasse) are still doing okay… my approach has not been scientific at all, I’ve seriously tried every strategy, practically all at once:
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