my reef GARden frenzY: 21 MONTHS

I must say this month of September has been a fruitful one. Acquisition of corals, particularly LPS and SPS, were initially slow but picked up pace towards the end of the month.

Then something struck me when I read a post in the Singapore Reef Club. A member posted about how he got his bleached corals to recover over a period of about 6 months by putting them in the dark and feeding them regularly. What he said made sense to me. When a coral is bleached, there are hardly any zooxanthellae in its structure, hence exposing it to light would only cause it to expel its remaining zooxanthellae. Without the zooxanthellae, the corals cannot photosynthesize and needs to rely on an external source of nutrition, that is feeding.

Hence, I changed my lighting regime and tuned down the white light and focused more on the blue spectrum. I removed the ATI Sun Module 4 x 39W T5 lights because I suspected that it caused further bleaching of some of my corals recently, including a Birdnest, a digitata SPS etc. Let's see how the corals react to the change although one of my Acans regained back some of its red colour. Without a chiller, my conclusion is I need the fan to bring down the water temperature slightly to reduce the incidence of bleaching.

Aquarium 1 (1 ft cube - 27 litres)

This aquarium still looks dirty and I haven't quite stocked anything here. I just added a small Yellow Tang to help combat the algae issue. My attention is still very much on Aquarium 3.

The list of livestock is as follows:

Fishes

Flameback Angel
Yellow Shrimp Goby
2 true Percula ocellaris clowns
Hector Goby
Yellow Tang

Invertebrates

3 Turbo Snails
Nassarius Snail

Corals

Acan
mega Blasto
bleached Hammer Coral

Soft Corals

Rose Bud Tip Anemone and Bud Tip Anemone

Polyps

unknown green coral
Green Star Polyps
Glove Polyps

Mushrooms

a few blue Actinodiscus mushrooms
a few green Rhodactis mushrooms

Macroalgae

green Caulerpa
red algae
purple algae

The technical information is as follows:

Dolphin H-200 hang-on-back filter

Shiruba XB-303 External Filter

Maxspect Razor Nano 60W (10,000 K)

Tunze Osmolator Nano

Aqua Cool Fan

a mega Blasto

a recovering Acan

Aquarium 3 (3 x 1.5 x 1.5 feet and sump - 250 litres)
This aquarium saw some exciting times because of the amount of SPS I introduced and the amount of re-positioning of the SPS frags. I threw some bleached SPS e.g. Birdnest, orange digitata sps, into the sump tank to see if they can recover. In conclusion, it is immensely rewarding to see the SPS growing gradually.

The updated list of livestock is: