17 MONTHS

enhanced photo of Aquarium 2

Looking at this photo of the former Aquarium 2, I must say I really miss this setup, especially the inhabitants that were with me for a long time and which perished in the transfer to the new aquarium.

I always found that the photos I took were not representative of what I saw because of the colour misrepresentation. But one thing I did recently was to turn up the lights to increase the illumination to capture better lit photos.

So, anyway the following are the livestock and technical updates and the photos:

Aquarium 1 (1 ft cube - 27 litres)
I have recently removed another batch of basal sand with a lot of accumulated debris from this aquarium. It is still a far cry to how it used to look like because my attention was mostly spent on Aquarium 3. My Acans also deteriorated for a while since the damages by the Yuma mushrooms and recently it was worse because the Hector Goby loved to spit sand onto the Acan, causing some death of the heads. Anyway, I moved them to Aquarium 1 for some recuperation.

The list of livestock is as follows: 

• Fishes 
• Flameback Angel
• Yellow Shrimp Goby
• 2 black Ocellaris clowns
• Hector Goby
• Invertebrates 
• Cleaner Skunk Shrimp
• big red Hermit Crab & 3 small red Hermit Crabs 
• 3 Turbo Snails 
• Nassarius Snail 
• small yellow Feather Duster Worm
• medium Clam
• Corals
• Soft Corals
• unknown Anthelia (with a lot of dieback recently)
• Zoas
• Xenia
• Rose Bud Tip Anemone
• Mushrooms 
• a few loose blue Actinodiscus mushrooms
• Macroalgae
• green Caulerpa
• red 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 

sand can be seen on the dead heads

close-up of the dead heads

none of the Acans was spared

pair of black Ocellaris Clowns

rose bud tip anemone I added for the clowns

Hector the Goby

Aquarium 3 (3 x 1.5 x 1.5 feet and sump - 250 litres)
There is still quite a bit of frustration that I felt with regards to this aquarium. A lot of the sps now started to show rapid tissue necrosis (rtn) or slow tissue necrosis (stn) and I lost a number of them already.

The updated list of livestock is:

• Fishes
• 2 Clown Fish
• Yellow Tang
• Purple Tang
• Blue-yellow Damsel
• Flame Angel
• Royal Gramma
• Six Line Wrasse
• Yellow Wrasse
• Fathead Sunburst Anthias
• Two Spot Goby
• Yellow Shrimp Goby
• Hi Fin Red Banded Goby
• 2 true Percula Clowns
• Invertebrates
• 2 Cleaner Skunk Shrimps
• Fire Shrimp
• Turbo, Nassarius and Bumble Bee snails
• electric blue Hermit Crab
• 1 big and 2 small Clams
• red Linckia starfish
• small yellow, big brown and yellow-brown Feather Duster worms
• Cowry
• 2 black pistol shrimps
• black crab in sump refugium
• Corals
• SPS
• 5 Acropora (bleached)
• 2 unknown branching sps
• 2 red digitata
• Green Millepora
• Red Millepora
• 3 Monti Caps
• LPS
• 7 Acans (nursing back the ones from Aquarium 1)
• Hammer Coral
• 2 Blasto
• mega Blasto
• Elegance Coral
• Sun Coral
• Supersun Coral
• Green Chalice
• red Plate
• Brain Coral
• Bubble Coral
• Mushrooms
• 7 Ricordea yuma mushrooms
• rock of blue Actinodiscus mushrooms
• Soft Corals
• 2 Chili Corals
• green Carpet Anemone
• red Flower Rock Anemone
• Polyps 
• frag of pink-green Palm Tree (Clove) Coral
• mixture of Zoas
• mixture of Palythoa
• 2 yellow Parazoanthus
• 3 Green Star Polyps
• 1 green and 1 purple Goniopora
• Macroalgae
• Caulerpa
• Chaetomorpha
• purple algae
• red Bamboo

The technical details are:

• Jebao Marine Aqua DC-6000 return pump
• Maxspect R420R 16,000k 120W
• Tunze 9004 Nano Skimmer
• 2 Two Little Fishes Phosban Reactor running Phosban
• Dymax cooling fan (42 CFM)
• Fluval 3 external filter
• MP25 and Boyu wavemaker
• Tunze Nano Osmolator
• Marine Magic Triplet Dosing

enhanced photo of right side of Aquarium before rescaping

it's hard to capture photos of the Two Spot Goby

left side of aquarium

panoramic view of fts

unknown red plate, green Blasto, branched sps and green Monti Cap

slightly bleached digitata spa and a brown Monti Cap

a new Bubble Anemone

another branching sps and red Millepora

a red Millepora with stn which I clipped off some parts

close-up of more stn

new rainbow brain

amazingly beautiful green Chalice

3 Acans and red green Blasto

pair of true Percula clowns, Sun Coral, Supersun Coral with Acans

16 MONTHS 27 DAYS

I know it is just a few more days before the end of the May but I thought I should just provide an early update first since there are a lot of photos taken weeks ago and I didn't want to clog up the month end update with too much things.

This month of May 2014 is both exhilarating yet full of tribulations. It is exhilarating because there are so many opportunities with a 3 feet aquarium when it comes to stocking of fishes, corals and so on but it is also a month when I lost some previously beautiful corals when I shifted them to the new tank and after I came back from a 4 days trip to Malaysia a few days ago.

I shall also start to refer to tanks 1 and 3 as aquariums 1 and 3 respectively instead because a tank somehow refers to an empty container whereas an aquarium does contain inhabitants such as plants and animals. So technically, an aquarium seems more appropriate than a tank in the naming.

Aquarium 1 (1 ft cube - 27 litres)
I vacuumed out two bucket loads of base sand after I shifted most of the corals etc to the new aquarium and it was full of detritus. It would probably need another one or two more water change sessions to clear all the accumulated debris. It was really nasty and I decided not to have a deep sand bed for this small aquarium because the water change should suffice.

pair of Black Clowns and a Flameback Angel

the Zoas are not recovering well

the non-pulsing Xenia

the recovering Acans

Aquarium 3 (3 x 1.5 x 1.5 feet and sump - 250 litres)
In the first few days, there was the appearance of some brown diatoms but it disappeared.

I decided to throw away a number of the bleached corals which had no colour or anymore polyps extension. Some of the remaining corals such as Monti Caps on the sand bed became a bit washed out before they were bleached. Nevertheless, I have switched the lighting intensity down and will gradually bring it up over the weeks to come and reduced the lighting hours to around 12 and to keep the remaining as just moonlight to give these corals some rest time.

Strangely, I have 9 fishes in the aquarium but somehow it looks overcrowded to me. I really have to be more selective now although I am still contemplating whether to transfer the 2 black Clowns from aquarium 1 to here.

The MP25 wavemaker also kicked up a big sandstorm with the fine aragonite sand that I used and buried a number of my corals. I am quite sad that my Sympodium polyps that grew so well in aquarium 2 previously was a victim of this and have mostly melted in this aquarium. I guess I have to buy new ones to try again.

this was the Sympodium before it perished

this shrimp and 2 other Skunk Shrimps perished after introduction

the brown Montipora digitata

clown was hosting on feather duster worm

these two Skunk Shrimps were alright for about 10 days before they died

this unknown sps suffered slow tissue necrosis (stn)

brown Monti Cap

another supposedly green Monti Cap

the melting Sympodium

the twin False Percula Clowns

the stn that eventually killed this fella

BLEACHING

this was a beautiful green sps which showed a darker underside

I had been fretting over the bleaching of my sps since some time ago when I still had tank 2 with my AquaBeauty 70W LED lights. What I knew was bleaching of corals often happened under 2 scenarios which cause the zooxanthellae to be expelled from the cells (photosynthetic algae living in the tissues of corals)  - 1) high water temperatures or 2) intense lighting.

I couldn't understand why my sps often ended up being bleached with poor polyp extension (pe) and suspected undesirable or unstable water parameters as the cause. I also blamed insufficient dosing of amino acids etc and my LED lights for being not powerful enough to keep sps. But when I started my new tank 3 with newly mixed sea water and a brand new set of Maxspect Razor 120W LED lights which is one of the most popular and best lights used by the local reefing community, and my newly introduced sps continued to bleach, I was completely perplexed. Then when I was fiddling with the lighting intensity today and switched all the lights off, I started seeing something which never occurred to me in the past.

I noticed that the few bleached sps were not totally or completely bleached from the bases to the tips. If high water temperature is the cause, then I figure it would make sense for the entire sps to be bleached. However, what I saw were that the portions of the sps facing the lights were bleached while the bases and areas not facing the lights were darker or lightly coloured. This could only mean that it was the lighting that caused the bleaching. Very often, I thought that only the white lights could cause bleaching and I had been so disturbed with the bleaching that I always overcompensated for it by turning up the blue lights (PAR 400-700 nm) to the maximum for almost 24 hours daily. This meant I was irradiating so much photosynthetic active radiation on the sps that their zooxanthellae were photosynthesizing 247 and eventually it became so saturated that they were expelled from the coral tissues.

Oh my gosh, if I am correct, I actually killed so many beautiful sps because of my pure stupidity and ignorance. With this revelation and realization, everything seemed to make sense and fell into place now. No wonder the pocci in tank 2 right at the bottom of my tank showed better colouration compared to the purple stag, the pink birdnest, the pink and the blue Millepora which were nearer the top and bleached first. I immediately removed the AquaBeauty which I just added 2 days ago to supplement the blue lights of my Maxspect and adjusted the intensities of both the white and blue lights to below 50% and duration of the lights to a maximum of 14 hours to give the corals some darkness for almost 10 hours.

I crossed my fingers and hope my suspicion is right and that the measures I have taken now will help the bleached sps to recover soon. By the end of the month, I am sure I would have some findings to post.

this was another amazingly green sps but there was rtn

this pocci looked better in tank 2 at the bottom of the tank

these are my newly acquired pink and purple milleporas which I hope would be fine

a beautiful green montipora cap

an unknown newly acquired sps

a bleached purple Acropora vallida with a dark underside and base

a pink Millepora with remnants of pink below, a stag and an unknown sps