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
• LPS
• 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:

• Fishes
• false Percula Clown Fish
• 2 black Clowns
• Purple Tang
• Blue-yellow Damsel
• Six Line Wrasse
• Yellow Tang
• Flame Angel
• Hector Goby
• Invertebrates
• Turbo, Nassarius and Bumble Bee snails
• electric blue Hermit Crab
• 2 red Linckia starfishes
• big grey Feather Duster worm
• Tuxedo Urchin
• 4 small Hermit Crabs
• Cleaner Skunk Shrimp
• Fire Shrimp
• Clam
• Corals
• SPS
• Monti cap
• Stylophora (with stn)
• Horn Coral
• 2 frags of green digitata
• frag of pink Pocci
• frag of Birdnest
• frag of pink Birdnest
• frag of red Monti cap
• frag of deep sea Acro
• frag of purple digitata
• 2 frags of radioactive Birdnests
• grey Monti cap with purple polyps
• frag of salmon digitata
• 2 frags of Optic Fibre Pocci
• frag of unknown Birdnest
• green monti cap
• frag of red digitata
• dark maroon sps
• Millepora
• frag of green Monti with orange polyps
• frag of unknown green stag
• LPS
• 2 Acans
• 2 Hammer Corals
• 2 Bubble Corals
• Sun Coral
• Supersun Coral
• Torch Coral
• red Brain Coral (bleached)
• red green Favites Brain Coral
• 4 Blastos
• Mushrooms
• orange Ricordea yuma mushrooms
• rock of blue Actinodiscus mushrooms
• brown hairy mushrooms
• Soft Corals
• 2 Chili Corals
• red Flower Rock Anemone (bleached)
• 2 pink Rose Bud Tip Anemones
• green tipped Leather Coral
• Elegance Coral
• Polyps 
• mixture of Zoas and purple Zoas
• yellow Parazoanthus
• pink Goniopora
• green Palythoa
• Glove Polyps
• 2 green Star Polyps
• Macroalgae
• Caulerpa
• Chaetomorpha
• red Bamboo

The technical details are:

• Jebao Marine Aqua DC-6000 return pump
• Maxspect R420R 16,000k 120W
• Reef Octopus BH1000 skimmer
• 2 Two Little Fishes Phosban Reactor running Phosban
• Dymax cooling fan (42 CFM)
• Fluval 3 external filter
• MP25 and RW-8 wavemaker
• Tunze Nano Osmolator
• Marine Magic Triplet Dosing

black clown sleeping on Brain Coral

right side after rescaping

new orange Blasto

red green Blasto

red Acan with Fire Shrimp

red purple Blasto

bleached red Acan

green Monti cap with orange polyps

there was some slight stn at the base so I snipped it off and relocated it

I relocated this deep sea Acro too

new green Acro frag

I suspected this Birdnest fella bleached so I moved it lower

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