Christy's Reef

The regal has calmed down somewhat, she hasn't been at the waters surface but still does idiotic things in the staghorn coral, she's taken to balancing herself amongst the branches and just sitting still for a little rest, its quite unsettling at times because she kind of looks dead.

She was super aggressive to everyone a couple of days ago. Everyone appeared in a snotty mood and there was a lot of tail swiping and chasing going on. I sat and watched the tank for a few hours and was wondering if maybe she was getting too big for the tank and was feeling stressed. She really hasn't grown a ton in the almost 3years I've had her, maybe an inch or so. I think she's grown more in girth than length. I've never seen a fish eat so much, sometimes I worry that the other fish don't get enough because she is such a pig. Thank goodness they're all herbivores, lord knows theres plenty of algae to go around ;)

So I spent about an hour today carefully picking out brown wafer algae. What a joy that is. At least it comes off in sheets for the most part. Any little floaties head across the tank and plaster themselves to my powerheads, which wouldn't be so bad except they start growing there. I have to start siphoning them off on a regular basis. Today I took both powerheads apart so that I could clean off the cages. I don't know how much water either one of them was circulating as there wasn't really many open ports on the intakes.

My nano tank is really hurtin, at this point I think it was truly stupid to put the pygmy hawkfish in there, its such a retarded fish and it takes quite a bit of food just to get it interested and then it stares at the food as it floats down sometimes hitting the bottom before it eats it, sometimes just hitting the bottom. As a result, algae is RAMPANT. You name it, its in there, caulerpa, valonia, green hair algae, some sort of red wiry algae and a couple other kinds I don't even know the name of. Today I looked at my prized rescue acan (not the one in the main tank a different one) and it was a big hairpie of green algae. I couldn't even see the polyps. I took it out and picked off a goodly portion of the algae, acclimated it to the big tank and put it on the bottom. All the algae is gone now (that took about 5 minutes, if only I could put a tang in my nano :P) but I only see a scant few tiny polyps left, I think its receded too far and will likely just dwindle into nothingness. Which is unfortunate as it was an absolutely gorgeous acanthastrea, it only had a few polyps left when it came into my posession. I really had high hopes for it though.