Christy's Reef

So I found my abalone tonight upside down, he was still sort of responsive to stimuli (ie. poking with a sharp object) but he was unable to attach to the glass. As he was a rather large "meaty" critter I decided to take him out of the tank rather than have him die in a back corner and skew all the tank parameters that I've been trying so hard to get down to zero. I kept the shell though its pretty. I don't think I'll ever have another one, although he was pretty neat I hardly ever saw him and I don't know if there was enough algae for him to eat now that I've got my system pretty under control for algae.

Speaking of algae, tonight I noticed I have no brown wafer algae. Like zero. I can't find any anywhere except for two tiny bits that are attached to my tuxedo urchin. I'm quite amazed and I'm not sure what to attribute that to. Its decline did coincide with the ultralith start so perhaps thats what did it??

I'm alwo seeing some MAJOR changes in a couple corals. My pink Pocillipora damicornis which has always been a rather dark brownish pink color (and more brown after the first Ultralith rocks change) is not going very light on the top part that is aimed towards the light. I'm really lking the color, its a nice rosy pink. My grey acro that was next to the pink birdsnest is not actually blue. LIke real blue, not that steely grey blue that it was before. The tips are growing like crazy and are a lovely sky blue color. My Acropora tenuis is finally settled in one place, not growing caulerpa and is growing some really awesome deep blue tips. And everything is GROWING!! Its friggin awesome!

I've also started another Tailored Aquatics product called Phosphate Destroyer. Apparently its pretty awesome. The last time I had my phosphates tested they were at 0.07ppm which weren't totally terrible but bad enough for a SPS tank. I wanted to start using a phosban reactor for my ultralith stones and one for my carbon so I figured I could ditch the phosban if its not really doing anything for the tank anyways. I strongly suspect that either I'm feeding too much or the ultralith hasn't kicked in "that way". I've made so many changes to the tank (dosing supplements, adding carbon, switching out the ultralith rocks to a filter bag instead of the phosban reactor, dosing a couple zeo products) that I have no idea whats going on, it could be any of those things thats doing the trick. I'm putting my faith in the two zeo products though. Since I started using those I've been seeing real results in the tank. Its pretty amazing, I can only imagine what using the whole zeo line could do for the tank.