I had to laugh, we were doing a cleanup of the reference library on canreef and my blog appeared. Specifically, my old blog of my 90gallon tank, which this one used to be before I transferred it over to blogspot and upgraded to the current 180 gallon. The link was broken and it was marked for death but I remembered the newer address so typed it in. Almost 3 years since I posted eh? And no goodbyes, no see ya laters, just stopped completely. So sad. Not like anyone is reading this anyways. But I'm bored at work and well, this is something to do so why not make a post?
So since we last talked a lot has happened. A lot hasn't happened as well.
The newer bellus croaked after about 5 weeks in the tank. It never really "acclimated" and the old one went after it every chance it got. Too delicate I guess. Since then the "old" bellus has some orange on her, like she's trying to change to a male but can't get that last bit done. No balls I guess. LOL!
The hair algae situation escalated. The sea hare was worth his weight in gold. He did his job and then moved on to another home. He did come back to visit as a few patches reared their ugly heads but the sea hare met a tragic end in the sump :( Not sure how he fit his big butt down there.
The zeovit sort of fizzled, a few drops of this and that daily is a pain in the arse. I neglected the tank due to a new baby (a human one) and the majority of the SPS died due to a massive cyanobacteria bloom. I finally eked out some time to do a chemiclean treatment but it was too late. The LPS survived and most of the fish are still around. The melanurus wrasse went blind in both eyes (first one so I hand fed him but then the other went too) and couldn't see to eat so I eventually had to euthanize him (a very sad day) and the royal gramma and linear blenny disappeared. The maxima clam died, unrelated to the algae issues, I'm not even sure when that happened. The squamosa packed it in just before Christmas 2015. I had done a hinge "replacement" on it in early 2014 when I found that the two shells moved independently of each other. Someone suggested repairing that by supergluing a piece of velcro onto both shells to keep them together. It worked until last fall when the superglue started to release. I reglued it but the clam never seemed to be the same and languished for a few months before finally giving up altogether. That was a big bummer. The tank is now disappointingly clam-less. I doubt I'll get another since they're so ridiculously expensive these days and squamosas are hard to come by.
Currently, the tank has a couple small patches of SPS that seem to be thriving. Last year I tried my hand at resurrecting the tank with some new frags but alas, 2 little kids made for a lot of neglect and the tank was getting infrequent water changes. I also suspected that the magnesium additive I was using was a problem as it left a black scummy deposit in the dosing container. I honestly can't remember the name of it, it wasn't DOWflake but something similar, for driveways but "reef approved" on reefcentral or something. Fellow reefers were using it without any problems. Even though the black stuff was left at the end of the dosing (the hose wasn't deep enough in the container to reach it) what else was going into the tank?? I discontinued that and got back on track with the water changes (at least monthly water changes and parameter monitoring) and a couple of the SPS have gone from a scant few polyps to large encrusting patches. Hopefully I'll get the bug again and add a few frags but other than that I'm just sort of in a holding pattern, the bug hasn't really rebitten at all. I even started up a nano tank at work (Innovative Marine Nuvo 8, zoa dominant) but thats become a bust as well with algae and death. At least the 180 gallon tank is algae free (which I can say is a first since I started it up!!), the fish are far from being neglected food-wise but they attack anything green in the tank so thats a silver lining!
No comments:
Post a Comment