Snorkeler's Cube

In my war against Valonias I lost an important warrior some months ago, my lone Mithrax crab (known as emerald crab to most of you of the northern hemisphere). My supplier of that crab had moved out of business and I couldn't find an LFS that had them.

Well, two weeks ago I found a new guy from Rio de Janeiro who supplied them, at brasilreef.com forum!! Brazilian ones, red/pink and not green but of the same shape as the green ones (my original one was pink too), which he fishes/catches ...

Today I had the wonderful surprise of finding a dead roach floating in my sump, apparently already decomposing... but probably not for too long as it was still in one piece and apparently still had a body.



Well, removed and dumped it, then took the opportunity to clean up my skimmer's cup, which was smelling pretty bad... the worst I've ever smelled it....

...

Decided to use my last day of vacation to continue the Valonia cleanup of my tank, with a small video showing how I'm brute-force scraping it off the rock with a water change.

The idea is that the bubbles I eventually pop get their spores sucked into the water change.

As the video shows that is probably not 100% true as sometimes the hose's suction isn't fast enough because it's clogged with previously sucked up bubbles.

Here we go:
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It is interesting how one can tell the difference between LFS's business and ethical/ecological practices when "rubber meets the road"...

Last week I had two distinct experiences regarding fish purchases.

One, at my LFS#2, was them suggesting I get a Desjardini Tang or a Foxface Rabbitfish to eat up my Valonia infestation, even though they knew my tank was a 180L, 60cm cube display tank probably limited in space for those two fish.

The second, at ...

Today I started my war against Valonia, officially. :-) Nothing too special, just decided it was time to start thinning them out by manual removal as a start.

I took a hose, 1/4inch, cut the tip at an angle to make it easy to scrape rock with it, and did a water change scraping the rocks. One rock that was literally covered with Valonias for months is now almost clear. Another water changes like this one should be enough to reduce the bulk of the Valonias.

Unfortunately ...