melev

Being sick is never fun, and knowing your reef isn't doing well only adds to your misery. I'm reclining per the doctor's orders and just watching tv, little energy to do anything else. But knowing some corals are declining is frustrating. (Knowing customers are waiting for their orders is even worse, but I need to be on my feet first to take care of those items...as soon as I feel stronger that is.)

I wrote an email to Prodibio to see if they had any direct suggestions to reboot the system, but odds are they are still traveling. A couple of days later while looking at the War coral, I decided I had to do something. To catch you up from previous blogs, I'm relatively certain my overdosing Prodibio in conjunction with running biopellets created a massive bacterial population in the reef. I didn't see any strange stuff in the tank although a number of corals have gotten pale or worse. The goo I saw in the skimmer was isolated to that spot, and likely why it never became visible in either display tank.

Prior to MACNA, I'd dosed the proper amount thinking just getting back on track was best but upon reflection I further tipped the scales in the wrong direction. At the time of that email I wrote, I thought that maybe I should stop dosing for a full month to let things settle down. I managed to perform a 52g water change on Friday night, thankfully since it doesn't require manual labor. Saturday night I decided the best way to lower bacterial levels in the tank would be to remove the biopellet reactor for the time being.

I've been running Prodibio and biopellets without issues for 3.5 years, so I don't see that being a problem and will likely resume when things become visible stable. It will probably take about six to eight weeks to get back on track. I hope the corals in question will hang in there, but only time will tell.

Filtration in the meantime will be even simpler than before: DSB, skimmer, refugium, fresh GAC, and water changes. Alk & Ca will be maintained with the calcium reactor.

Here are a few pictures I took from my easy chair yesterday. This is the ORA tank-raised Mandarin I've had since early 2011.