cmbspd

Okay, it is day 5 for my newly setup 110g tank. If you've been following then you know that I've got an unusual situation in that all the live rock I bought from a local reefer is covered with coral polyps and the used tank setup that I bought came with an adult hippo tang (disclaimer: I didn't seek out to add either of these!). I'm at a point where I've got several questions for the experts. Luckily I think that I escaped any major ammonia spike - my test kit has consistently been 0 or close to zero everyday so I have high hopes that the tang will thrive (I even saw him some nori today, his first confirmed meal in almost three weeks!). I do seem to have nitrites around .1ppm (usually I have trouble with the Red Sea color chart but tonight the reaction color definitely matched .1ppm). I switched to a Salifert kit for NO3 and it is 25-50ppm - so a little high, but not end of the world. My PO4 has dropped steadily from somewhere around .5 to 1ppm to 0-.03ppm over the last three days.

This coincides with my installation of a reactor filled with 50g of PHOSaR. Does this stuff work that quickly? If so, I'm impressed even though I still want to figure out where the PO4 came from originally. Or I am just seeing testing error? Or maybe my Chaeto is settling into the refugium and photosynthesizing...but that seems to much of a change to attribute to three days of photosynthesis by about a softball sized mass of algae.

Most of my corals appear healthy - with their polyps open and extended during the day. There is one type that I've never seen open so I've been moving it to lower levels in the tank just to see if it "revives". I hope to post pictures soon - I can roughly id most of the polyps but want to make sure than none have special care requirements.

I think that I'm now experiencing a first wave of diatoms. I constucted a foam/rock background with virgin lacerock and just today a brownish yellow film appeared on it. Really amazing how quickly this occurred and neat to see how closely the coverage correlates with light level - thicker at the top of the tank and on outcrops. Do you think this will spread to the corals and coralline algae on the liverock in the tank? So far it hasn't, but these rocks were added a couple of days after the tank was filled with saltwater so maybe there simply hasn't been time. I know diatoms are simply part of the process and don't mind - I just want to protect the corals if I can do anything.

I did go ahead and buy 5 Astraea snails because I hadn't seen and ammonia and there is some red microalgae (and a little green) growing on the liverock. There were a couple of hitchhiker hermit crabs that came with the rock but no snails that I could see so I figured this small addition was a prudent strategy to help keep the corals from being overgrown.At least in freshwater, the best strategy is to prevent an outbreak of nuisance through a combined strategy of nutrient limitation and herbivory. Assuming reasonable NO2 and NO3, I plan to add another 5 to 10 in about a week and a half. I've also cut the photoperiod from 12 to 10 1/2 hours.

So my Ca, alk and Mg levels are all a little low (see previous blog post). Certainly nothing to worry about in terms of cycling a tank but not optimal for the corals. My setup came with a Korallin Ca/CO2 reactor, with Pinpoint Ph controller. What do you think? Should I get it going? On the one hand, it is better to try it out and mess up in the early stages but on the other maybe I should wait a while for water chemistry to mature...

PS my "eviscerating" mushroom coral is back to normal!