Thanks for the update! I need to desperately do one myself. But I enjoy seeing other peoples more lol. I think I would pull the Macro Algae. I think you don't have the right nutrients in the water column and that is why your corals are withering. You have way too much surface area for bacteria to filter or displace anything that may have died so I doubt it is actual water quality. I would start using reef energy A & B and reef chili or Reef Frenzy every other day until corals start coloring back up. You will have a small algae outbreak in the DT but it will subside. I would definitely NOT frag that gorgeous hammer. I also dose All for Reef to keep Alk, Cal, Mag and other trace elements leveled off. Stuff works awesome for me in my frag system.
Thanks for the advice and pointers. I will have to look into the additives you mention. I am dosing Alk and Ca daily (by hand, which I should fix), but am not regularly doing much to provide more for the corals.
laminar flow the myth is that dosing daily with pumps is a necessity. Get s hanna alk checker and keep it stable. I doubt with your coral stock it’s depleting much alk to worry about setting up more equipment that could fail. Until you really start consuming alk/cal where water changes and supplements can’t handle All 4 Reef is awesome. I also am recovering from an alk swing and lost the zooxanthellae out of many of SPS and they have all recovered with reef energy and heavy feeding in less than a month. Good luck!
I can't remember is the frag tank plumbed into the main system? You should keep that hammer together but only move it up when you've solved your issues, it's a centerpiece coral at that size!
OK, that's solid advice. Yes the frag tank is plumbed together with everything else, so if stuff is doing OK in the frag tank and dying upstairs, then it can't be water quality, right?
Stray current? I don't think you have a pest that's eating these various corals. Could have just been your old lights were not enough, or maybe flow issues? How often do you vacuum the sandbed?
Sand bed... very rarely, to be honest. You think I should hit that more? I do have the diamond gobey who moves stuff around, but it isn't vacuuming, by any means. The old lights were low on par, for sure, especially they way I was running them most recently, with only 1/2 of the fixtures on , to get a better blue balance. What do you mean by "stray current"? Something that is beating up the corals in a given location?
Yes vacuuming the sand will help with nutrients, unless you want them to grow you beloved marco algae. Just try a very small section and see how dirty it is. That will tell you how if you do or do not need to. As for stray current I mean electricity. That's about the only localized issue I could think of that may only effect certain areas of the same connected water. Even if your lights were terrible they shouldn't kill stuff like duncans which are virtually bulletproof.
What's up buddy? We need to figure out whats going on with the tank! I wonder if you need to export nutrients more efficiently or something? Have you tried Cheato? It always worked for me.. Also, are you supplementing cal and alk at all? Seems like the corals with a stony base are the ones not doing so great. Maybe your parameters are getting low? How often are you changing water? This setup is too awesome not to run perfectly! Good luck my man!
Thanks for the quick watch and thoughtful questions! Lets see, yes NO3 and PO3 are both high (like 15 and 0.5 respectively), so nutrient export is something I need to work. I have tried a number of macros algae and all have just withered away. I will get some chaeto on the next pass, reefcleaners didn't have any on my recent order, so I grabbed the ulva and gracilaria. I supplement Ca and Alk, and my most recent tests had them around 460 and 10, so not low. Mg was low (1280, so I dosed that earlier in the week, and will look again tomorrow). That could be part of it, for sure. I need to hook up a doser and get it all set and steady. The good news, is the fish are all doing well, and a few things are hanging in there. I will keep at it, though.
ya doesn't seem like anything is crazy elevated or crazy low. maybe your phosphates and nitrates are a little high. If, you can't keep macros alive for some reason, ever thought about either buying or building a turf algae scrubber? Seems pretty easy, just some pvc, some crafting mesh stuff and a pump.. I see some GHA in the tank so maybe you can use that to your advantage in a scrubber? Just a thought.. I'm rooting for you buddy!
Sitting here reading the other comments and wondering what's going on with your tank, maybe it's something you would have never thought of. Like chloramines or something in your RO water? Your setup seems to be legit so, theres something wrong happening where you least expect it..
Good call. I had a scrubber going at one point, but took it down becuase I wanted to establish the macro in the fuge and thought it may be taking away what was needed there. The fuge doesn't seem to produce pods very much either, which I believe will happen more with more macro. It's all checken and egg stuff, huh? I will ride out the current set of experiments with the fuge before jumping to something different, though. too much change too quick is a bad thing as well.
And changing the RO filters wouldn't be a bad thing either. I think general maintenance is all behind, so perhaps good things will happen with more effort there.
Thanks for checking in, Mo. I currently have the blue and violet at 30% with the others at 23%, running a geolocation from one of the options (I think they are all about the same, 12hours, equatorial kind of day cycle. I dialed them down a bit last week, as it looked like the mushrooms and the pocillapora were bleaching out. I will slowly bump them back up a bit a week. Where are you running yours?
