Reefer 170, year 2

Facebook reminded me of a video I recorded of my reef tank a little over a year ago, so I thought I’d shoot another video, write a post about it, and share some of the interesting things that have changed over the last year.

This was the tank in May of 2019, at about 9 months after setting it up:

At that point, it was mostly zoanthid and LPS… small frags. I had a few SPS frags that were given to me by a fellow hobbyist that I was using to see if I was ready for them yet. A year later, the tank is pretty much packed… to the gills I guess:

The notable bare spot is that lower front pillar in the zoa garden. It had been home to my WWC Halle Berry zoanthids, which exploded in number shortly after being added to the tank and then began withering just as quickly a year and a half later without warning (and without any of the other polyps suffering). I managed to save 3 polyps and will try to re-establish them in the future.

All told, I’m pretty happy with the results of the Triton method for maintaining the acropora along the top of the arch. I started dosing Acropower recently as well, so we’ll see if that results in increased growth.

Interestingly, in the first video I had a frag of Tierra del Fuego acropora on the top right, but it kept struggling and nearly died like 3 times. I did a few dips in PolypLab’s Reef Primer and it finally started to look better. In the second video, you can see it in the back left of the arch when viewed from the front. It’s encrusted and super-happy now.

I also credit Reef Primer with saving my Dragon Soul goniastrea. You can see it as a small chunk on the sand in the first video, toward the bottom right of the tank. It had gotten a bacterial infection a few months after being introduced to the tank (it was a frag from my old brain) and the flesh was starting to receded from the skeleton, which is super depressing to watch. One dip and it started looking so much better. It’s fully recovered and has grown to easily ten times the size, which is incredibly fast for a brain coral.

Fish-wise, almost everything is new. I lost most of the ones from the first video shortly after trying to re-home a struggling Green Mandarin Dragonette for another reef keeper. It died and, shortly thereafter, I lost all but one of my fish (the Tailspot Blenny). I don’t know what the cause was, but this new batch of fish is looking good and I have no plans to add any more in the near future.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the videos and if you ever want to talk about reef keeping (or want to talk about getting a frag or two from my tank for yours), please reach out.