New nano tank struggling

[civics14]

Those corals you have aren't very demanding in light, you can always reduce the intensity some, especially since there are no nutrients for it to consume. My experience, too strong lighting with no nutrients = pale / dying corals.

I don't think that's too many changes. Also, I would suggest removing the carbon as well since it strips away a lot of the organics from the water. Keep your current feeding schedule. Also, go get 1 astrea snail. They are amazing at cleaning rocks from algae.

 

[syte]

Thanks @civics14. You guys have been very helpful. I’ll go ahead and bump down the light. I’ll post the details over the next few weeks! I plan on adding a clean up crew this weekend

 

[syte]

As promised, here is an update:

So after removing phosguard, I noticed improved in my gsp. A coral that previously hadn’t come out for 1 1/2 months, is starting to come out. I assume that the tank had become too clean. One weird thing is that even though my Zoas and psammacora open or are fuzzy, respectively, I don’t get any growth.

If I had to guess the lighting is probably too much. I don’t have a PAR meter but if I had to approximate the lighting it’s probably 300 PAR at the sand bed. My tank is only 7 inches deep. It’s being powered by a led/t5 power module fixture which are pretty par intensive. Next thing I plan on trying is lessening the light. I’ve waited about 2-3 weeks for the last change to take into effect. Maybe before updating the PAR, I should wait a bit longer?

I would’ve seen some signs of bleaching on the Zoas. But in reality, they’re pretty saturated in color. I’m assuming bleaching isn’t the only indicator of too much light. Since these zoas have been underneath these lights for 7 months, you’d think they’d be fine with it.

I’m assuming both the lack of coraline and no growth is the result of this lack of lighting. Even though I have small amounts of green hair algae, I‘d assume that’s fairly normal. Algae is going to grow unless you have some population of hetrotropic bacteria or coralline on the rocks. At least that would lessen it I’d think. Since I don’t have either, it’s probably using the little phosphate to power its growth. Thoughts?

 

[project1004]

Looks like your tank is getting in a better shape and that’s awesome! You say that some corals didn’t open for over a month but now opening up so those corals will need some times before it’s starts to bud out. As we expected, your tank was too clean and those corals you are keeping likes little dirtier waters. So perhaps keep the same feeding but lesser water changes. Probably easier to control these way than to feed more and keep the same water changing etc.

If you want to lower your par from the light, maybe you can take a bulbs out of your light fixture over time. Or work with only T5 initially because t5 is more softer light with better spread. And Zoas do great under t5’s. If you don’t have hair algae all over the place, I won’t say it’s mainly due to too intense lighting.

Btw, coralline algae need to be introduced manually if you want the tank to be covered by coralline algae. (I maybe wrong but I also did this method in the past and it was o Lu way to get coralline algae into the system. It may look nice initially but they do end up being more of eye sore over time and more work to keep it clean from my own experience.


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[syte]

Thanks for the feedback. Sadly i’ve introduced coraline multiple times. It’s grown very little.

I think what kind of threw me off was I was getting green hair algae in small amounts but no growth in corals. I thought maybe the GHA was consuming all the nitrates and phosphates but it does in fact seem like I was starving my tank considerably. I’ve upped feeding and also am dosing amino acids. I’m hoping this is reasonable .

As for lighting I may wait to see how the tank responds with the recent light changes. If nothing comes out of it I may bump down the led module a bit

 

[syte]

Another update,

Corals continuing to do a bit better. No growth yet but see improvement in health. Everything is opening until my cleaner shrimp forces they to close

Got a bit of a basic question.
We’ve always been told that algae is equal to too many nutrients. Since ULNs tanks are able to grow macro algae, I’d imagine all tanks are capable of it. The fact that many tanks don’t have algae is just a side effect of proper bacterial populations or cleanup crew. I kept seeing people suggesting I had too many nutrients (not here) because I had some level of algae. If algae is consuming the nitrate and phosphate could that interfere with corals ability of receiving enough?

If you’re in a situation where algae is not leaving much phosphate or nitrate, guessing you could try to manually remove as much as possible.

 

[reef_life]

Algae can definitely inhibit the growth of other coral that compete for those nutrients. Based on the looks of the rock I'm assuming you started with dry rock? I did the same thing and after reading a lot of threads I've found that it can take up to 2 years to completely stabilize a tank with dry rock. BRS added live Sand after 1.5 years and it immediately cleared up a tank. I'm going to try that. I'm over a year in and rocks are still stained green with barely any coraline

 

[civics14]

Another update,

Corals continuing to do a bit better. No growth yet but see improvement in health. Everything is opening until my cleaner shrimp forces they to close

Got a bit of a basic question.
We’ve always been told that algae is equal to too many nutrients. Since ULNs tanks are able to grow macro algae, I’d imagine all tanks are capable of it. The fact that many tanks don’t have algae is just a side effect of proper bacterial populations or cleanup crew. I kept seeing people suggesting I had too many nutrients (not here) because I had some level of algae. If algae is consuming the nitrate and phosphate could that interfere with corals ability of receiving enough?

If you’re in a situation where algae is not leaving much phosphate or nitrate, guessing you could try to manually remove as much as possible.

I have no scientific proof, but I never had any issues with algae outcompeting my corals for growth. My previous tank, I had an insane amount of algae growing, but at the same time, I had amazing growth in my corals, all the while testing phosphates & nitrates at 0. So, I assume they are both just taking it out of the water column as they become available.

The crazy part is, I started to have problems when the algae started to go away. I had physically removed 2-3 cups full a week from my rock for several months, then my tangs & emeralds took care of the rest. When I started to have detectable nutrients, it become tough to control. I had to get GFO online and dose vodka like crazy to get it down.