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Ya sexxy shrimps are a must in there for sure. You already gotten so much lives in there. That’s cool!
Rick's 80 Gallon SCA (+40b)
- Thread starter skrappy
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You won’t even need to grow pods separately. 
2 year tank-iversary was first of this month. Things are going ok. I have lost a little bit of coloration with the addition of the frag/macro tank. Pretty quickly the nutrients hit 0/0 so I've been fighting to keep them up. My purple tang was a butt head and smacked my blotched anthias in the eye giving him pop-eye, its looking like its almost healed up now but it has been taking a while to do it, so the purple tang was re-homed to the frag tank. I got a tiny yellow tang to replace him in the main tank, as well as a red headed fairy wrasse. All of my fish look happier now and swim around much more, including my chicken shit melanurus wrasse. The purple tang hates it though, he sits against the side of the frag tank glaring at all the fish in the other tank, you can tell he wants to go beat them up, but they don't seem to pay him any attention. I did unfortunately loose a small handful of high end frags I was growing out. They were all on a section of the rack in the frag tank that was giving them good growth, but it was also growing the heck out of my CSB. With being busy, or perhaps just in my laziness, I didn't notice that the CSB anemone had grown large enough that it was now reaching them, when I was checking on the tank a week or so ago I noticed it had 2 tentacles dancing around between a nice group of now solid white skeletons 
I've now re-arranged that frag rack.
I've now re-arranged that frag rack. 
Wow. That is looking great. Not sure what color loss you are talking about though.
lol, thanks, we are usually our own harshest critics in this hobby right. My Stan Lee nub has become a muted grey/green, no longer blue and purple; my Walt Disney has become more green, the purples are just about all gone now and there is just some light pink in its place in a few areas; and my ASD rainbow milli has lost most of its pink and is looking mostly green and orange now. Pretty sure things will look good again in another 6 months once everything has settled in and I've gotten a nutrient addition sorted out. I think I was getting close then I got busy with work and stopped doing daily phosphorus and phosphate testing, and my feeding schedule went from being super meticulous to just tossing in a cube of something frozen a few times a day when I can. I have no clue what my numbers are right now, but I'm guessing they are probably 0/0 again.
Yes we are, nonetheless it’s looking good!
I forgot to mention, my WD has become more yellow and lost almost all its other colors. I wonder if it changes as the colony matures. Is the colony in the middle the WD?
It is the one in the middle. I am pretty convinced the color change is due to nutrient levels changing. I had high Nitrates(50-75+) and Phosphates(.2-.3) for over a year and the WD kept bright deep purples and pinks the whole time, it only started to loose the purples after the addition of the macro tank with the nutrients dropping to 0/0. With the other corals having similar color loss all at the same time, I'm pretty confident 0/0 nutrients are the problem. Hopefully I'll have the time over the next few months to get back on a good feeding and nutrient testing schedule, then we can see what happens, my fingers are crossed. All that being said about coloration, I did notice a few corals that had stagnant growth for a long time all the sudden took off when the nutrients dropped, the Tyree pink lemonade being one of the biggest transformations. I'm hoping I can find a good balance that gives me the best of both worlds, I'll be shooting for 10-15 nitrates and .06-.1 phosphates in the long run to see how that does for me. Admittedly it is proving challenging for me to keep the numbers consistent with a planted macro tank, I'll probably have to get on a daily macro trimming schedule also to try and keep it consistent; a lot different than just keeping a ball of one type of macro in sump.
I am currently at around 5-10ppm Nitrates and .01-.04ppm Phosphates. Honestly, I'm afraid to change it cause I have my routine that keeps it at this level. I do wonder how it would look if it were to be higher.
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I had similar incident about 8 month ago loosing most of all my coral’s fluorescent colors and still not recovered from it. I don’t know what else I can do but just let it be. You can see here on “yellow tip” where the yellow was all lost but on a new growth it has the”yellow tip”.
I guess my trace is okay seeing from the new growth. I’m also struggling with nutritions, I’ve taken the algae scrubber off line a month ago.
My nitrate is around 2-2.5 and phosphate is around .03-.05.
Photo of yellow tip. Can see the new growth. X.x
I guess my trace is okay seeing from the new growth. I’m also struggling with nutritions, I’ve taken the algae scrubber off line a month ago.
My nitrate is around 2-2.5 and phosphate is around .03-.05.
Photo of yellow tip. Can see the new growth. X.x
Your tank looks great, if it ain't broke don't fix it, right. Hard for me to encourage anyone to change something when it's on cruise control like yours is. Maybe your WD and Bill Murry get a little better coloration, or maybe it throws your stability out of wack and you give yourself headache after headache getting the tank happy again.
Corals loose color a lot faster than they gain it, lol. I've got a few pieces that have gone through some ups and downs, and the accent colors don't seem to come back very well except on new growth. In my cases so far I have just let them grow and eventually everything is new growth and they look right again. I would wait and let the new growth come in and fix it, and if the chunk that lost its color doesn't ever get new growths and it bothers you, then just hack that part off and new properly colored stuff will grow in there then. But I would refrain from chopping that whole chunk off until the new growth has really taken off; even if it doesn't have the yellow tips that whole chunk is still encouraging the new growth so if you chop it off now it may stunt all the rest of it sending you back to square one. Coloration fixes seem to take the longest, hence why in one of my above posts I said I would see how it looked in 6 months, I expect it will take at least that long to get the WD to color back up the way that I want it.
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I hope your corals make comeback faster than mine!!! lol…. Are you still dosing the dailies of reef moonshiner? I guess it won’t hurt? How often do you do ICP testing? Currently doing every 3 month for me.
Yep, still doing moonshiners, ICP once a month. I send in the ATI ICP test, get the results in about 2 weeks, corrective dosing for a week, wait a week and then send in another test. Rinse and repeat. And its a good thing I do because the new sandbed for the the grass is still soaking up a ton of fluoride and barium, and the macros/grass/mangrove are pulling out all my iodine, potassium, zinc, iron, and nickel, just to name a few. The tank looks ok, but the tests show that adding the 40b to the system was a pretty significant destabilizing event. On the plus side my aluminum levels have never been lower, lol. I hope to have it dialed back in and stable in another 2 or 3 months, but the perfect colors coming back will probably take much longer than that.
