Trying to "do it right": My RedSea Reefer-S 850

[beesnreefs]

Today marks exactly 6 months since I started this tank so it seems like a good time for an update. Lots to share....

Fish: I finally got my results from AquaBiomics. I had been losing fish late December/early November suddenly and quickly. Definitely had flukes on my WTB Tang which PraziPro seemed to solve but something else was clearly happening as well. I couldn't figure it out so decided to order AquaBiomics eDNA kits, test the system, and then start an 8-week peroxide dosing regimen I found at humblefish. When my Midas Blenny suddenly died I couldn't wait anymore so I started the peroxide on 12/3/22. Finally got my test kits on 12/12 so peroxide had been going for 9 days. Hard to know what impact that had on results.

Well, the test kit found paramoeba pemaquidensis, an amoeba responsible for gill disease....in cold, saltwater salmon (what the heck?!?). So weird!

Anyway, I completed the full 8-weel peroxide regimen last week and am happy to say all the fish are doing GREAT! I even added two new fish last week - a Midas Blenny and Royal Gramma from Dr. Reef. Both are settling in nicely. I have 3 more days or peroxide left so I'm continuing the treatment until the containers are empty. Then I'll pull more water samples to send to AquaBiomics but I'm feeling pretty good about the health of the tank from the fish side of things.

Corals: After battling dinos and losing some nice pieces everything is bouncing back. I'm going through 0.5 dkh a day now and can see distinct signs of growth. Torches are plump and flowy, and some of my SPS are coloring up nicely and starting to grow. We even added a blue maxima and it seems quite happy so far!

Cyano/GHA: Almost all signs of dinos have disappeared. For several weeks I was testing alk, nitrates, and phosphates daily and dosing NeoPhos and NeoNitro as needed. Most of that time I had to dose nutrients every...single....day. Well, about 2-3 weeks ago it finally stabilized. I'm not maintaining 3-5 nitrates and 0.05-0.1 phosphates even with a weekly 8% water change. However, I got a bad case of cyano when the dinos went away. Every week I siphon them and have continued daily beneficial bacteria. Trying to stay the course as best I can....really do not want to go nuclear (chemical) in this tank. That said, in the last 2 weeks I've begun growing some hair algae.

Next Intervention: I read the post of bacterial "rip clean" here on R2R and got intrigued so I did some reading up and contacted @Lou Ekus. Tropic Marin has two products that caught my attention - Reef Actif and Bacto-Balance. Reef Actif is an algae based product that target feeds beneficial bacteria (especially the kind that take up nutrients and feed corals). Using the product may help boost the biome in a way that outcompetes the nasties like cyano...and even GHA. It's not an overnight fix, by any means, but has a double benefit (outcompetes uglies and feeds corals).

Bacto-Balance is an all-in-one carbon dosing product but is unique in that the carbon is medium-to-long chain so it tends to target feed good bacteria and be unavailable to bad. PLUS...it includes some nitrates and phosphorus so you're carbon-dosing and beefing up the biome but not dropping nutrients in the overall system.

I ordered both products and intend to start with Reef Actif. I'll use that for 2-3 weeks and track my cyano (using photographs and a section of cyano I will not siphon the entire time). If it works, I'll add in Bacto-Balance in a few weeks as Lou suggested the products can be synergistic.

Here is a short vid of the tank from today (forgive the green glass!): https://youtube.com/shorts/MvwBSbYOyAU?feature=share

 

[beesnreefs]

Some more updates, two weeks later:

Cyano: I allowed myself to get talked into using Chemiclean. To be honest, I wasn't seeing any progress with the cyano despite all my "natural" efforts. Not gonna lie, felt a little guilty going this route and was quite scared about it...but I'm glad I did it. Cyano completely eradicated in 48 hours with no ill effects on fish, corals, or anything else. However...

Dinos: The SCA have reappeared in a small area of the tank. It isn't terrible and this time I feel A LOT more prepared. Whereas last time I ignorantly allowed nutrients to bottom out and stay that way, I am now testing nitrates/phosphates twice a week and dosing when necessary. For the past few weeks they have stabilized and not really budged much from Nitrates = 3-4 and phosphates = 0.05 - 0.08. I continue to add beneficial bacteria daily and have actually increased the dosing since noticing the reappearance of SCA. Finally, I have increased my daily dosing of live phyto and the wife and I bought Poseiden Reef phyto reactors and are now growing our own live phyto.

Culturing Phyto: When we added the blue maxima clam we started talking about increasing phyto dosing. The general consensus we've seen is that to "mimic" ocean water, it's good to dose about 1 mL of live phyto per gallon of tank water daily. We have a 225g system - accounting for sand and rock and equipment we estimate around 200g actual water volume. I've been using Algaebarn's OceanMagik which is a very nice product...but a bit cost prohibitive at that daily volume. So, after some reading and watching of videos we pulled the trigger and bought two phyto reactors. We also bought seed cultures of Nannochloropsis and Tetraselmis. Nanno is apparently easy to grow and high in EPA. Tet is high in DHA so combined they provide a good nutritional profile.

GHA: The hair algae is getting annoying. Ugh, I hate the phases these tanks go through when we start from dry rock. Yesterday I took a tooth brush to all the rocks and siphoned up as much as a I could. I'll continue doing this with my weekly water change. I also looked into adding urchin (not comfortable with their bulldozing ways so decided against it), a sea hare (too worried about the inking possibilities), an abalone and more snails. I've put my name on a "tell me when in stock" for a tropical abalone at a couple sites and contacted Gerald at IPSF about a crew of his snails. If you're interested, Jake Adams did a great writeup and video on abalone you can see here: https://reefbuilders.com/2021/09/07/abalones-are-fascinating-and-long-lived-aquarium-animals/

Some pictures/videos of the tank from yesterday:

FTS

Full tank video with blues on:


dang you Small Cell Amphidnium dinos! (Also photo-bomb gem tang)

Phyto reactors (nanno on left, tet on right)\

Maricultured acro colony from my LFS (they had it for 2 months):

Video of acro crab in maricultured acro colony! (So darn cute): https://youtube.com/shorts/Y_O0hJhtJ68?feature=share


Video of our new anemone crab filter feeding (he lives in our Amazeballs colony now): https://youtube.com/shorts/YGyxWQ38LyI?feature=share

 

[ReefRDude]

Care to give us an update? Hope things are doing much better for your tank. I will definitely be following this.

 

[beesnreefs]

Care to give us an update? Hope things are doing much better for your tank. I will definitely be following this.

Happy to! Been ups and downs for sure.

Still battling the GHA and dinos (though the dinos aren't as bad). For the GHA we are scrubbing the rock with smoker's toothbrushes every Sunday. We then clean out the water with fish nets and siphon throughout the tank into a 5-micron sock in the sump. Finally, we cut the lights by 10% and reduced photoperiod by an hour. Also cut out almost all the white and red so it's pretty much just blue.

We got hit with ich(!) a few weeks back....been battling that as well in the tank using a daily hydrogen peroxide dosing regimen. It was ugly at first with roughly half the fish showing trophonts and a few fish acting really depressed. So far, although it's been a solid month, I've only lost 1 fish though and we seem to be slowly eliminating it. Right now only my WTBT tang shows trophonts....they show up, increase in numbers just a bit, fall off in a week, then show up again 1-3 days later. But each week it's less and less and no other fish have shown trophonts since it all started.

A couple of weeks ago I started Reef Moonshiners and plan to give that a solid 3-6 months to see how it works. Ran my ATI ICP, did corrections, and have been doing the daily dosing. Should be sending off another ICP next week to see where it's at. No water changes since starting. I've heard really good things about Moonshiner's so I'm hopeful it helps us with SPS. So far, my LPS look reallllly happy with it!

What else would you like to know?

 

[ReefRDude]

Happy to! Been ups and downs for sure.

Still battling the GHA and dinos (though the dinos aren't as bad). For the GHA we are scrubbing the rock with smoker's toothbrushes every Sunday. We then clean out the water with fish nets and siphon throughout the tank into a 5-micron sock in the sump. Finally, we cut the lights by 10% and reduced photoperiod by an hour. Also cut out almost all the white and red so it's pretty much just blue.

We got hit with ich(!) a few weeks back....been battling that as well in the tank using a daily hydrogen peroxide dosing regimen. It was ugly at first with roughly half the fish showing trophonts and a few fish acting really depressed. So far, although it's been a solid month, I've only lost 1 fish though and we seem to be slowly eliminating it. Right now only my WTBT tang shows trophonts....they show up, increase in numbers just a bit, fall off in a week, then show up again 1-3 days later. But each week it's less and less and no other fish have shown trophonts since it all started.

A couple of weeks ago I started Reef Moonshiners and plan to give that a solid 3-6 months to see how it works. Ran my ATI ICP, did corrections, and have been doing the daily dosing. Should be sending off another ICP next week to see where it's at. No water changes since starting. I've heard really good things about Moonshiner's so I'm hopeful it helps us with SPS. So far, my LPS look reallllly happy with it!

What else would you like to know?

Thanks for the Update...I'm really curious.....If you had to do it over would there be anything that you would have done differently? I'm currently putting together a plan for a CADE build. I watched the BRS Series on MicroBiome Cycle and it seems you meticuously did everything that they recommended to cut down your chance of getting problems from the Uglies but you still had to go through all this headache.

 

[beesnreefs]

Thanks for the Update...I'm really curious.....If you had to do it over would there be anything that you would have done differently? I'm currently putting together a plan for a CADE build. I watched the BRS Series on MicroBiome Cycle and it seems you meticuously did everything that they recommended to cut down your chance of getting problems from the Uglies but you still had to go through all this headache.

Congrats on the upcoming new CADE build! What size system? When do you plan to set it up? Exciting times!

OK, some things I wish I had done differently:

1. Slowed down (aka, PATIENCE!): While I went with no lights and no corals for the first month, I think I should have gone longer to give the biome more time to populate. Then, when I turned on the lights, I could have slowly ramped them up to coral levels before adding coral - instead, I turned on the lights and added some corals right away. Finally, I also think I added fish too quickly - at one point I was adding 1 or 2 new fish every couple of weeks and I worry it stressed everyone out.
2. Better biome seeding: I did use a few bags of OceanDirect live sand and added some live sand/mud from both IPSF and Aquabiomics shortly after turning on the lights. Thinking back, I wish I had added more live material (clean live rock and sand) earlier in the process and given it more time to establish throughout the system. FWIW, my copepod seeding worked quite well...I had a ton of copepods at one point! Now I have a ton of amphipods
3. Nutrient management: I wish I had been more proactive about testing nirates and phosphates once corals/lights were added. As the system builds up and slowwwwwly matures there are all sorts of biome shifts that naturally occur. In my case, it resulted in nutrients bottoming out. I honestly don't know how long they were at (or darn near) zero but it was long enough for small cell amphidinium dinoflagellates to go absolutely bonkers in the tank. That set off a cascade of issues I'm still working through.
4. More aquascaping: I absolutely love the look of the scape I built. And it is fairly functional from a coral perspective. That said, I went the HNSA route and I think it's just a hair more NSA than H. Thinking back, I wish I had made a bit more cave/sleeping spots for fish. My original fish plan was between 16-18 fish...I think I can really only have 13-14 of them with the aquascape I have. If I go more than that I could see territorial issues cropping up.

Happy to answer any other questions

 

[ReefRDude]

Awesome!! Thank You for this detailed lay out of the things you would have done differently. This will be a big help. I am not sure exactly which Cade I will be going with at this point. It's up in the air between a CADE 1200 S2/P or just the 1200 S2. It will be several months down the road as I am in no rush and really just in the researching stage. I also want to see what the second part of BRS's MicroBiome cycle experiments bring. Just not sure when that will be released. As I get closer I know I'm going to have some question that I may pick your brain about.

 

[beesnreefs]

Awesome!! Thank You for this detailed lay out of the things you would have done differently. This will be a big help. I am not sure exactly which Cade I will be going with at this point. It's up in the air between a CADE 1200 S2/P or just the 1200 S2. It will be several months down the road as I am in no rush and really just in the researching stage. I also want to see what the second part of BRS's MicroBiome cycle experiments bring. Just not sure when that will be released. As I get closer I know I'm going to have some question that I may pick your brain about.

Happy to help in any way I can! I'm no expert, to be sure, but trying to learn as much as I can.

 

[ReefRDude]

Happy to help in any way I can! I'm no expert, to be sure, but trying to learn as much as I can.

Thank You....I really appreciate the help. Please post more pics as your tank starts to progress through this Ugly Phase.

 

[beesnreefs]

Thank You....I really appreciate the help. Please post more pics as your tank starts to progress through this Ugly Phase.

Here's a vid from today:

A couple things of note:

• Still battling SCA dinos, this the brown crud on the sand.
• Still battling GHA but it does seem to be growing back slower this week. Still, you'll see some in there and we've cut out almost all white and red light so this is pretty much straight blue on the ATI Stratons (I have an orange filter on the phone)
• Going through a s&%t run with acros so the one's you'll see are pale, bleached, or dark brown

 

[ReefRDude]

Here's a vid from today:

A couple things of note:

• Still battling SCA dinos, this the brown crud on the sand.
• Still battling GHA but it does seem to be growing back slower this week. Still, you'll see some in there and we've cut out almost all white and red light so this is pretty much straight blue on the ATI Stratons (I have an orange filter on the phone)
• Going through a s&%t run with acros so the one's you'll see are pale, bleached, or dark brown

Oh Man! Once you get past this ugly stage and get some coral grown out, It's going to look Amazing! Love the sleek look that the Stratons give your Tank!

 

[beesnreefs]

Oh Man! Once you get past this ugly stage and get some coral grown out, It's going to look Amazing! Love the sleek look that the Stratons give your Tank!

Thanks! I do love these lights. The UI isn’t wonderful but the spread and spectrum is phenomenal. The tank looks soooo good when it’s full spectrum

 

[RockyMountainReefing]

Thanks! I do love these lights. The UI isn’t wonderful but the spread and spectrum is phenomenal. The tank looks soooo good when it’s full spectrum

Dude I’m going bare bottom and I’m worried sick. Dry rock of course. What recommendations do u have for some biome?

 

[beesnreefs]

Dude I’m going bare bottom and I’m worried sick. Dry rock of course. What recommendations do u have for some biome?

Sorry for the super late reply. If you're going with dry rock I personally believe everything you can do to add a healthy biome is critical.

Healthy corals will bring some biome with them. Of course, if they aren't QT'd they could also bring in pests.

Aquabiomics sells clean ocean sand and rubble. Eli Meyer is doing some awesome stuff.

Indo Pacific Sea Farms has some awesome biome boosting products for not that expensive. Gerald is fantastic.

Places like Tampa Bay Live rock is a good place to get maricultured live rock....but it comes with some risks (SCTLD is a possibility, hitchhikers, etc.) Their rocks are pretty gorgeous.

Live rock/sand from a friend's or community member's healthy system.

Adding pods of all varieties. Also live phytoplankton.

Bottled bacteria is not likely to do much in terms of biome health and diversity. I've heard people smarter than me say that Dr. Tim's Eco Balance is a good product with some real science behind it...but it's a handful of bacterial species so not something that will build out your whole biome. More of a supplement.

 

[beesnreefs]

Dude I’m going bare bottom and I’m worried sick. Dry rock of course. What recommendations do u have for some biome?

@RockyMountainReefing I'll add that utilizing your sump can help a lot. Live rock and other biome-boosting things in the sump can go a long way. Just realize that if you go the live rock route you may get things that require light to live

 

[beesnreefs]

Admiring the tank today I realized it's been a looooooong time since I've updated this thread. Dare I say, things are going pretty well now.

A recent ramp down video:

A full spectrum video from this afternoon:

And a couple photos from today: